AIC's 52nd Annual Meeting

The Chicago Cultural Center building was completed in 1897 as the first permanent home of the Chicago Public Library. The designers, Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge, worked in collaboration with the decorative arts studio of Louis Comfort Tiffany to create the elaborately decorated Neo-Classical building, which occupies an entire city block. The north wing of the building includes a series of rooms dedicated to the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR).

The library began outgrowing its space in the mid-1960s, which spurred conversations about demolition. Support for keeping and restoring the building led to its placement on the National Register for Historic Places in 1972 and efforts were made throughout the late 1970s to restore and revitalize the space for its future job as a center for arts and culture. By this time, the colorful decorative finishes were viewed as outdated and many of the original decorative schemes were covered with flat beige paint.

While the original marble-clad walls and much of the antiqued metallic plaster ornament remained in the GAR Rooms, the original paint schemes were a mystery until the 2020-2021 restoration, when paint analysis found the dynamic and colorful schemes that complemented each room’s stone, wood, and metalwork. The plaster finishes utilized pigmented oil glazes over both paint and metallic leaf to create a range of decorative effects such as faux antiqued metal that were meant to reflect the individual character of each space. Analysis confirmed that some of these original finishes were left exposed, but others were hidden under multiple layers of beige paint. The existence of the “buried” original finishes and their lasting integrity launched the campaign to restore over 8,400 square feet of original decorative schemes in the rooms.

An appropriate conservation treatment approach was determined after extensive feasibility testing. This included overpaint removal, consolidation, and restoration techniques. The original concealed finishes were exposed by meticulously removing layers of post-historic paint to reveal the nuanced, hand-painted surfaces of 1897 design. The re-exposed finishes were then conserved, and areas of loss were carefully reintegrated. The result was the original artisan’s work, where present, rather than a recreation.

As a result of the GAR Room restoration, a seminal work in the history of decorative architectural finishes was re-exposed. The GAR Room finishes give unique insight into the aesthetics at the turn of the twentieth century. The palette consists of rich metallic colors such as oxidized reds, greens, yellows, and bronze. Aluminum leaf ornament is layered with many different colored glazes to capture the appearance of aging bronze. These colors mimic the palette of many Tiffany lamps: the finishes are not bright and shiny but rather aged and grand.

Thus, the “un-restoration” of the GAR Rooms at the Chicago Cultural Center are an example of conservation work applied on a huge scale that re-exposed the entirety of an original work by 1897 artisans.