Martin Ryerson Mausoleum - CARLI Digital Collections Featured Image

The photographer: Charles William "Bill" Brubaker (1926-2002), an architect and member of the Chicago-based firm Perkins & Will for nearly 50 years, who documented Chicago’s built environment in a personal slide collection that has been digitized by UIC.

The decedent: Martin Ryerson (1818-1887), a wealthy Chicago businessman in the lumber and real estate trades, whose son Martin A. (middle initials are important!), the philanthropist and namesake of the library at the Art Institute of Chicago, commissioned the firm of Adler & Sullivan to build his father’s mausoleum, completed in 1889.

The architect: Louis H. Sullivan (1856-1924), one of the most significant and influential American architects of the late nineteenth century, an early modernist and pioneer of the steel-framed high-rise skyscraper, as well as a mentor to Frank Lloyd Wright (and inspiration for the Henry Cameron character in The Fountainhead). Although famed for his ornamentation, Sullivan notably coined the phrase “form ever follows function.”

Despite having made his fortune in wood, a more durable material—Quincy granite—was used for the monument at Ryerson’s final resting place. The form also speaks to the concern for enduring the test of time: In this monument Sullivan merges two types of Egyptian funerary structures, the mastaba and the pyramid. Much to my disappointment, the style appears unrelated to any personal fascination with mummification and grave goods, but rather can be attributed to a stylistic revival deriving from the Napoleon-led scientific expedition of 1798-1801 and a subsequent interest by nouveau riche tycoons (see also the Schoenhofen pyramid) in immortalizing themselves like pharaohs. Firmitas, utilitas, venustas. The dark color of the stone and the austere lack of ornament, however, set the Ryerson mausoleum apart from its peers.

To come full circle, Brubaker photographed Sullivan’s monument for Ryerson at Graceland Cemetery in 1962 (along with the Getty tomb, the second of three mausolea designed by Sullivan). If you’re curious about the kind of memorial marker such a renowned architect as Sullivan must have, as luck would have it, Brubaker photographed Sullivan’s monument several years later on a return visit to the same cemetery. If you’re picturing something extremely functionalist to the point of utilitarianism, you’re dead right, mate.

Written by Ellen K. Corrigan, Assistant Professor, Cataloging Services, Booth Library, Eastern Illinois University

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