For this installment of “The Odd Couple,” Felix and Oscar meditate on a 1974 photograph of the Monadnock Building and the Kluczynski Federal Building taken by William S. Engdahl for Hedrich-Blessing, the Chicago-based architectural photography studio. Oscar unpacks the visual rhetoric of the image, and Felix parses this rhetoric against his lived experience of the building.

Oscar    This photograph was taken from a corner at the intersection of Jackson Boulevard and Dearborn Street in Chicago. Its vertical orientation exaggerates the upward thrust of the buildings, which loom over the viewer with a Rodchenko-style angularity and a weightiness that almost gives me vertigo. The Monadnock’s east elevation occupies a large expanse of the picture frame, and the Federal Building tentatively leans in, as if to whisper something in its neighbor’s ear. The photographer is putting these buildings into conversation—that arch created by the camera lens at the top of the photograph visually connects the two structures, which are actually situated a good distance apart, given that they are separated by Jackson Boulevard. Felix, you’ve spent a lot of time at that intersection and in the Monadnock Building. What do you make of this visual affinity, which is exaggerated by the photograph? If the Monadnock and Federal Buildings could actually engage in a conversation, what would they say to each other?

Felix   I see the same building twice. Of course, I realize they are not the same building—one is clearly made from stacked masonry parts, the other from steel extrusions—but if you look beyond material, you will see the same building, too. The image lays bare an identical tectonic objective: a load-bearing corner stripped of all embellishment. On the left, the Monadnock’s corner attenuates from a thickness of six feet at its sharp base upward to what appears to be that of a single brick veneer at its rounded cornice line. At the time of its construction, I suppose losing weight as you went up was the only way to top out at 197 feet. On the right is a steel I-beam encased in concrete with a couple coats of black paint. A self-supporting curtain wall often demonstrates its true thickness only at its corners, and in this case, the only hint of ornament allowed by its matte black finish is light and shadow. The two examples reluctantly express how to use materials sparingly toward similar vertical ends. So in addition to Rodchenko, I see Caravaggio’s Narcissus. Like the pool of water that separates the young boy from his older self, Jackson Boulevard serves as a mirror for each building to look across, inward, and to speak to itself. And while two Chicago schools and almost seventy years separate the two buildings, they appear closer in age each time I see them together.

Oscar   Interesting! I think the photographer wants us to see the buildings along those lines, as counterparts. The picture is taken from an extreme angle that distorts the scale of both structures and makes the Federal Building look as if it is the same height as the Monadnock (it is not). And shooting the two buildings with an even focus in black and white creates an unmodulated picture plane: two silvery grey, rectilinear masses punctuated by regularly spaced black voids are separated by a sliver of more grey, the sky. There is little that distinguishes the Monadnock’s brown masonry facade, which in person evokes the rich, supple leather binding of an antiquarian book, from the glassy reflective sheen of the Federal Building. The photograph contrives a visual homogeneity that is surely rooted in twentieth-century histories of architectural modernism. Think, for instance, of Carl Condit’s 1964 The Chicago School of Architecture, which positions architects like Burnham and Root (and especially the structural innovations embodied in their buildings) as the progenitors of a movement that found its natural and ultimate expression in the postwar work of Mies van der Rohe. The picture wants us to see the buildings in a similar light because that is the received and accepted genealogy of modernism. I love your allusion to Caravaggio’s Narcissus, in part because it’s a great painting, but also because the myth of Narcissus is a kind of cautionary tale about the seductiveness of the image: Narcissus is so enamored of his own likeness that he perishes. Hedrich-Blessing’s photograph reproduces, in visual form, a teleological narrative that dominated architectural history writing in the last century. The image seduces us into reading the Monadnock and Federal Buildings as the same (or close to the same) building, as you suggest. But are there reasons to question the visual argument of the photograph? What motivates a discourse that valorizes similitude, and what’s lost when we ignore, or photographically elide, the things that make these buildings strikingly distinct?

Felix   I agree that the image leads the viewer down the path of sameness. Yet it also presents a fairly unusual way to perform a formal analysis. To draw parallels, or distinctions, between two buildings, one typically begins by comparing identically scaled orthographic projections: a plan to a plan, a section to a section, or an elevation to an elevation. But this image flattens the two buildings into what appears to be a double two-point perspective. This is largely due to each building’s distinct site orientation (i.e., the Federal Building is oriented east-west and the Monadnock north-south). But if we were to look more conventionally and start from, say, the ground floor plan of the two buildings, we would immediately see and experience some striking differences. The Monadnock’s lobby, or interior street, is one of the finest public achievements of any commercial office lobby. In addition to a security desk, gilded elevator banks, and aluminum egress stairs (the first of their kind), the lobby’s double-loaded corridor is flanked by a variety of specialty businesses that include a milliner, barbershop, travel agent, and flower shop, to name a few. Inversely, the Federal Building’s lobby restricts access. After all, Illinois’s two senators have offices upstairs. Although the building meets the ground with steel pilotis and a recessed glass facade, advocating for transparency and accessibility, the lobby is actually restricted. And where the Monadnock’s thick-walled ground floor may look standoffish to passersby (particularly from the vantage point of the photograph), once inside the long corridor one can look through the two layers of glass that place the shops between an interior pedestrian street and an actual one outside. The two lobby plans could not be more diametrically opposed in terms of how they greet their publics at ground. But I suppose the cropped “passport” signals the Monadnock’s masked commercial appeal.

Oscar   That’s a great point about different representational modes and the types of comparisons and analyses they make possible. That observation, paired with your description of the programmatic functions of the lobbies, makes me question the photograph and the relationship it sets up between the two buildings even more. I’m still thinking about your Narcissus reference, and it strikes me that Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro does something that we also find in the Hedrich-Blessing photograph. It does away with environment. In the painting, Narcissus’s upper body and knee emerge out of a black void and are reflected in a pool of water, which is also rendered in black. A thin, discontinuous white line and the dirt at the very edge of the pool are all that exist beyond the body and reflection of this self-absorbed young man. The Monadnock and Federal Buildings are also mostly devoid of context, in this case because of cropping. Apart from that “passport” sign you pointed to, and the words “Copy Corp.” in the window just above the sign, the photograph tells us very little about the distinct ways in which these buildings function and address their users (your description of the lobbies, on the other hand, added so much color!). This is where I see that discourse of similarity, which is embodied in the photograph and suffuses so much writing on twentieth-century architecture, moving into problematic territory. Like the mythical figure of Narcissus, that line of thinking (or picturing) the buildings is overly self-referential. It treats architecture as an isolated cultural phenomenon rather than as something that operates within a much broader and heterogenous economic, political, and social fabric. But maybe I am asking too much of photography? Photographs are always excerpts, so maybe it’s impossible to produce an image that either visually or conceptually “sites” or embeds architecture in the way that I’m asking it to do. What do you think?

Felix   With all due respect, Oscar, you may be asking too much of architecture, let alone photography. I am of the belief that architecture is best when self-absorbed. Please do not misunderstand that to mean it should be dismissive of the larger contexts within which it cultivates discipline. But I’m a formalist: I begin with geometry and end with geometry. That usually means drowning in a pool of self-referentiality, like Narcissus, but I think it also takes as much discipline to block out context as to curate it. And that’s also how great photography can make even mediocre architecture meaningful. For example, the Federal Building is not as seminal a building as the Monadnock. Alone, it isn’t even peak Mies. It requires a specific context for it to look exceptional. In most lived views, that means standing as one in a triptych of buildings (the adjacent courthouse and post office being the other two). The photograph, however, strips the Federal Building of its siblings and adopts a surrogate. The framed narrative can be read formally, historically, or programmatically, as previously discussed, or it can just as easily be interpreted as an advertisement for the city that invented the tall office building. Unlike a complete transcript, the excerpt is always incomplete and will always require the reader (or in this case, the observer) to fill in the gaps according to their own intellectual baggage. By definition, an image should be a fanciful way to site a building.

Oscar   Your use of the word fanciful gives me pause in the context of image-making, but I might apply it to the idea that an architect, photographer, or artist can block out context. I think you are suggesting that, while it’s not easy, arriving at a place of creative neutrality or total originality is, in fact, a possibility. Did I get that right? I struggle with this and the idea of pure form. In his analysis of narrative, the historian Hayden White argues that the form of written historical narratives is shaped by the sociopolitical structures, value systems, and struggles of the contemporary moment. This idea applies not only to history writing, but to architectural design and photography, too. To describe an architectural photograph as a work of fancy implies that it is somehow detached from reality, made outside of its moment. Just as the historian selects and omits historical events in the crafting of a historical narrative, photography involves the selective inclusion, omission, and framing of visual and physical events. Thus, image-making is, consciously or not, a political act. The picture is temporally situated and ideologically motivated. The “intellectual baggage” that you suggest we apply to a reading of the image should really be reframed as a kind of critical engagement. We have to challenge ourselves to see the form of the image as performing a narratological function. It is the viewer’s job (or user’s, in the case of architecture) to uncover the motivations that undergird the form.

Felix   By fanciful I would like to suggest that most images, particularly those taken by the likes of Hedrich-Blessing, Ezra Stoller, and Julius Schulman, imbue their subjects with visionary potential. Sometimes the image might even divert attention from a truth better witnessed in person. Also, originality is fanciful, too; only the less interesting kind. To site, and see, a building through someone else’s lens should charge it with uncanny accuracy. And while much of my earlier discourse may privilege form, I am also a closet contextualist. My baggage is that I want it both ways. For example, let us recall that the same photographer who captured this image also lionized the Federal Building’s architect in 1956, when he captured him smoking that famous cigar (see Portrait of Mies van der Rohe, Crown Hall, IIT, Chicago, by William Engdahl). In that portrait series, however, at least his intent was crystal clear: architecture is a singular act. So, if we attempt to look closely again at our double Narcissi—our focus aligned low to the pavement, alongside Engdahl’s viewfinder—we might agree that the image is constructed to monumentalize the status of one architect over another (Mies’s black monolith looms over Root’s stone pyramid) as well as indulge in our capitalist society’s timeless obsession with architecture (or anything) that defies gravity (#skyscraper). This same vantage point has become a corporate architecture industry standard from which to exaggerate a building’s height, magnify the architect’s cunning, and fan the client’s ego. Perhaps Engdahl inadvertently put too much of himself into the biased diptych. The better view, however, is actually twenty-five feet to the right, standing in the center of the intersection of Jackson and Dearborn, looking at the two buildings as equals relative to their nineteenth- and twentieth-century histories.

The Odd Couple was played by Thomas Kelley (Felix) and Sarah Rogers Morris (Oscar) in Flat Out 5 (forthcoming Fall 2025).