Detlef Mertins: Did you work closely with engineers?
Bruce Graham: Absolutely. When Bill Hartman took over the SOM office, it was the first thing that I pushed for. We were very lucky to get some very good engineers, especially Fazlur Khan. We had an older engineer at first, who was very nice and very good. But when we wanted to put the columns for the Inland Steel Building on the outside in order to have a clear space inside, he said, 'I can't do it. But there's a young engineer at the University of Illinois." So Faz came over, and we did it. From then on, Faz and I were buddies.
DM: What was it like working with Fazlur Khan? What was the exchange like between you?
BG: Obviously, it was different every time. We didn't have the same discussions each time. But I would have a sketch or an idea, and then Faz would come, and we'd talk about what the structure would be like. We also talked to a very good mechanical engineer who worked with us. Faz trained more engineers and put together a team of excellent people. Then we divided the office into studios that were relatively separate. Each studio had a senior architect or design partner directing it, with a managing partner as well. Each team had mechanical engineers and structural engineers working directly with them. It was as if each was a little office rather than there being one big office. The intimacy and the relationships within the studios were terrific.
DM: Did you ever want to pursue an architectural idea that seemed illogical to Faz structurally?
BG: Not me. I was very involved in engineering. In fact, before I studied architecture, I took engineering and applied sciences.
DM: Even Mies, in some instances, stretched the logic of structure. The roof of the New National Gallery is probably the most well-known case. The structure is being stressed in order to achieve the effect of levitation that he wanted.
BG: Well, I love the museum. It's a wonderful gallery. But you're right. Mies wasn't oriented to engineering, although he admired engineers.
DM: And he worked with engineers. Myron Goldsmith was very important for his understanding of structure.
BG: Myron was an architect-engineer. He was an architect first. Faz was a real engineer.
DM: What's the difference?
BG: The sophistication.
DM: You once said that Mies's approach to the expression of structure was aesthetic. What did you mean by that?
BG: He was fantastic with the proportion of space and making structure as an expression of it. In most cases, it was beautifully done. There's no question that he was a master of architecture. When he put mullions in front of the columns at 860 Lake Shore Drive, he called it structural, but he meant aesthetic structure, not Bruce Graham or Faz Khan structure. He meant the aesthetic structure that keeps the rhythm of the building as a whole.
DM: How was Mies significant for your work?
BG: He was significant, but Chicago architecture is a broader historical thing. It isn't just Mies. It isn't just one person. Louis Sullivan wasn't exactly stupid. The structures of Louis Sullivan are also very clear, very clearly expressed. By the way, that's why I went to Holabird & Root first, before I went to SOM. They had a tradition of doing structural engineering and architecture together.
DM: Wasn't it also Mies who suggested that you do that?
BG: Yes. When I was a student, I came from Philadelphia to see him. He received me. He was a very nice man, a very simple man. I asked him where I should go to work, and he said Holabird & Root.
DM: What else did you talk about with Mies?
BG: We were good friends. There wasn't another intellect like him in the city. There just wasn't. The person I didn't like, as a person, was Frank Lloyd Wright. He was a real son of a bitch. I gave him hell one time. He was giving a speech at the University of Chicago and was blasting me. So I finally got up and said, "Mr. Wright, why don't you sit down and shut up?" And I walked out. It's ridiculous for an architect to criticize another architect that way. But by that time, he was a little insane. He certainly wasn't a constructivist. Fallingwater nearly collapsed. He wouldn't listen.
DM: Did you see Mies as a constructivist?
BG: Yes.
DM: What did you talk about with him?
BG: How the wine was. Once in his old apartment he had an easy chair with a table and his cigars and his martini and all the furniture against the wall—somebody asked him why he didn't move into 860 Lake Shore Drive. He said, "There's no place to put the furniture. I was born in a little village in Germany. I can dream and imagine this new world, but I can't live in it."
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