ATDTDA (1): White City / Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building

[Tim Strzechowski]

from Eric Larson, The Devil in the White City:

[...] To find ways to accelerate the work, Burnham called the eastern architects to Chicago.  One looming problem was how to color the exteriors of the main buildings, especially the staff-coated palisades of the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building.  During the meeting an idea arose that in the short run promised a dramatic acceleration of the work, but that eventually served to fix the fair in the world's imagination as a thing of otherworldly beauty.

By all rights, the arena of exterior decoration belonged to William Pretyman, the fair's official director of color.  burnham admitted later that he had hired Pretyman for the job "largely on account of his great friendship with John Root."  Pretyman was ill suited to the job.  Harriet Monroe, who knew him and his wife, wrote, "His genius was betrayed by lofty and indomitable traits of character which could not yield or compromise.  And so his life was a tragedy of inconsequence."

The day of the meeting Pretyman was on the East Coast.  The architects proceeded without him.  "I was urging everyone on, knowing I had an awful fight against time," Burnham said.  "We talked about the colors, and finally the thought came, 'let us make it all perfectly white.'  I do not remember who made that suggestion.  It might have been one of those things that reached all minds at once.  At any rate, I decided it."

The Mines Building, designed by Chicago's Solon S. Beman, was nearly finished.  It became the test building.  Burnham ordered it painted a creamy white.  Pretyman returned and "was outraged," burnham recalled.

Pretyman insisted that any decision on color was his alone.

"I don't see it that way," Burnham told him.  "The decision is mine."

"All right," Pretyman said.  "I will get out."

Burnham did not miss him.  "He was a brooding sort of man and very cranky," Burnham said.  "I let him go, then told Charles McKim that I would have to have a man who could actually take charge of it, and that I would not decide from the point of friendship."

McKim recommended the New York painter Francis Millet, who had sat in on the color meeting.  Burnham hired him.

Millet quickly proved his worth.  After some experimentation he settled on "ordinary white lead and oil" as the best paint for staff, then developed a means of applying the paint not by brush but through a hose with a special nozzle fashioned from a length of gas pipe -- the first spray paint.  Burnham nicknamed Millet and his paint crews "the Whitewash Gang" (pp. 174 - 75).
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