Movie Poster, 1930 Courtesy, Paramount Pictures In addition to its own films, Paramount Pictures distributed foreign films under an agreement with Germany’s UFA Studios, the largest film studio in Europe at the time. Through its association with UFA, Paramount was able to bring the work of directors Ernst Lubitsch and Josef von Sternberg, and actors such as Maurice Chevalier and Marlene Dietrich to American audiences for the first time. “The Blue Angel” featured music from Bertoldt Brecht’s “Three Penny Opera,” one of the most famous musicals of the period.

History

1306 S. Michigan Avenue was built in 1930 by architect Anker S. Graven. This sleek four-story Art Deco building, clad in limestone, was erected as the Paramount Publix Corporation as a film exchange, a venue for the presentation of films to the independent cinema operators throughout the Midwest who could rent them for exhibition at their theaters. The studio occupied the building up to about 1950, when it was taken over by the Equitable Life Assurance Company. In the 1970s it was known as the Seafarers International Union Building. The City of Chicago took possession of it in a tax sale in 1984, and used it for the Health Department’s Environmental Health Clinic. The building was acquired by Columbia College in 1999 for use as the school’s Dance Center. After extensive interior renovation and adaptation, the Dance Center opened its state-of-the-art educational and public performance facilities in the fall of 2000.

Design Philosophy

The end of World War I in 1918 had a profound impact on European politics, society, and design. This event marked the end of the hereditary monarchies that ruled Germany, Austria and Russia for hundreds of years. With them went the artistic patronage that had characterized their societies, and the historic revival styles that had expressed and reinforced aristocratic position and authority. It was the beginning of a progressive age characterized by unprecedented experiments in governmental organization and economic structure, and by a social upheaval caused by the collapse of the old order. This caused artists, architects and designers to seek a new aesthetic vocabulary to express their changed status from royal subjects into citizens of a modern, industrialized world.

The sources for this new aesthetic vocabulary were found in the products of the machine. The Industrial Age had introduced new technologies for building and design that enabled architects to build more economically, more quickly, and more efficiently. This streamlined, technological process, along with the desire for a new aesthetic, combined to inspire the ornamental form of modernism now known as Art Deco. Although named after the famous Exposition International des Arts Industriels et Decoratifs, held in Paris in 1925, the style can clearly be seen in objects designed from the end of the war, and its approach can be seen in the revised curricula of such traditional schools as the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and in the revolutionary Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany. A truly modern style, it was felt, needed to be free of historic associations and embrace modern technology.

The progressive ideals of 1920s European modernism found resonance in the United States, where historic revival design had held sway since the end of the nineteenth century. While the social and political conditions here were not comparable to those in Europe, the predominance of industry, the increasing sophistication of technology, a belief in the idea of progress, and the desire for a new mode of expression that embraced the present and future were common interests. American architects used European ideas and incorporated them into their designs.

It was the desire to project an image of modernity, progressive ideals, and a belief in a better future through technology that brought the Paramount Pictures Corporation to cinema designer Anker S. Graven to create the building at 1300-06 South Michigan Avenue. As a designer of prominent cinema theaters in several cities, he was familiar with the functional needs of and symbolism desired by the film industry. The fact that it served its original owners in a quickly and frequently changing industry for twenty years is a testament to the success of Graven’s design.

Description

The Columbia College Dance Center Building is a three story with basement brick and reinforced concrete structure with stone cladding on its Michigan Avenue and
11th Street façades and brick on its other elevations. Its design is Art Deco, however the articulation of this style is found more in the details of the exterior than in its overall massing, which is horizontal rather than vertical. In detail, however, vertical lines dominate: the piers have faceted fluting, and the metal foliate-patterned spandrels between the upper floors and above the third floor are set back, giving vertical emphasis to the chamfered corner bays. The effect mimics the setbacks of contemporary highrises, and the detailing makes the building look in some respects like an unfinished or truncated skyscraper. The façade is limestone, with a granite facing at the base and elaborately carved foliage details around the portal. Despite its small size, the building communicates a sense of the monumental in its scale and design.

Campus Preservation Plan

• Volume VIII: 1306 South Michigan Avenue [79 pages]
• View entire plan