http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/09/AR201...

Bruce Graham, 84

Bruce Graham dies; architect of most famous Chicago buildings

By Blair Kamin

March 10, 2010

Bruce Graham, 84, the hard-driving architect of the Willis Tower, once the
world's tallest building, and the John Hancock Center, the X-braced giant
that became a symbol of Chicago's industrial might, died March 6 [2010] at
his home in Hobe Sound, Fla. He had Alzheimer's disease.

At the peak of his influence, from the 1960s through the 1980s, Mr. Graham
was the top man at Chicago's biggest architectural firm, Skidmore, Owings &
Merrill (SOM), and had the ear of business leaders and politicians.

From that power base, he shaped a legacy that suggests the epitaph on the
tomb of Sir Christopher Wren, who is buried in his masterpiece, St. Paul's
Cathedral in London: "Reader, if you seek his monument, look around you."

Besides the Willis (originally Sears) Tower and the Hancock Center, which
bracket Chicago's skyline like enormous black parentheses, Mr. Graham played
a major role in designing such landmark structures as the Inland Steel
Building and the 1986 expansion of McCormick Place.

Mr. Graham's best designs added a Chicago-style muscularity to the lean,
crisp modernist look brought to perfection by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

Reviewing Sears Tower in 1974, the late Chicago Tribune architecture critic
Paul Gapp called the skyscraper "a building whose exterior profiles are a
bold, vital and exciting departure from orthodox mediocrity."

Mr. Graham's detractors termed him a businessman rather than an artist. Yet
few disputed that Mr. Graham was the most powerful Chicago architect of his
generation or that he was a leader, along with SOM structural engineer
Fazlur Khan, in shaping once-unthinkable super-tall structures.

The 1,451-foot, 110-story Sears Tower reigned as the world's tallest
building from 1973, when construction workers raised a beam autographed by
the late Mayor Richard J. Daley, to 1996, when it lost its title to the
Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The Chicago tower, renamed
last year for a British insurance brokerage, remains the nation's tallest
building.

Born on Dec. 1, 1925, in Colombia, Mr. Graham was the son of a Canadian-born
international banker and Peruvian mother. He grew up in Puerto Rico. Spanish
was his first language.

Mr. Graham came to the United States in the 1940s as a student, served in
the U.S. Navy and got his bachelor of architecture degree from the
University of Pennsylvania in 1948. He then journeyed to Chicago, the
hometown of his first wife, and sought out Mies, who advised him to work for
Chicago architects Holabird, Root and Burgee.

Mr. Graham did his apprenticeship at Holabird, then left for the
up-and-coming firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, where he conducted a
long-running feud with architect Walter Netsch.

"Bruce Graham is very tough," Netsch told the Tribune in 1981. "Seldom do
you find a good guy who is a great architect." The rivals both had a hand in
one of SOM's finest projects, the Inland Steel Building, built in 1957.

The building's open expanses of office space were made possible by the
placement of structural columns on its perimeter and the consolidation of
elevators and other services in an adjoining service tower. A leader in
using silvery stainless steel as a cladding material, Inland Steel was an
aesthetic triumph.

Mr. Graham's greatest achievement came in the 1970 with the completion of
the mixed-use Hancock Center. The high-rise housed stores, parking, offices,
apartments (now condominiums), an observatory, and a bar and restaurant
under its 1,127-foot-tall roof.

Unlike earlier skyscrapers, in which an internal cage of steel carried most
of the load, the Hancock's exterior columns, beams and X-shaped braces
formed a rigid tube that did most of the heavy lifting. The arrangement was
economical, and the X-braces offered an instantly recognizable skyline
image, silencing detractors who had likened the Hancock to an oil derrick.

Sears Tower offered an even taller variation on the tube theme, consisting
of nine interlocked tubes. The tower was built for Chicago-based retailer
Sears, Roebuck and Co., which originally had wanted a building of just 60
stories.

Once as Mr. Graham, a smoker, related the story of the Sears Tower's
origins, while lunching with Khan, he grabbed a handful of cigarettes,
cupped some in his hands and placed a smaller group on top, demonstrating
what came to be called the "bundled tube" concept.

The 75-foot square tubes rose together until two dropped off at the 50th
floor, two more stopped at the 66th, and three more at the 90th, leaving
only two to rise to the summit.

As time passed, Sears' luster dimmed. Its ground-level plaza was rarely
used. Many Sears employees found their new home antiseptic. The Sears
Merchandise Group left the tower in 1992.

Nearly three years after hijacked jets toppled the twin towers of the World
Trade Center in 2001, Mr. Graham demonstrated that he had lost none of his
self-assurance. "If that plane would have hit the Sears Tower," he told a
reporter, "the plane would have fallen, not the tower."

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Chicago Tribune