The city is filled with well-designed building types: banks, houses, churches — skyscrapers, of course. But how often are public schools considered?
Chicago’s schools, particularly those designed between the late 1800s and early 1900s, are among the city’s most architecturally distinctive buildings.
They’re temples to the ideals of a free public education — something to consider as the new school year gets underway.
And the 40 schools designed by Dwight Perkins during his five-year term as the system’s chief architect are among the best of the best. I was reminded of this earlier this month when the Chicago History Museum sent out a back-to-school announcement heralding Perkins’s work.
The sprawling, Prairie School-designed Carl Schurz High School, at 3601 N. Milwaukee Ave., is the best-known of Perkins’ work for the school system. It’s a city landmark that is also listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
But there is also Harper High School, at 6520 S. Wood St.; the former Trumbull Elementary, at 5200 N. Ashland Ave.; Schurz’s unsung, but not landmarked, twin, Bowen High School, at 2710 E. 89th St., and 40 other predominantly Prairie School-styled school buildings Perkins designed between 1905 and 1910.
“In terms of open space, the Progressive Movement, the Prairie School, he was chief architect for the public schools at a time when all of these movements were coming together,” Chicago Architecture Center President and CEO Eleanor Gorski said. “He was able to wrap all of these [movements] together in a dramatic, beautiful architectural package.”
Perkins’ school work represents an extraordinary break from the neo-Gothic and Greek Revival templates that gripped educational building architecture at the time.
His schools were often lively and colorful, brick and terra-cotta buildings — almost Mayan and Egyptian in detail and form in the case of Harper High and George W. Tilton Elementary, at 221 N. Keebler Ave.
Other schools, such as Schurz and Bowen, are strongly Prairie School, with exposed brick piers, broad overhanging roofs and horizontal ranks of windows.
Creating open space around the schools was another hallmark of his work, particularly in the case of Schurz, where he sites the building on a triangular 8-acre site.
“You go in any neighborhood where his school buildings are, they stand out — in a city with tons of famous architects,” Gorski said.
And what did Perkins get for all this?
Fired.
The school system accused Perkins of incompetence, insubordination and building extravagant designs. The charges ended up being reduced to insubordination, and he was dismissed.
“The real reason was that he specified terra cotta or brick [for his designs], and there were three people [on the school board with connections] to the cut-stone industry,” Perkins’ then-87-year-old son, architect Lawrence Perkins (who founded the firm Perkins & Will), told me in a 1993 Sun-Times story.
“He used to keep them in line, and they didn’t like it one damn bit.”
But Dwight Perkins would go on to bigger and better things. His firm Perkins, Fellows & Hamilton would design the Lincoln Park Zoo Lion House and Lincoln Park’s Cafe Brauer.
And his designs with the firm Perkins, Chatten & Hammond include Northwest Tower, now called The Robey, a 12-story Art Deco skyscraper at North, Damen and Milwaukee avenues.
“He never had to work for half of what he was worth again,” Lawrence Perkins said.
Rebekah Coffman, the Chicago History Museum’s curator of religion and community history, said the Perkins-related email blast was part of a larger effort to bring more attention to the institution’s architectural holdings.
“We’re thinking about collections in different ways [and] it just seems like a good kickoff to the school year,” she said.
Coffman said the museum has many of Perkins’ school material, including drawings, pamphlets and photographs, all of which could be part of a 2027 exhibit.
“There’s a lot of material,” she said.