





































The Architecture of Ethics:
Stanley Tigerman

Emmanuel Petit

Chicago-born Jewish architect Stanley 
Tigerman wouldn’t mind to be portrayed as a sort 
of  freethinker and even libertine of  the architectural 
discipline while, paradoxically, constructing himself  
as the defender of  ethics in architecture. He is 
somebody who insists that what architects do with 
physical architecture is important but that ultimately 
the architecture of  the ‘here and now’ is a mere 
scaffold to support ideas that exceed the sphere of  
art and that lie beyond the expressive possibilities 
of  architecture. 

Philosophy has institutionalized a series of  
major figures—the positive philosophers—who 
constitute the foundation of  the field as we have 
come to define it: Plato, Kant, Hegel, and the like; 
but it also draws its vitality from their dialectic 
counter-parts: the anti-philosophers—Socrates, 
Kierkegaard, Bataille—i.e. those thinkers, who don’t 
play by the rules, and who (some would claim) have 
no business being counted as a part of  the discipline 
of  philosophy. These anti-philosophers, however, 
are indispensable to making philosophy move. If  
given the choice, Tigerman would certainly side 
with the anti-philosophers ... constructing himself  
as a sort of  anti-architect, who cannot leave the 
discipline because it is what fuels his resistance—
the resistance to all these fantasies of  perfection, 
synthesis and performance—of  “do-good-ism” 
in the world. He insists that he wanted to become 
an architect when he read Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead. 
It made him furious! If  your hope is to save the 
world, build the largest shelter for homeless people, 
like Stanley did with his Pacific Garden Mission in 

He Wanted 
to become an 

architect when he 
read Ayn rand’s 
fountainhead. it 

made him furious!

“

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Chicago, or found a school for socially responsible and environmentally 
conscious design (like he did with Eva Maddox when they founded 
Archeworks in Chicago in 1994). But do not expect an invitation into the 
architectural Hall of  Fame for it. For that, you need other techniques: You 
need a theory of  anti-architecture. 

Tigerman provides something of  that sort. He has all the credentials 
to master the subject of  architecture; but in spite of  that, his real “subject” 
never ceased to be the human being, while architecture was, for him, a sort 
of  stage or dramatic space within which to choreograph the dialogues and 
encounters between humans. His long-lasting friendship with the late dean 
of  the Cooper Union School of  Architecture, John Hejduk, was largely 
based on this common interest: Didn’t Hejduk also fathom architecture as 
an arena for the poetic and ineffable meeting between humans, as well as 
for the empathy between human subjects and the subject of  architecture? 
While Hejduk designed cities “populated” with architectural characters 
on their journeys from Venice to Berlin and to Prague, and from Riga to 
Vladivostok, Tigerman liked to draw his own autobiographical dream cities 
set against the backdrop of  non-realist environments in the spirit of  Joan 
Miró’s “Carnival of  Harlequin” (1924-25) and the “Garden of  Earthly 
Delights” by Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch, which was filled with 
literal renditions of  certain proverbs of  the day. The so-called Architoons 
were always colonized with the fragments and anecdotes of  Tigerman’s 
personal, eclectic architectural memory—from Greek caryatids, to Mies 
van der Rohe’s buildings, to tectonic details of  the Chicago balloon frame, 
concentration camp barracks and their steaming chimneys, the temple 
of  Solomon, the Chicago street grid, and Tigerman’s own buildings and 
paper projects. This imaginary cosmos was animated by little frogmen 
or cherubim in the tradition of  François Rabelais’s grotesque carnival 
characters in Gargantua and Pantagruel—which the literary theorist Mikhail 
Bakhtin had rediscovered as the epitome of  an “open” or “polyglossic” 
text in his Rabelais and His World: Carnival and Grotesque from the mid-
1960s.1 Tigerman’s cartoon figures seemed to protect his personal and 
plural Oikos of  memories as much as they guarded the disciplinary book 
of  architecture—which was at risk of  turning abstract, inert, and static in 
the hands of  the second and third generation modernists under whom 
Tigerman was trained (i.e. the generation of  Paul Rudolph). One of  the 
Architoons portrays one such cherub (a.k.a. an architect), who is torn in a 
Janus-faced reality between the “archaeological” gravity of  the discipline 
and his spirited need to escape into another world of  personal, idiosyncratic 
creativity: He is stepping on top of  an architectural column which breaks 
underneath his feet while at the same time he stretches and reaches up to 



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hold on to the umbilical cord of  one of  his creative 
offsprings, the phallus-shaped Daisy House (Porter 
Beach, Indiana, 1975-78), which took flight on top 
of  a cloud.

His interest in the exchange between “subjects” 
is the reason Tigerman kept being drawn to ethical 
philosophy and the theories of  dialogism, from 
Aristotle to Emmanuel Lévinas—Lévinas, the 
philosopher and Talmud-scholar who was also 
formative for Jacques Derrida’s attentiveness to 
the alterity of  writing, and who was close friends 
with the anecdotalist of  the unknowable, Maurice 
Blanchot; and then to Martin Buber, who published 

his book Ich und Du (I and Thou) in 1923, in 
which he cogitated about the nature of  the true 
encounter with the Other. Buber maintained that 
the genuine meeting between I and Thou could 
not be premeditated (or “composed”), but that it 
was utterly serendipitous and, hence, revelatory. In 
a sense, the sublime spontaneity and transience of  
the principle of  “dialogue” as described by Buber 
has been at odds with the tradition of  architectural 
production where thorough planning, notation, and 
representation preceded the actualization of  the 
project. In Buber’s terminology, such a “structured” 
confrontation with the world treats that world as a 

The Daisy House



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collection of  objects. When the subject “plans” the world in this way, 
however, he can no longer encounter subjects, but all his relationships are 
reflections of  his own ideas: Ich-Du turns into Ich-Es (I-It). As one of  
the ills of  modernity, dialogue is turned into a monologue, and alterity is 
suppressed. 

In Tigerman’s view, by the 1960s, architectural modernism had turned 
into a monologue only accessible to the narrow circle of  architectural 
cognoscenti. He hoped, nevertheless, that his career as an architect could be 
a journey to discover otherness in architecture, and, as the title of  his 1982 
book Versus: An American Architect’s Alternatives suggested, to track down 
“other” stylistic and ideological attitudes in architecture. To this end, he 
made a point of  remaining a sort of  outsider to the orthodox teachings of  
the discipline.2 Like Buber, Lévinas, and Derrida, Tigerman’s Jewishness has 
played a determining role for this desire for alterity. He was introduced to 
the study of  the Torah by his grandfather, a self-taught Talmudic reader, and 
has subsequently always affirmed his Jewishness. With it, he has cultivated 
a compassion for the oppressed and the persecuted. In architecture, this 
empathy translated into a skepticism towards establishment doctrine, from 
which he liked to distance himself. His book Architecture of  Exile from 
1988 thematized the “exilic” relationship the Hebraic culture entertained 
with the hegemonic, Greek or “Hellenic” tradition of  architecture as 
manifested in the candid structure of  the Parthenon. The book also made 
a case for the liaison and convoluted dialogue between the (visible) realm 
of  architectural aesthetic with the more ethereal spheres of  ethics and 
the sacred—between presence and absence. As a Jew, Tigerman continues 
to relish the existential “drift” between the contrasting sentiments of  
alienation and belonging to the city of  Chicago—a predicament Saul 
Bellow had so captivatingly described in his Adventures of  Augie March; 
the bildungsroman begins with the famous sentence “I am an American, 
Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at things as I have 
taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to 
knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so 
innocent. But a man’s character is his fate, says Heraclitus... .”3 

At the time Tigerman tried to launch his architectural career in 
Chicago, he felt that a certain strand of  modernism had besieged 
architectural discourse while the experimentalism of  younger architects 
was pushed aside. In order for the discipline to stay energetic and lively, 
however, the “minimal palette” of  the modernist canon had to open 
up and accept certain “contaminants” into its stern aesthetic, stringent 
utopianism, and ideological catechism. Tigerman challenged all claims 



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that architectural study was “ontological” in nature, 
i.e. that the discipline had to devote itself  to some 
stable conceptual “synthesis” or inner “being,” 
which theory was called to uncover. Instead, he 
alleged that architecture had an “inability to define 
itself  inherently”4 and that, therefore, it needed 
to transgress its cherished myths of  purity and 
perpetuity (e.g. the clarity of  tectonic and functional 
principles, the permanence of  proportional 
systems, the synthetic nature of  typological partis, 
a.s.o.). Instead of  propagating the modern myths 
of  stability, Tigerman fathomed architecture as 
the rift or space, which inserts itself  in-between 
incongruous temporalities: “The gestalt of  art 
lies in that intersection of  one’s own epoch and 
eternity.”5 One of  his missions became to disclose 
the heterogeneity of  Chicago’s architectural heritage 
and reveal alternative directions to the legacy of  the 
“heroes” of  modernist Chicago—of  Louis Sullivan, 
Daniel Burnham, Frank Lloyd Wright, and, most of  
all, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

Mies had come to Chicago following the 
close of  the Bauhaus by the Nazis, as part of  
what Tigerman called the “German invasion”6 
of  Chicago modernism. Appearing as a sort of  
European aesthetic arbiter and ideologue, Mies was 
able to give something to the United States that 
none of  the other modernist forefathers could: 
Unlike Le Corbusier, who was perceived as too 
intellectual to fill this role, Tigerman argued, or 
Walter Gropius, whose theories lacked paradigmatic 
clarity, Mies’s architecture, “was not unnecessarily 
demanding on the functional or intellectual 
levels,”7 and was thus able to convey a sense of  Ur-
European taste, permanence and democracy. While 
Tigerman praised Mies’s early role in America, he 
rejected the subsequent pervasive dissemination 
and banalization of  his architecture by his many 
followers, particularly C.F. Murphy and Skidmore, 
Owings and Merrill, who adjusted Mies’s ideas to 
the corporate context and made of  his architecture 

Like Buber, 
Lévinas, 

and Derrida, 
Tigerman’s 

Jewishness 
has played a 

determining role 
for this desire for 

alterity

“

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the official canon.

Tigerman’s relationship with Mies and Miesianism has been complex 
to say the least; he invokes Mies in most of  his texts, where he makes 
of  him a kind of  straw figure or vodoo doll of  modernism. While the 
acolytes had turned Mies into their “object” of  contemplation, study, 
and imitation, Tigerman fathomed a more subjective (Buber’s Ich-Du) 
encounter with Mies — Mies as an imaginary father figure and mentor. 
Nine years after Mies’s death, in 1978, Tigerman addressed an open letter 
to him in which he reported that, “here in Chicago everything appears to 
have remained much the same as it was ten years ago”8; he then wrote a 
postscript to that letter in 1986, in which he deplores “that Americans, by 
and large, still consider you [Mies] as a commercial paradigm rather than 
as a philosophic role model.”9 Tigerman did see in Mies’s abstractionism 
a philosophical stance: Because the German emigré had inaugurated a 
radically “other” vision in architecture, he could figure as the epitome of  
the liberal freethinker. In Tigerman’s mind, to imitate Mies did not imply 
that one had to repeat his abstract aesthetic, it meant to make oneself  
different from anyone else so far ... including Mies. In architecture, Mies 
could function as the model for the individualist.10 Much of  Tigerman’s 
own architecture can be read as a dialogue with Mies’s “matrix,” 
which nevertheless is traversed and warped by another, more “supple” 
geometrical logic: The composition of  Tigerman’s Oakbrook Residence 
from 1976-77, for example, seemed to emulate the paradoxical meeting of  
the Miesian grid with a more fluid, flexible, and lyrical geometry. Similarly, 
some of  Tigerman’s early oil paintings, which directly borrowed from 
another German-born artist, Josef  Albers, also evidenced an interest in 
the close alliance between rational line geometries and the quasi-figural 
presence a slight disturbance of  geometry can engender.

Tigerman’s part real, part imaginary exchange with the German 
expatriate was intentionally concocted as a psychoanalytically charged 
relationship, which culminated with Tigerman’s creation of  an ambivalent 
collage in 1979, entitled “The Titanic”; the work showed Mies’s Crown Hall 
at the Illinois Institute of  Technology precariously floating (or possibly 
sinking) in the ocean against the backdrop of  a clouded sky. “The Titanic” 
illustrated the nachleben of  the ambivalent encounter between Tigerman 
and Mies—immersed in an oneiric and unstable milieu of  the clouds and 
the deep water. With it, Tigerman demanded that the baton be passed to 
a (then) young generation of  architects in Chicago, who felt a Bloomian 
anxiety of  influence from their modern antecedents.11 

In 1976, Tigerman turned his personal discontent with the architecture 



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scene into a more collective disagreement when he 
co-founded a group of  self-declared “individualists” 
and “freethinkers”: The Chicago Seven included 
Tom Beeby, Larry Booth, Stuart Cohen, James 
Ingo Freed, James Nagle, Ben Weese; in 1977, the 
group expanded to eight to include Helmut Jahn, 
the “Baron von High-Tech.”12 The first formal 
event of  the Seven was an exhibition the group 
organized for The Cooper Union in New York, 
and later took to Illinois. The participants of  the 
exhibition conceived of  “Chicago Architects” as a 
sort of  salon des refusés, which was scheduled to be on 
display at the Richard Gray Gallery simultaneously 
with the “official” and “canonical” retrospective 
of  Chicago architecture at Chicago’s Museum of  
Contemporary Art, entitled “A Hundred Years of  
Chicago Architecture: Continuity of  Form and 
Structure.”13 The New York opening of  the show 
was to give it legitimacy before it would go back 
“home” to Chicago. In order to communicate 
their insurrectionist intent, facing up to the official 
tenet of  Chicago modernism, this group of  
architects was named after its political homologue 
in Chicago, also called the Chicago Seven around 
social right activists Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, 
David Dellinger, Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, John 
Froines, Lee Weiner and Bobby Seale, all of  whom 
had been arrested and put to trial for conspiracy 
and for instigating to riot at massive protests against 
the Vietnam War at the 1968 Democratic National 
Convention.14 Seale had to appear again at hearings 
in 1970 as one of  the New Haven Nine during 
the New Haven Black Panther trials. During these 
trials, the architecture school of  Tigerman’s alma 
mater, Rudolph’s Art and Architecture Building 
at Yale, fell prey to a mysterious fire, although no 
arson was revealed. Both the Chicago Seven and the 
New Haven Nine were all finally found not guilty 
of  conspiracy, yet Tigerman was well aware of  the 
cultural stir these conspirators had provoked—not 
least because Tigerman knew Weiner. Beyond the 



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name of  the political precedent, some of  its street-fighter terminology 
was also adopted by the architectural Seven; one of  its members explained 
that “what Mies did is that he thought of  it as a war for saving our souls 
or the battle for the saving of  architecture. Late in his life he once said, 
“I’ve showed them how to do it. I am winning the war for architecture.”15 
The Seven rose up against becoming the foot soldiers of  a war they did 
not endorse.

The Seven also positioned themselves in rivalry with two groups of  
architects on the East Coast, one of  which had declared a shared interest 
in the autonomy of  the discipline of  architecture in the context of  the 
CASE study groups in the late sixties.16 As an outcome of  one of  these 
meetings held at the Museum of  Modern Art in 1969, five of  its members 
published a series of  house projects in a book entitled Five Architects in 
1972; the projects were intellectually strung together by a critical essay by 
historian Colin Rowe.17 Because of  his aptitude to provide a connective 
theory for their ideas, Rowe emerged as the eminence grise of  the “New 
York Five,” or “Whites,” which included Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, 
Charles Gwathmey, John Hejduk and Richard Meier. It did not take long 
until the Whites’ interest in Le Corbusier and the autonomous, abstract 
syntax of  form was challenged by the so-called “Grays,” who were mostly 
associated with Yale and Pennsylvania universities, and included Vincent 
Scully, Robert Venturi, Robert A.M. Stern, and Romaldo Giurgola, among 
others. The Grays promoted the semantic dimension of  architectural 
form, and its ability to “communicate” by connecting to the history and 
the architectural motives of  the Western humanist traditions.18 The staged 
rivalry between the Chicago and the New York groups was based on a 
significant conceptual difference, in that the Seven abstained from defining 
a shared set of  aesthetic and theoretical principles, so that every one of  
its members would preserve his individuality and singularity. Tigerman 
described the Seven’s liberal agenda as follows:

The New York Five thought they had something in common, and they presented 
themselves as Whites: exclusivist, autonomous beings ...they had a certain 
collective belief  in “autonomy.” The Grays, which was [Romaldo] Giurgola, 
[Robert A. M.] Stern, and all those people, saw themselves as inclusivists. The 
guys in L. A., the Silvers, saw themselves as studies in extrusion, because of  the 
speed of  the automobile. 
The Chicago Seven have nothing to do with each other—formally, and now, 
personally. I don’t even see them. ...It was the only way we could get seven 
desperate people who had nothing in common, including respect for the other; but 
one thing we had in common: we needed to penetrate a city that was monolithic, 
that was Miesian.19 



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The Seven stayed away from delineating a 
shared aesthetic-formalist code; instead, they were 
mostly defined negatively, by stating that they did not 
participate in the established architectural culture of  
Chicago. This strategy of  affirming identity through 
negation and distance was entirely consistent with 
Tigerman’s ironic weltanschauung, which hinged 
on the possible co-existence of  contradictions and 
unresolved dualities. The Seven made this ironic 
self-understanding into an ideological model for 
urban cohabitation when, in 1978, they organized 
the “Chicago Townhouse” competition at The 
Graham Foundation. This event came in defense 
of  a pluralist discipline, and became one of  the 
forerunners of  the strada novissima installation at 
the showcase event for postmodern architecture 
two years later at the Venice Biennale, called “The 
Presence of  the Past.”

Tigerman’s advocacy of  the creative and 
independent freethinker has to be seen against 
the background of  a determining and officially 
sanctioned conflict the United States engaged in at 
the time he developed his project in architecture: 
the Vietnam War. The senseless loss of  human 
life in the worsening war after 1965, and well into 
the 1970s, presented the American society with 
an existential puzzle, which destroyed the former 
confidence in the ability to master and control every 
aspect of  life; moreover, it stirred up suspicions 
about the ethical value underlying the positivism of  
the modern and secular lifestyle. When the United 
States’s official campaign against Communism 
turned into a national disaster, Tigerman started 
to question the relative gain of  abstract and 
universalizing heroism in the face of  the individual 
suffering of  the people of  both war nations. He 
was well aware that the emerging existential angst 
around Vietnam did not only affect the collective 
conscience, as the media in the socially oriented 
sixties kept suggesting, but it resulted in fears on a 
very personal level: The national calamity made him 



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aware of  his own finitude and mortality. Together with this realization of  
finitude, Tigerman’s simultaneous midlife crisis, only added to his individual 
disquietude at the time.20 He wrote in 1982 that towards the second half  
of  the 1970s, “I felt the need to reassess the way I wished to live the rest 
of  my life. I became fascinated with the idea that the notions of  humor 
and irony could be regarded as perverse responses to the acknowledgment 
of  death.”21 Here, he announced his primordial reason as well as the 
rhetorical modes of  expression of  his form of  architectural liberalism; 
the introduction of  humor and irony into architecture was to open a space 
within the discipline’s dense matrix of  foundational assumptions, and re-
conquer within it a territory for individual freedom of  expression. In spirit, 
the double, tragic/comic rhetoric of  his architectural writing and design is 
very close to Roberto Benigni’s in his 1997 comedy La vita è bella—a daring 
aesthetic-ethical tour de force about the life in the concentration camps in 
Auschwitz.

In view of  the Western world’s apparent lack of  self-doubt and self-
criticism manifested in the U.S. government’s bad judgment around the 
Vietnam war and the war protests, Tigerman challenged the “modern” 
notion of  an overarching and synthetic ideology (i.e. the zeitgeist) which 
was considered to epitomize all aspirations of  a people at a particular 
moment in time. He criticized the collective delusion of  endless progress 
which, more than engrained in the very project of  modernity, was also 
endemic to the post-Emersonian, American pioneer ethics and found 
itself  boosted by the economic upswing and the consumer euphoria in the 
postwar decades. Ultimately, he considered the United States’ one-sided 
confidence in an uninterrupted cultural, social and economic renewal in 
the 1950s and early 60s immature: “There is something perverse about 
the reenactment of  the desire to remain collectively ‘young.’ It is as if  
an entire culture rejects its own coming of  age because it may ruin that 
culture’s optimism.”22 The heroic and positivist devotion to this shared 
belief  seemed like a naive conceit of  a nation, which failed to understand 
the true meaning of  individual “existence.” Vietnam shuttered the illusion 
that a nation like the United States would or could speak with one voice, 
and that any attitude of  dissent and disagreement should dissolve in the 
positive spirit of  an allegedly unified ideological will of  the American 
society.

In the context of  these questions raised in the socio-cultural 
sphere, Tigerman was drawn magnetically to the intellectual tradition of  
existentialism, from Socrates to Søren Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, from 
Dostoevsky to Kafka, and finally, to Mark C. Taylor’s (a-)theological 



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speculations—themselves based on Kierkegaard.23 
Tigerman liked to think of  his own position in 
architecture as analogous to the place Kierkegaard 
occupied in philosophy: What Kierkegaard was to 
Hegel, Tigerman thought he could represent in 
relation to Mies. In a sense, Hegel and Mies both 
attempted to “systematize” existence through their 
respective sterile metaphysics, which was in the 
service of  a universal welt- or zeitgeist. Kierkegaard 
and Tigerman, by contrast, insisted on the 
importance of  the subjective perspective as well 
as the freedom associated with it. They maintained 
that singular, contingent acts and reflections were 
not dictated by any universal will, but instead, 
belonged to the free initiative of  every discrete 
human being–the sphere of  “That Individual.”24 
Along with his disapproval of  abstract systemdenken, 
Kierkegaard had expressed his criticism against a 
fixed, dehumanized, and “spatialized” view of  
time, and suggested to replace it with the more 
individualized and transient notion of  “life-time.”25 
Tigerman similarly insisted that space and time were 
contingent on the mortal existence of  a person’s 
lifecycle; many of  his sketches make thematic the 
idea of  the irrecuperable passage of  individualized 
time, as does, for example, the drawing entitled 
“Hinge.” About his phallus-shaped Daisy House, 
Tigerman wrote: “The necessity to communicate 
the finite condition of  man in all its ironic nobility 
was an obvious requirement of  [this building].”26 
The house’s patron truly epitomized the Janus-
faced relationship between the very human 
sentiments of  tragedy and comedy: The client was 
the owner of  burlesque show venues in Chicago, 
and was diagnosed with terminal cancer when he 
approached Tigerman to design the house. After 
turning down the client several times, Tigerman 
finally accepted to design a house for him under the 
condition that the project would make his patron 
laugh: “I drew an erect phallus with semen coming 
out at the end, directed at him, and he laughed. He 

What 
Kierkegaard 

was to Hegel, 
Tigerman 

thought he could 
represent in 

relation to Mies

“

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liked it, and we built it, and he died three months later; that’s the truth.”27 
This thoroughly humanized, tragic/comic liaison with other subjects 
through the medium of  architecture has been at the core of  Tigerman’s 
critique of  modernism, and was, at the same time, fundamental to his own 
version of  “postmodernism.” 

Endnotes

1. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. by Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge: 
MIT Press, 1968).

2. Refer to Tigerman’s autobiography Building Bridges to Burn, forew. by Emmanuel 
Petit (ORO, 2011).

3. Saul Bellow, The Adventures of  Augie March: A Novel (New York: Viking Press, 
1953).

4. Tigerman, “The Ten Contaminants” (1991), Schlepping Through Ambivalence: 
Writings on an Ambivalent Architectural Condition, ed. Emmanuel Petit (New 
Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 54.

5. Tigerman, “Juxtaposition vs. Judgment, 1965,” Versus: An American Architect’s 
Alternatives (New York: Rizzoli, 1982), 56.

6. Tigerman used the expression “German invasion” to designate Mies van der 
Rohe’s arrival in Chicago in an interview with Barbaralee Diamonstein. 
Diamonstein-Spielvogel, “American Architecture Now: Stanley Tigerman,” 
Diamonstein-Spielvogel Video Archive, Duke University Libraries, 1984.

7. Stanley Tigerman, “Mies van der Rohe: A Moral Model”; “Paradigms in 
Architecture,” Perspecta 22, The Journal of  the Yale School of  Architecture, Rizzoli, 
New York (1986), 118.

8. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, quoted in Tigerman, Versus, 30.

9. Refer to Tigerman’s “P.P.S. to Mies,” Schlepping Through Ambivalence, 153.

10. I borrow the idea of  the meaning of  imitating an individualist from Alexander 
Nehamas’s view of  Socrates, in Art of  Living, where Nehamas claims: “To 
imitate Socrates is therefore to create oneself, as Socrates did; but it is also 
to make oneself  different from anyone else so far, and since that includes 
Socrates himself, it is to make oneself  different from Socrates as well. That is 
why he can function as the model for the individualist” Art of  Living: Socratic 
Reflections from Plato to Foucault (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of  
California Press, Sather Classical Lectures, 1998), 11.

11. In 1973, Harold Bloom published Anxiety of  Influence: A Theory of  Poetry, in 
which he argued that because a poet must look for an original poetic vision 
in order to guarantee his survival into posterity, the overwhelming influence 
of  his precedents provokes a sense of  anxiety in living poets.

12. Tigerman designates Jahn as the “Baron von High-Tech” in Versus, 30.

13. Oswald W. Grube, Peter C. Pran and Franz Schulze, 100 Years of  Architecture in 



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Chicago: Continuity of  Structure and Form (Chicago: J. Philip O’Hara, 1976).

14. The Chicago Seven were originally eight, but one of  their member’s trial (Bobby 
Seale’s) was separated from the trial of  the other seven because of  his blatant 
disrespect of  the court proceedings and the judge. 

On the Chicago Seven protests and trials, refer to: J. Anthony Lukas, “Judge 
Hoffman Is Taunted at Trial of  the Chicago 7 After Silencing Defense Counsel”, 
New York Times, February 6, 1970; David Dellinger, From Yale to Jail: the Life 
Story of  a Moral Dissenter (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993); Abbie Hoffman 
& al., Conspiracy, introduction by Noam Chomsky, edited by Peter and Deborah 
Babcox and Bob Abel (New York: Dell Publishing Company, 1969).

15. James Ingo Freed, Chicago Architects Oral History Project (Chicago, Illinois: The Art 
Institute of  Chicago, 2000).

16. On the CASE study group meetings (Conference of  Architects for the Study of  
the Environment), refer to Harry Francis Mallgrave, Modern Architectural Theory: 
A Historical Survey, 1673-1968 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

17. Five Architects: Eisenman, Graves, Gwathmey, Hejduk, Meier (New York: Wittenborn, 
1972).

18. For a discussion of  the “White/Gray” debates, refer to Joan Ockman, 
“Resurrecting the Avant-Garde: The History and Program of  Oppositions,” in 
Beatriz Colomina (ed), Architecture Production (New York: Princeton Architectural 
Press, 1988).

19. Conversation Stanley Tigerman with Emmanuel Petit, Princeton, NJ, December 
2001; in Emmanuel Petit, “Irony in Metaphysics’s Gravity: Imagination and 
Iconoclasm in Architecture 1960s-80s,” Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 
January 2006, Annex B.

20. Ibid., 115.

21. Ibid.

22. Tigerman, The Architecture of  Exile (New York: Rizzoli, 1988), 155.

23. Tigerman extracts most of  his references to existentialist thinkers from William 
Hubben, Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Kafka: Four Prophets of  Our Destiny 
(London and New York: Collier Macmillan Publishers, 1952 & 1962). Later, 
Tigerman refers a lot to Mark C. Taylor’s Erring: A Postmodern A/theology 
(Chicago: University of  Chicago Press, 1984).

24. The epitaph on Kierkegaard’s grave referred to the philosopher as “That 
Individual.”

25. Paul Bové, “The Penitentiary of  Reflection: Søren Kierkegaard and Critical 
Activity,” boundary 2, vol. 9, no. 1, A Supplement on Irony (Autumn, 1980), 
233-58, p. 237.

26. Tigerman, Versus, 116.

27. Conversation Tigerman with Petit; “Irony in Metaphysics’s Gravity... .”



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Stanley Tigerman responds

Question: The essay by Emmanuel Petit is talking about 
your ethics. And in the essay one of  the things he says is that 
your temperament or approach would have more in common 
with the anti-philosophers like Socrates and Kierkegaard 
and Bataille rather than the system builders like Kant and 
Hegel. Is that something that you would agree with or be in 
sympathy with?

Answer: I don’t have any feeling about it at all. 
Emmanuel writes what he sees and thinks is correct, 
and I am, with respect to him, simply an other. So 
I don’t have any feelings that he’s right or wrong or 
whatever.

Q: Then he does get in to the struggles that went on in 
the 1970s and 1980s with postmodernism and your central 
role there, and at the time, a lot of  times it was relegated to 
being about style, and he brings out the idea that there was 
a strong ethical incentive or underpinning to your work and 
your positions at that time, and I was hoping that you might 
have something to say about that.

A: Yeah actually I do. Architecture is an elitist 
one.  We are the hired guns for the wealthy. Or those 
in power, or kings or princes, or princes of  industry, 
or princes of  the art world. We were never about 
ethical considerations. But its provable in the last 
fifty years at least, when you could actually explore 
the phrase “follow the money and you will find 
architects” So when kings had to build in apartheid 
South Africa, we did. When the kings had to build 
for the Shah of  Iran we did. When it came time to 
build for OPEC money we did. And so today you 
find major corporate firms stampeding to the ticket 
counter of  overseas airlines to work on projects in 
countries whose human rights history doesn’t exist. 
So it still is the same. But in the 1970s on the heels 
of  Venturi’s book Complexity and Contradiction in 



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Architecture, architects took a second look at their 
origins. And so there was an attempt, feeble there’s 
no question of  it, stylistic, yes, to get in touch with 
their predecessors. To find roots as it were—of  a 
rootless people. I wrote a book twenty-five to thirty 
years ago entitled the Architecture of  Exile, which 
stipulates that Americans are in exile. This is not 
our land. It belonged to the American Indians etc. 
It was promised by the bible. Ashes to ashes, dust 
to dust but this is not our soil and we are exploitive 
even as I speak to you, so yes I for a very long time, 
not that I hold it as a badge of  honor, I have been 
a person who has been involved with ethics, who 
writes about it, who tries to build about it, etc. Yes 
that’s true.

Q: What specifically in postmodernism as it was playing 
out at the time seemed to you to have an ethical imperative?

A: Well, among other things, you have to 
remember that you are talking to someone who 
may be native to Chicago, but ultimately it is not my 
home. I was born here but it is not my home. This 
is a Baptist fundamentalist city. And also was a city 
that took great care to patronize Mies van der Rohe. 
And so it was very difficult in the sixties to come 
back from graduate school and to find a place in this 
place which was no place for me. And so we formed 
something called the Chicago Seven, with a group 
who was were antagonistic to an establishment 
condition, and we tried to make a place for us at 
the table. Around that time, a little bit later, I did 
that infamous piece about the titanic, about Crown 
Hall sinking into Lake Michigan and it struck a note 
at the time and it drew great discussion in the then 
emerging architectural culture in Chicago which 
was really nothing more than two sides battling it 
out between the traditional, canonical structural 
constructivist tradition and another group that had 
nothing in common—the Chicago Seven—but 
who felt that a more open, multi-valent condition 
might be better for all concerned in Chicago, and so 



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we battled our way to the table, and there were any number of  events—
mosh pits or whatever—where we invited others to argue it out with us 
and they came and we did. That condition no longer exists today. Basically, 
there is no Chicago architectural culture.

Q: What you had in common was an attitude towards multivalence?

A: What we had in common was we wanted a place at the table. Make 
no mistake about it. We were all different, one from the other and to find 
that place took a long time but it did transpire at some point. So yes, you 
could call it multivalent, you could call it philosophically inclined, but it 
was really very self- oriented and selfish. We wanted respect without the 
credential of  having studied with Mies. And it ultimately transpired. In the 
process, Chicago opened itself  up to every stripe of  ambulance chaser 
who came to Chicago to build. 

Q: I do have one other question I would like to run by you. One of  the things 
Emmanuel brings out in the article is about spontaneity. He thinks that cultivating 
spontaneity with another person through design rather than sort of  presenting them with 
a design—he thinks that spontaneity is something that characterized what you do. Do 
you agree with that?

A: Again, I don’t know about that. I do know that we in the West fear, 
as Emmanuel Levinas put it, the other–The other that stalks the street. We 
are terrified of  looking this person in the eye. We’re terrified of  terrorists, 
forgetting that the tradition of  terrorism is rampant in all the countries 
of  the West. Think of  the French Revolution, think about the American 
Revolution—it was filled with terrorists. The British didn’t know if  they 
were going to have a bomb in their pocket. Suicide bombers are just 
an advanced version of  the terrorists we were—American, that is. So I 
think—I’m reading a book right now that is very interesting, called On the 
Muslim Question which years ago could have been called “On the Jewish 
Question” the Jews in America and everywhere else, were never respected, 
they had to fight for the place and ultimately they had no place even in 
America. Only if  you fell into the melting pot and declared yourself  an 
American first—so we don’t take kindly to veiled Muslim women or 
trance-talking Muslim males. We could—this country is supposed to be 
made up of  diversified people that are not the same to each other. It’s 
the only country on Earth that has that distinction. We could embrace 
an other, a foreign person, a person that doesn’t speak like us and who 
has values other than ours—meaning values established by the Koran—as 
opposed to the Judeo-Christian bible. But we could, so I’m of  the type 
who believes in that, who doesn’t scare. You know, you go through life 
with only two ways, with fear or with love. And those who go in fear die 



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in fear, and those who go in love die in love. And 
that’s really all I have to say about it. I mean, I am an 
architect. I trade, I also read and I write and I draw. 
I do other things other than making buildings. And 
I like to think and hope that the buildings I make, 
make sense. We [Tigerman McCurry] don’t market, 
we don’t brand, we don’t have a marketing director. 
I’m not interested in branding, I’m not interested in 
any way in the diminishment of  the discipline. But 
it is being diminished all the time—right now, as we 
speak. In other words, I’m glad I’m eighty-three and 
I’m not going to live to see the disaster that’s about 
to come to architecture.

Stanley tigerman


