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In Memoriam: Richard Driehaus

The philanthropist (1942-2021) championed the preservation and restoration of a built environment that edified the human person.
Spanish Architect Rafael Manzano Receives Driehaus Prize in Chicago

Richard Driehaus, who died March 9, was a rare example of a good elite. Our wealthiest socialites and marshals of “high culture” are characterized by ugliness: moral, aesthetic, and cultural ugliness—an altogether tasteless bunch, often enough. But the prominent Chicago-native businessman and philanthropist, going against the grain, dedicated himself to proclaiming that beauty still mattered, earning the moniker “modernist Chicago’s voice of dissent” from the New York Times. 

In the city that gave rise to Frank Lloyd Wright and a second life to Bauhaus expat Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Driehaus aimed to recover the beauty of 19th-century Chicago from the modernists and bring more traditional styles of architecture to the forefront. Through his philanthropic generosity, he became one of the nation’s leading patrons and outspoken supporters of classical architecture, traditional urbanism, and historical preservation—leaving an indelible mark not just on Chicago’s built environment, but the international architectural community. While elites have practically defined themselves by their rote hollowing out of Main Street and veneration of inhumane glass and steel citadels, Driehaus became a champion for the preservation of a built environment that edifies.  

Driehaus was born and raised on Chicago’s Southwest Side, where he grew up in a classic octagon-front bungalow in the Brainerd neighborhood. His family was lower middle-class, rarely with much disposable income. Around age 10, Driehaus recalled, his mechanical engineer father commissioned an architect to design a Queen Anne-style home for the family, made of detailed “stone and brick, with a pointed roof.” The family owned a lot in the Beverly neighborhood they hoped to build their new home on. But soon afterwards, Driehaus’s parents came to the crushing realization that they couldn’t afford to build it as his father’s career was bound up in the faltering coal industry. Later on, when his father developed Alzheimer’s, Driehaus’s mother had to go back to work as a secretary.

The Chicago philanthropist would later point to the Queen Anne that never was as one catalyst for his preoccupation with the built environment. (Driehaus would also cite it as the reason for his purchase of a Queen Anne rowhouse in the Gold Coast neighborhood, his residence of many years.) But that fascination was always there, ingrained in him since childhood. “He always had a strong aesthetic sense,” Dorothy Driehaus Mellin, the elder of his two sisters, told Chicago magazine. “I used to help him on his paper route, and he would talk about the different houses—what he liked about this window or that style of brickwork.”

After making his fortune as an extraordinarily successful investment fund founder and manager, Driehaus turned his eye toward philanthropy. In 1983, he founded the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation, and by the end of the decade made his first foray into the foundation’s primary focus, the built environment, with a donation to a Chicago organization, Friends of the Parks. Other organizations such as Friends of Lincoln Park, Landmarks Illinois (their Illinois Preservation Awards program was renamed the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation Preservation Awards in 1994), and the National Trust Historic Preservation were beneficiaries of grants from the foundation through the 1990s. Through the foundation, he has gone on to support numerous other initiatives in historic preservation, architecture and urbanism, culture, and the arts. 

Another local award, the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation Award for Architectural Excellence in Community Design was established in 1997, with the intent to “[encourage] developers and architects not to sacrifice thoughtful design in projects when faced with budget constraints.” Additionally, the Richard H. Driehaus Foundational National Preservation Awards honor the best in historic preservation and re-imagining of historic buildings for reuse. Recent winners of the award range from Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unity Temple (also newly added to the UNESCO World Heritage List) to the Richardson Olmsted Campus in Buffalo, NY. More recently, he sponsored the Rafael Manzano Prize for New Traditional Architecture, dedicated to recovering and promoting Spanish and Portuguese architectural traditions.  

Throughout his life in the spotlight, Driehaus often pointed to his Roman Catholic roots as a guide to his philanthropic endeavors (and we may speculate, to some degree, his aesthetic sensibilities). He first attended St. Margaret of Scotland grammar school on the Southwest Side, where the nuns left a strong impression on him for the rest of his life. He credited the sisters with teaching him that “you have to continue to learn your whole life, you have to be responsible for your own actions, and you have to give something back to society.” Afterwards, he went on to St. Ignatius College Prep and DePaul University. 

Beyond millions in major grants to Catholic charities and organizations, his passion for historical preservation intersected with his faith on more than one occasion. He spearheaded the renovation effort of Old St. Patrick’s Church, the historic downtown church that survived the 1871 Chicago fire. After one organization dedicated to preserving and maintaining houses of worship went under, Driehaus carried that mission forward in 2008 by funding a Chicago office for a national organization with a similar mission, Partners for Sacred Places. 

However, not all historic preservation was worthy of his name. Driehaus refused to back a mid-2000s preservation battle to restore the Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House, a mid-century white-and-glass International Style home lauded as an iconic modernist exemplar. “The problem is there’s no poetry in modern architecture,” Driehaus said on the topic at the time, according to Chicago magazine. “There’s money—but no feeling or spirit or soul.”

When most financiers and investment moguls gravitated to sterile steel and glass skyscrapers, Driehaus moved much of his financial firm’s offices into the 1886 Ransom Cable mansion, a Richardsonian Romanesque-style home. Diagonally across the intersection is the Samuel M. Nickerson House, purchased by Driehaus in 2003. The preservationist thoroughly restored the Nickerson House—one of Chicago’s last Gilded Age mansions and one of the most important existing examples in the country—to its former glory and opened it to the public in 2008 as the Richard H. Driehaus Museum, which displays the art and decoration of the Gilded Age and Art Nouveau periods. 

Most notable of all his eponymous awards is the $200,000 Driehaus Architecture Prize, established in partnership with the University of Notre Dame School of Architecture in 2003. The Driehaus Prize, an award honoring a living architect “whose work embodies the highest ideals of traditional and classical architecture in society,” was a critical step for the philanthropist onto the global stage. It has since grown in reputation to gain status as a premier award in architectural circles, even as architectural elites continue to shun, and often even hold in contempt, the classical tradition. (One need only to recall most recently the reaction from the architectural establishment and journalist class to Trump’s now-repealed executive order establishing classical architecture as the default for federal buildings: denunciations, cries of “authoritarianism,” and invocations of “dictator chic.”)

The Driehaus Prize was established as a classicist competitor to the Pritzker Architecture Prize. While the Pritzker Prize has had a strong tendency over the decades to reward modernist architects—from Frank Gehry to Gottfried Böhm (among other works, architect of the ghastly, brutalist Mary Queen of Peace church in the Diocese of Cologne, Germany) and Tadao Ando (designer of the formless Church of the Light)—the Driehaus Prize looked to reward more traditionally minded architects. 

The Driehaus Prize “started out as a little adventure when an old friend suggested I visit the University of Notre Dame,” the Chicago philanthropist recalled, “I was astounded to learn that yours was the only college teaching classical architecture in the country.” The work of traditional architects and urbanists ought to be rewarded, uplifted, and celebrated, Driehaus thought, as only then could the winds in the architectural profession begin to shift. 

The inaugural recipient of the award was Léon Krier, the renowned architect, advocate of traditional urbanism, and designer of Charles, Prince of Wales’s model town, Poundbury. Other laureates have included Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk (2008), the husband-and-wife team behind the new urbanist Seaside, FL, plan; Quinlan Terry (2005), the English architect behind, among many other works, the Maitland Robinson Library at Downing College, Cambridge; and Ong-ard Satrabhandhu (2020), a Thai architect known for blending Eastern and Western traditional architectural forms. 

Through this award, Driehaus hoped to give momentum to the movement seeking to return beauty into the built environment and moving the profession toward his classical vision: 

I had been looking with interest at architecture for some years and had already concluded that, given the work done in the last 50 years, we Americans deserved better buildings. We seemed to be settling for a homogeneous approach. Buildings were looking like bland shoeboxes. I believe architecture should be of human scale, representational form, and individual expression that reflects a community’s architectural heritage .… There is a delight, proportion, and harmony in classical architecture that I wasn’t finding in the contemporary buildings coming up around me in Chicago.

For Driehaus, the coherence and order of classical architecture—in both its ancient and neoclassical revival forms—combined with traditional urbanism, stood against the cold and uninviting modernist-aesthetic flattening of the built environment that so firmly gripped the 20th-century (lack of) imagination. “We live such fragmented lives in this modern world,” he said, commenting on his efforts to preserve the community peculiarities and 19th-century fabric of Chicago. “I suppose the period just speaks to me in an organized and natural way.” 

“Too many places today are devoid of the uniqueness that lends itself to memory,” he wrote last year, “because we have failed as a society to thoughtfully preserve the places that we have inherited and to create new ones that resonate emotionally.”

Requiescat in pace, Richard Driehaus (1942-2021). 

Joseph Paul Barnas is a writer from Chicago, Illinois. His writing has also appeared in University Bookman and Athwart. This New Urbanism series is supported by the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation. Follow New Urbs on Twitter for a feed dedicated to TAC’s coverage of cities, urbanism, and place.

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