Ben Weese, architect and preservationist who helped save Glessner House, dies at 94

Ben Weese was an architect and historic preservationist who was part of the “Chicago Seven” architectural group, an informal coterie of Chicago architects who banded together to reject the rigid approach toward modernism espoused by Ludwig Mies van Der Rohe.

Weese served on the Commission on Chicago Landmarks and worked with his architect brother, Harry, and others in the field to form what now is the Chicago Architecture Foundation. The organization began with the sole purpose of saving the Richardsonian Romanesque-style Glessner House on the Near South Side.

“What I admired most about Ben was the passion he put into everything he did,” said William Tyre, the executive director and curator of the Glessner House. “Whether it was fighting to save important architecture, designing quality low-income housing, engaging in social causes or hugging a tree, he gave 110% of himself, because he believed in these pursuits and how they would positively impact the larger community.”

Weese, 94, died of complications of Alzheimer’s disease on April 29 at the Belmont Village-Lincoln Park senior living facility in Lincoln Park, said his wife of 60 years, Cynthia. He was a Lincoln Park resident for more than 65 years.

Benjamin Horace Weese was born in Evanston and grew up in Barrington, playing football and competing in the pole vault at Barrington High School. He received a bachelor’s degree in 1951 from Harvard University.

During the Korean War, Weese was a conscientious objector and instead was enlisted to help refugees from East Germany through an operation set up by the Church of the Brethren.

Back home, Weese returned to Harvard and earned a master’s degree in architecture in 1957 before going to work at his brother Harry’s architectural firm.

He and photographer Richard Nickel were among those who formed what then was known as the Chicago School of Architecture Foundation to try to preserve the three-story, 35-room Glessner House at 1800 S. Prairie Ave., which dates to 1886. About 30 individuals came together to form the foundation and paid $35,000 in 1966 for the house.

“It was not an easy sell to his fellow architects. Many understood the importance of the house, but didn’t think the effort could be successful with its location … and the enormous funds that would be needed for its maintenance,” Tyre said. “Ben made a very convincing argument that converted skeptics into supporters.”

After buying Glessner House, the foundation embarked on an effort to raise about $200,000 to restore the mansion, which today is managed by a nonprofit group that offers tours and programs.

One of Weese’s early projects as an architect was designing the 29-story residential building at 55 W. Chestnut Street on the Gold Coast, which was completed in 1966. During the 1970s, Weese designed the 26-story Lake Village East, a 38-sided tower with a footprint akin to that of a tree stump, in the South Side’s Kenwood neighborhood. The Tribune’s architecture critic at the time, Paul Gapp, called the building “kind of an oblate sphere interrupted by all … those wild angles.”

“Everybody is jumping onto the prefabricated module bandwagon these days, but there’s no reason to blindly accept that kind of technology when it is so limiting,” Weese told the Tribune in 1973. “Our building is antimodular, antisystems. It offers great freedom in planning apartment layouts.”

Two years later, Weese’s Grace Street Apartments in Lakeview, for senior citizens, was completed. The Tribune called the tower a “cousin” to Lake Village East, with a “marked family resemblance.”

“We were trying to enclose more area with less outside,” Weese told the Tribune in 1975. “The result is an economy of total exterior wall surface and a reasonable construction price tag.”

Also in the 1970s, Weese joined with architects Stanley Tigerman, Laurence Booth, Thomas Beeby, Stuart Cohen, James Ingo Freed and James Nagle to form the “Chicago Seven,” a group that later grew to 11 and which broke from what Gapp once called “the Miesian orthodoxy of Chicago-style architecture.” The group drew international attention in 1976 with its “Chicago Architects” exhibit honoring the wide variety of design philosophies developed in Chicago.

The group then began dreaming up other intellectual exercises, such as contests and exhibitions, all aimed at a more inclusive perspective of Chicago’s architectural history. The group’s work helped lead to the rise of postmodern architecture in Chicago.

In 1977, Weese left his brother’s firm after 20 years to form his own firm with his wife, architect Cynthia Weese, which now is known as Weese Langley Weese.

The firm worked on the conversion of the Webster Hotel near the Lincoln Park Zoo into rental apartments, renovations of the LaSalle Towers building at 1211 N. LaSalle St. in Old Town and the design of the 30-story Chestnut Place apartment building, 8 W. Chestnut St. Weese won awards for his Goose Lake Prairie State Park Interpretive Center in Morris, Illinois.

“In the case of Ben, his architecture was completely of a piece with his sense of commitment to community and to a high sense of morality,” said UIC architecture professor emeritus Robert Bruegmann. “His architecture tends to be simple, solid, understated. It always conveys a fitness of purpose and attention to context and the needs of its users.”

Bruegmann noted that Weese’s “underlying decency, even his deep sense of spirituality, shines through” in his work on Illinois Wesleyan University’s Evelyn Chapel, Wartburg College’s chapel and the Westminster Presbyterian Church in Peoria.

For more than a decade starting in the 1990s, Weese served on the Commission on Chicago Landmarks.

Weese cut back on work over the years before retiring altogether around 2010, his wife said.

In the late 1990s, Weese, a bicyclist and frequent user of public transportation, printed a set of Post-it notes reading “Save the Planet, Get a Small Car” that he would slap on the backs of sport utility vehicles.

“There’s a war on between the pedestrian life and the auto excess,” Weese told the Tribune in 1998. “It’s a matrix of problems, but I find the social isolation, which has come to a millennial head, is epitomized by the sport utility vehicle. Why do you need a four-wheel drive to get around a city where the snow is plowed immediately?”

In addition to his wife, Weese is survived by a son, Dan; a daughter, Catharine; and five grandchildren.

A service is being planned for the fall.

Bob Goldsborough is a freelance reporter.