Legendary Chicago architects Stanley Tigerman and Margaret McCurry of Tigerman McCurry Architects are closing their Chicago office and tell Dennis Rodkin at Crain’s Chicago Business that they are retiring. The pair, which have long been prominent figures in Chicago’s architecture scene, say that they will make a formal announcement in the coming weeks.
Tigerman (86), a member of the Chicago Seven, a group of architects which helped shape and popularize the postmodern movement, is known for being outspoken and bucking popular opinion. In the late ‘70s, Tigerman famously unveiled his Titanic photo collage, which depicts the Mies-designed Crown Hall sinking into Lake Michigan on its side—a symbolic piece that critiqued the modernist movement which Mies van der Rohe helped make a global phenomenon through his time at the Illinois Institute of Technology.
Having designed hundreds of buildings over his career, Tigerman was honored by the Art Institute of Chicago’s Architecture and Design Society in 2012 and was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award by AIA Chicago in 2013. In 2015, Tigerman participated in and later praised the first ever Chicago Architecture Biennial, which paid homage to the architect by naming its first edition “State of the Art of Architecture”—the name of a 1977 conference at the Graham Foundation which was organized by Tigerman.