Sculpture on a Grand Scale

Jack Christiansen's Thin Shell Modernism

Tyler Sprague

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780295745626
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Dissertations et monographies sur l'architecture

The Kingdome, John ("Jack") Christiansen's best-known work, was the largest freestanding concrete dome in the world. Built amid public controversy, the multipurpose arena was designed to stand for a thousand years but was demolished in a great cloud of dust after less than a quarter century. Many know the fate of Seattle's iconic dome, but fewer are familiar with its innovative structural engineer, Jack Christensen (1927–2017), and his significant contribution to Pacific Northwest and modernist architecture. Christiansen designed more than a hundred projects in the region: public schools and gymnasiums, sculptural church spaces, many of the Seattle Center's 1962 World's Fair buildings, and the Museum of Flight's vast glass roof all reflect his expressive ideas. Inspired by Northwest topography and drawn to the region's mountains and profound natural landscapes, Christiansen employed hyperbolic paraboloid forms, barrel-vault structures, and efficient modular construction to echo and complement the forms he loved in nature. Notably, he became an enthusiastic proponent of using thin shell concrete—the Kingdome being the most prominent example—to create inexpensive, utilitarian space on a large scale. Tyler Sprague places Christiansen within a global cohort of thin shell engineer-designers, exploring the use of a remarkable structural medium known for its minimal use of material, architectually expressive forms, and long-span capability. Examining Christiansen's creative design and engineering work, Sprague, who interviewed Christiansen extensively, illuminates his legacy of graceful, distinctive concrete architectural forms, highlighting their lasting imprint on the region's built environment. A Michael J. Repass Book

CHAPTER 1

BEGINNINGS

Education in the American Midwest, 1927–1952

THOUGH THE CITY of Seattle and the Pacific Northwest figure prominently in Jack Christiansen’s career, his early life and education were rooted in Chicago and the American Midwest. The culture of Chicago and its surrounding neighborhoods—industrial, constructive, and diverse—became the stage of Christiansen’s youth, instilling a peaceful yet practical understanding of the world. His love of reading introduced him to new, faraway places and inspired his future outdoor explorations. His education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign exposed him to the Midwest legacy of building innovation, kindling his love of architecture. While Christiansen’s early experiences instilled values and perspectives he carried his entire life, they also set the stage for his departure to Seattle.

CHRISTIANSEN’S YOUTH

John Valdemar (commonly called Jack) Christiansen was born on September 28, 1927, in Chicago. He lived with his parents in a two-story duplex in the West Ridge neighborhood on Chicago’s north side, near Grandville Avenue. Once composed primarily of bungalows, the area had densified during the 1920s with the construction of closely spaced, multifamily buildings. The duplex was owned by Christiansen’s maternal grandparents, who lived upstairs, while Jack and his parents lived on the lower floor. Close to neighborhood parks and schools, Jack Christiansen’s childhood home was comfortable and safe.

Jack’s mother, Louise Linderoth Christiansen (1903–93), was the daughter of Niles and Cecelia Linderoth. The couple emigrated from Sweden in 1894, and Niles established a private dental practice in north Chicago. Louise grew up in Chicago and majored in mathematics at Northwestern University, graduating in 1926—often the only woman in her classes. After college, she worked at the Continental and Commercial National Bank in Chicago, but left the position when she married.¹

Jack’s father, Christian Valdemar Christiansen (1902–65), called C. V. or Wally, worked for the Bowman Dairy Company, just as his father had.² C. V. had attended the University of Illinois in dairy science and graduated in 1924. By the 1920s, Bowman had become the largest dairy in the Chicago area. Christiansen described his father’s position as “dairy technologist,” an emerging profession that used scientific processes to develop new dairy products for the consumer industry. Both scientific and commercial, his profession is listed in the 1930 US Census as “bacteriologist” and later, in 1940, as “chemist” for “retail, milk dairy.” Christiansen recalled his father coming home from work and sharing samples of new types of ice cream or milkshakes that were being tested for consumer markets. C. V. Christiansen was successful enough in his career to survive the Great Depression of 1929 without significant economic difficulty. Jack Christiansen learned later that his father’s salary had been reduced for one month during the Depression, only to be restored the next month. His father steadily advanced within the Bowman Dairy Company and eventually became the director of laboratories.³

Christiansen’s father was likable and easygoing, making time after work to play with Jack and his younger sister, Joan (born 1935). They enjoyed some sports together, yet his father was also hampered by an undiagnosed heart condition and high blood pressure, and he often came home from work exhausted.⁴ As another consequence, family vacations were casual affairs—like relaxing road trips to the rivers and lakes of northern Wisconsin. While enjoyable, these trips often left young Christiansen wanting more adventure and excitement.

With successful, supportive parents, Christiansen pursued a variety of interests. From a very young age, Christiansen took to drawing. As a child, he routinely drew family members’ portraits—his mother and father, his nearby aunts and uncles. Recognizing his interest and ability, his parents sent him to take classes at the Art Institute of Chicago, one of the largest cultural institutions in the city.⁵ Beginning at age eight, Christiansen would walk to the Granville Avenue station and take the Red Line train downtown—all by himself—a bit of freedom he greatly enjoyed. Christiansen recalled running through the halls of the Art Institute, surrounded by world-class artwork, before sitting down for instruction in drawing and painting.

Jack Christiansen and sister Joan, 1936

Christiansen showed promise. One summer, a landscape he produced—a simple painting of a rural house, fence, and road—was selected by the Art Institute to travel the country as part of an exhibit of children’s artwork. Christiansen recalled a deep sense of pride in his artistic creations, even at a young age. He would continue to draw and sketch throughout his personal and professional life.

In 1937, the Christiansen family moved to the suburb of Oak Park, into a large, two-story house at 802 Woodbine Avenue.⁶ There were wide streets, expansive lawns, and large spaces between the suburban homes—it was a quiet, peaceful neighborhood. Christiansen enjoyed riding his bike along the tree-lined streets, and only occasionally did he notice the unusual, prairie-style homes of Frank Lloyd Wright dotted throughout the neighborhood.⁷ Christiansen was, instead, more interested in taking the elevated train into Chicago for baseball and football games on the weekends.

Within his stable suburban life, Christiansen began to seek out more excitement, often within the pages of books. As a young boy, Christiansen became an avid reader and devoured any book he could get from school or the local library. He most enjoyed books with travel, intrigue, and adventure, like the Hardy Boys series. These books provided a window into alternative worlds outside of his own, introducing him to different places, people, and ideas.

Christiansen was particularly taken with Lost Horizon—the famous post–World War I adventure novel by James Hilton.⁸ In the book, a war veteran exhausted by the burden of combat finds the utopian, mountain monastery of Shangri-La—a place of meditation and peace that fosters exceptionally long life. Young Christiansen was most taken by the descriptions of the stunning high-altitude location of the mountain retreat. In Lost Horizon, Hilton described the mountain landscape of the Himalayas in poetic detail: “Far away, at the very limit of distance, lay range upon range of snow-peaks, festooned with glaciers, and floating, in appearance, upon vast levels of cloud. . . . There was something raw and monstrous about those uncompromising icecliffs, and a certain sublime impertinence in approaching them thus.”⁹

The mysterious mountains were natural, dangerous, and yet strikingly beautiful. Through Hilton’s words, Christiansen could visualize this mystic mountain landscape, full of unexplored valleys and unknown peaks. The natural environment could create a poetic, transcendent experience. This was a world entirely unlike anything he had seen in the flatlands and rolling hills of the Midwest, and it captivated Christiansen’s imagination.

Christiansen began to seek out images of real mountains in magazines such as National Geographic. He studied world atlases and maps, locating high peaks around the globe and devouring any information he could find on climbing adventures. He discovered a 1939 Life magazine article that began to describe for him a place like the one he had read about. Under the heading “America’s Future,” the article described the Pacific Northwest as a place of rugged abundance, where “the land is rich in nature’s goods” and “irrigation makes the Northwest land bloom.”¹⁰ The article’s accompanying photographs showed large expanses of land in Idaho, Oregon, and Washington that were being transformed through industry and infrastructure—such as the aluminum processing now made possible because of hydroelectric dams, including the Bonneville Dam and the soon-to-be-completed Grand Coulee Dam. The photographs showed jagged mountain landscapes and staggeringly tall stacks of wood boards in a Seattle lumberyard.

But unlike in Lost Horizon, this was a real place, one Christiansen could imagine visiting. Describing the very place he longed to find, the article proclaimed: “The look of the land bears out the Northwest’s frontier promise. Behind the cities of the coast lie mighty reaches of forest, mountain, valley and river where you may go for miles and see only a thread of railroad track or a lonely settler’s clearing as evidence of man’s presence on the giant earth.”¹¹ The Pacific Northwest had captivated Christiansen’s spirit, and by age twelve, he began to envision a life for himself—one full of exploration and adventure—out West.

In fall 1941, Christiansen started his freshman year at Oak Park and River Forest High School. World War II had begun in Europe in September 1939, and the escalating war had a significant impact on his high school experience. After December 1941, when the United States declared war on Japan following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Christiansen began to see older neighbors and friends heading off to war, and it became clear to Christiansen that he would be enlisting in the military upon graduation. In preparation for a technical occupation during the war, Christiansen focused on foundational subjects like science and math in his coursework. He did not take formal art classes in high school, although he continued to draw and sketch on his own. Like most boys at the time, he played sports in season: football in the fall, basketball in the winter, and baseball in the spring. Growing rapidly to over 6 feet tall, he particularly enjoyed basketball.

Christiansen also held many jobs over the summer as a youth—both before and during high school. With a shortage of workers due to men’s obligatory military service, Christiansen had no trouble finding a job.¹² For several summers during high school, Christiansen worked in construction—his first real engagement with any type of building activity. He spent the entire summers of 1942 and 1943 working as a hod carrier—hauling bricks in wheelbarrows and mixing mortar for the masons at different places on a job site. Through the backbreaking labor, Christiansen began to see how buildings came together, all the while learning basic skills from the roughand-tumble bricklayers. Christiansen kept his eyes open on each job, not realizing that this sort of activity would play a large role in his life.

By the time of his senior year (1944–45), Christiansen was playing junior varsity football and basketball. He was also a member of the Burke public speaking and leadership group and the Newton Club—an organization that “broadened knowledge of chemistry through talks, demonstrations, movies and trips.”¹³ The year Christiansen graduated, the school yearbook devoted several pages to students who had left school and were currently serving overseas, and Christiansen anticipated enlisting immediately after graduation. In early 1945, his parents took him to a local recruiter and enrolled him in a Navy radar technician program. Christiansen graduated from Oak Park and River Forest High School in 1945 and did not work at all that summer in anticipation of joining the military in the fall.

Jack Christiansen, relaxing in summer 1945

But global events drastically shifted Christiansen’s path. World War II in Europe ended abruptly, with the German surrender on May 7, 1945. The United States’ detonation of the atomic bomb over Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, effectively concluded conflict in the Pacific theater. At the end of the summer, the navy ended the radar technician program that Christiansen was set to enter. With the obligation to serve diminishing, rather than sign up for general enlistment, Christiansen and his parents decided—relatively quickly—that he should begin his collegiate education.

The only school Christiansen considered was the University of Illinois, in Urbana-Champaign, the state’s flagship institution located roughly 150 miles south of Oak Park. The university was founded in 1867 as the Illinois Industrial University, a land-grant institution intended to provide industrial education to the public and foster the growing agricultural and technical needs of the state. John Milton Gregory and other early founders called the University of Illinois the “West Point for the working world,” referencing the high-quality engineering education offered at West Point Military Academy.¹⁴

Christiansen did not have a specific career in mind as the fall semester approached. He felt no pressure to continue the family tradition in the dairy industry, nor did it hold much appeal to him. He remained interested in drawing, but also enjoyed his summers of construction and his science classes in high school. Searching for a specific path, Christiansen and his parents met with a high school guidance counselor, who gave him a career survey—a simple...