At the turn of the century, some Chicago architects took time off from designing buildings to try their hands at designing pots. Working with terra-cotta manufacturer William Day Gates, Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis Sullivan, William LeBaron Jenney, and George Elmslie, among others, helped create the distinctive vases, garden planters, and lamp bases known as Teco pottery. The architects used some of these pieces in their own buildings; others were sold by dealers throughout the country. Ignored for years, they are now back in fashion, and through February 14 the Chicago Historical Society is hosting an exhibition of more than 100 pieces by these and other artists.
Whether through shrewdness or serendipity, Gates chose a good time to get involved with clay. Chicago was booming and still rebuilding after the fire of 1871. Terra-cotta was fireproof, versatile (different glazes could change its color and surface texture), and easier to work with and less expensive than stone. Within a few years it would cover and decorate the exteriors of buildings from movie theaters and stores to skyscrapers like the Wrigley Building.
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When large terra-cotta items like garden urns or chimney pots are loaded into a kiln for firing, odd-shaped empty spaces are left over–bad business, since hot air makes no profit. This itself may have led Gates to think about making something small to chink those spaces. But he also enjoyed “puttering” with clay, and his young chemists (including, by the late 1890s, his two older sons) were developing new and interesting glazes. Why not do something no one else was doing–use these talents to produce “art pottery” that could be fired along with the architectural pieces at little extra cost?
In 1899, almost 20 years after he began his clay works, Gates announced that “the company has been experimenting, in a small way, with the manufacture of pottery ware. . . . [A] profitable business may be developed in pottery production, and the manufacture of this ware will give employment to their men during the dull seasons in the building trade.”
These ideas–the unity of fine and “domestic” art; the unity of beauty and function; the importance of craftsmanship, natural materials, simple style; the moral quality of beauty; and the dignity of work–did not originate with Gates. They were all part of the Arts and Crafts Movement. This new wave began in England in the 1880s as a revolt against both the pedantic distinctions of the Royal Academy (which maintained, for instance, that painting was art but that pottery was not), and the dangers of the Industrial Revolution (which the rebels saw as degrading to work, nature, the workers themselves, and the goods they produced). The more radical members of the movement, like John Ruskin, looked toward a transformation of society through craftsmanship: “It is only by labor that thought can be made healthy, and only by thought that labor can be made happy, and the two cannot be separated with impunity. It would be well if all of us were craftsmen of some kind, and the dishonor of manual labor done away with altogether.”
Gates later wrote, “You might have thought it a queer place to build a factory. Perhaps it was. If it were only a factory, you were right. . . . We built, not a factory, but a place in which to create beautiful ware–the product of the skilled hands of craftsmen–and the setting has a tremendous influence on work. . . . Atmosphere is a much abused word, but there is such a thing, and we have it.”
Lack of fussiness was something the Prairie School architects strove for in their revolt against Victorian ornament and clutter. Just as they saw decoration as part of form, they considered the insides and outsides of their buildings to be all of a piece. Frank Lloyd Wright was probably the most vehement of the architects in his desire to have what went into his houses blend with the total design: “The very chairs and tables, cabinets, and even musical instruments, wherever practical, are of the building itself, never fixtures in it,” he wrote. He designed with Gates several site-specific works–including a large stand for the Lawrence-Dana house in Springfield, and a recently rediscovered skyscraper-shaped vase for Unity Temple in Oak Park, which is displayed in the historical society exhibit. In addition, at least one of Wright’s vases (No. 330) was mass-produced and sold for $30 through the Teco catalog.
