Chicago is a city proud of its architecture. And rightly so: Chicago’s skyline is stunning; not as expansive as New York’s but contained within a smaller area, it boasts a vertiginously beautiful cityscape, one that gives us a sense of an ongoing dialogue between different architectural movements and periods, where Mies van der Rohe’s striking monoliths stare down the neo-Gothic Tribune Tower across the river. Indeed, Chicago offers us something of a potted history of modern architecture. In 1871, the Great Chicago Fire levelled much of the city, and as disastrous as it was for the place and its people (many of whom were killed or displaced in the tragedy), a huge rebuilding project meant Chicago would rise from the ashes a thoroughly modern city, ready for the twentieth century. In 1885, the first steel-framed high-rise building was erected in Chicago – a major leap in engineering which would usher in the new era of the skyscraper. Today it boasts some spectacular features to its skyline, including of course the Willis Tower, one of the tallest buildings in the world, as well as some impressive recent examples of postmodern design.
But there’s one building in Chicago I really want to talk about. In amongst the glistening glass-and-steel spires of the city, breaking up the architectural homogeny of phallic erections, the Crain Communications Building somehow seems different. There’s something about its slanted, diamond-shaped roof with a slit down the middle that stands out from the blunt objects that surround it. As I stood staring up at it from the nearby Millennium Park this last summer, suddenly it clicked. “Hey, you’re right – it does kinda look like a vagina!”
So how does an architectural work get a nickname like ‘the vagina building’? Well, the answer is pretty straightforward: it’s not the most faithful anatomical representation, but the Crain Communications Building does, on a symbolic, figurative level, resemble a vagina. The building’s apocryphal origin story is that the architect was a feminist who wanted to comment on the phallocentricity of architectural practice by breaking away from the monadic, towering forms skyscrapers normally take on. With the divided form on the top level of the building, the imagined architect was giving architectural space to the female form in Chicago’s skyline and evoking Luce Irigaray’s championing of the multiple and boundless female body: the vagina that is both divided and whole, the two labia always in contact with each other and themselves.
Unfortunately, this was all too good to be true. The architect was actually Sheldon Schlegman – a man – who was apparently blissfully unaware of how much his building looks like a fanny. And yet, the name has stuck – the Crain Communications Building will forever be called ‘the vagina building’ by the people of Illinois. But what are we to make of the resemblance? Was Schlegman really so oblivious? Was it some unconscious driver that made him unwittingly find inspiration in the female genitalia?
There is a long history of the relationship between architecture and the human form. Vitruvius, the first-century-BC Roman architect and engineer, explicitly conceptualised what he believed to be the links between architecture and the human form – largely speaking, this was just a matter of the proportions in a building reflecting the proportions of the human, specifically male, form. If there is something male about the external body of upward-projecting buildings, perhaps feminine architectural space was to be found on the inside – in the rooms and corridors of our buildings. In her foreword for The Vagina Monologues, Gloria Steinem pointed out the feminised design of patriarchal places of worship. In churches, for instance, “there is an outer and inner entrance, labia majora and labia minora; a central vaginal aisle toward the altar; two curved ovarian structures on either side; and then in the sacred center, the altar or womb, where the miracle takes place – where males give birth.”
But as the Crain Communications Building demonstrates, it is possible to create an external feminine architecture that doesn’t just reflect a tired Freudian notion of recession to the womb. Most recently, Zaha Hadid’s designs for a yonic new stadium for the Qatar World Cup 2022’s immediately earned it the epithet the ‘vagina stadium’. Hadid has also dismissed the comparison. Intentionality, however, isn’t the point. Whether they meant it or not, it is important that contemporary architecture is breaking up the prevalent phallocentricism of our urban spaces, and hence challenging the insidious ideology of the patriarchy that inheres in the literal fabric of our societies. Our architecture, the spaces we live in, shape our lives in a quite literal way, but also in deeply symbolic ones. Standing in Millennium Park in Chicago, looking up at the yonic tower draped in sunlight, seen by thousands of people every day, I guess it is what it looks like.
