Chicago architect Carter Manny Jr. was in the news on the day he died — a timely reminder of his searching intelligence and considerable impact on projects that ranged from O’Hare International Airport’s original terminals to the FBI Building in Washington, D.C.
Manny had a remarkably varied career, serving as a partner at one of Chicago’s top postwar architectural firms, C.F. Murphy Associates, and directing the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, a Chicago organization that makes research grants to architects around the world.
He also crossed paths with leading figures of 20th century art and architecture, among them artist Alexander Calder. To honor the completion of two Calder sculptures in Chicago — the Flamingo stabile in Federal Plaza and Universe, a motorized installation in the lobby of Sears (now Willis) Tower — Manny organized a circus-style parade in 1974 in which the artist participated.
The parade, which featured more than a dozen circus wagons, clowns, unicyclists and multiple marching bands, was back in the news Wednesday — part of an online story that chronicled how Universe is not part of the planned $500 million renovation of Willis Tower and is likely to be removed from the skyscraper.
On that same day, Manny, 98, died at his San Rafael, Calif., home. His stepson, Michael Moranattributed his death to old age and "a compounding of various conditions."
Longtime Chicago art critic Franz Schulze, who conducted an oral history interview with Manny for the Art Institute of Chicago, called Manny’s passing "the death of a giant."
Photo gallery: Newsmakers and celebrities with Chicago ties who died in 2017.
Born in Michigan City, Ind., in 1918, Manny graduated from Harvard in 1941, then enrolled in Harvard’s architecture school, where he became friends with Philip Johnson, a wealthy and sophisticated Clevelander who in 1979 would become the first winner of the Pritzker Architecture Prize.
The outbreak of World War II prompted Manny to enter a 12-month industrial management program at Harvard’s business school that was geared to the war effort. Following the war, he apprenticed briefly with Frank Lloyd Wright. Then, on the advice of Johnson, he didn’t return to Harvard, but enrolled instead at the Illinois Institute of Technology, where German refugee Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was preaching the virtues of a lean, industrial-era architecture of steel and glass.
It was a fateful move for Manny — and for Chicago.
After graduating from IIT in 1948, Manny went to work for Naess & Murphy, later known as C.F. Murphy Associates. He rose to partner by 1957, the same year Mayor Richard J. Daley selected the Murphy firm to design O’Hare. As a partner in charge, Manny dealt with clients and worked with partners in charge of design.
O’Hare Terminals 2 and 3, as well as the airport’s heating plant, all reflect Mies’ influence. So do other acclaimed works of mid-20th century modernism, like the Richard J. Daley Center (originally the Chicago Civic Center), whose steely, broad-shouldered design is chiefly credited to the Murphy firm’s Jacques Brownson.
C.F. Murphy Associates also worked on the First National Bank of Chicago (now Chase Tower) with Chicago architects Perkins+Will. As part of the project, Manny dealt with Russian-French artist Marc Chagall who designed The Four Seasons mosaic in the skyscraper’s plaza.
Manny "was never a designer" but "he had a critical eye and he cared about design. He just didn’t care about the business," said Chicago architect Helmut Jahn, who worked under Manny at the Murphy firm, which was later called Murphy/Jahn and is now called JAHN.
Photo gallery: Newsmakers and celebrities who died in 2017.
The 1975 FBI Building (now the J. Edgar Hoover Building), which covers a full block of Pennsylvania Avenue and is designed in the concrete-heavy Brutalist style, drew mixed reviews.
Assessing the building in 1978, Tribune architecture critic Paul Gapp called it "mediocre at best, although surely no worse than most of the other federal buildings constructed in Washington in the last decade or so."
Manny retired from C.F. Murphy Associates in 1983, but had already begun a second act at the Graham Foundation, serving as its acting director from 1971-1974 and as its director through 1993.
During his tenure, the foundation distributed more than 1,200 grants collectively valued at more than $10 million, according to Sarah Herda, the foundation’s current director. Among them was a grant to a then-relatively unknown Dutch architect, Rem Koolhaas, for the 1978 book "Delirious New York," a celebration of Manhattan’s "culture of congestion." Koolhaas would win the Pritzker Prize in 2000.
Herda said that Manny was known for acutely questioning grant proposals yet remaining open to the potential impact of their ideas. "Those are things that are in the very DNA of the organization," she said.
Late in life Manny teamed with Henry Kuehn, a former Chicago-area business executive who now lives in Louisville, Ky., to research the final resting places of more than 150 American architects, including Mies, Louis Sullivan and Daniel Burnham. The research led to a book, authored by Kuehn, called "Their Final Place: A Guide to the Graves of Notable American Architects."
His own final resting place, his family said, will be in Michigan City, where his ashes will be spread.
"He was a one-of-a-kind," Kuehn said. "He was very strong in his opinions on things, but he had this wonderful self-deprecating quality. He never took himself too seriously."
He put the ‘gentle’ in gentleman," said his wife, Maya Moran Manny.
Manny’s first wife, Mary Alice Kennett, died in 1994.
Before moving to California more than 10 years ago, Manny had two homes in the Chicago area — one on North Lake Shore Drive and a log cabin in Michigan City.
Survivors also include a daughter, Elizabeth; a son, Carter III; and three other stepsons; Tom, Peter and John.
A memorial service is planned.
bkamin@chicagotribune.com Twitter @BlairKamin
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