TIGERMAN'S ARK

September 20th 2019 would have been Stanley Tigerman's 89th birthday. 

I worked for Stanley Tigerman from 1986 to 1989. The text below reflects on the mulitfaceted and and mentoring individual I knew well.

Stanley Tigerman built his ark as an architectural haven for eighty-eight years.

This haven in Chicago, provided shelter for generations of architects both in practice and academia. 

Constructing the ark was not an easy task, he assembled it from many material styles of architecture, but predominantly Postmodernism; therefore the ark was a spectrum of colors and patterns applied to all its facades. 

Tigerman’s vision for the project was in response to the public outrage he experienced from his 1978 montage entitled “Titanic”. The montage depicted Mies’s Crown Hall sinking into Lake Michigan. Tigerman was cast out, labeled a rebel of the discipline. At this moment of his career, he decided an ark for architects would be his life’s work. Tigerman’s Ark was completed in May 2019 awaiting the next Great Flood of Chicago architecture; elevating its’ legacy to unforeseen heights, as he so often had predicted.