Past Made Future, Part 2: Mesopotamian Architecture

When I started this blog, I never imagined writing about Ghostbusters (1984), but it's a strangely appropriate topic for the beginning of this post!  The plot involves a 1920s high-rise apartment building (semi-fictional) designed by the evil architect and cult leader, Ivo Shandor (fictional), in a kind of neo-Babylonian style that includes a rooftop temple dedicated to the Sumerian deity Gozer (also fictional). Things get a little crazy when an ancient ritual gets out of control (involving the "The Gatekeeper," "The Keymaster," and the Stay-Puff Marshmallow Man) and nearly brings about the end of the world -- and if you've seen the movie, you know the rest...

Rendering of "Spook Central" for the Ghostbusters movie

I'm calling the Ghostbusters apartment building "semi-fictional" because it is based, in part, on an actual New York co-op: 55 Central Park West designed by Schwarz + Gross and completed in 1929.  The set designers used the building as a starting point, and through special effects, embellished its height and ornamentation making the structure look taller and more ominous and the architectural details more elaborate.  The pièce de résistance is the pseudo-Sumerian temple topping the building, a kind of exclamation point to the building.

As fantastic as 55 Central Park West appears in Ghostbusters, it pales somewhat to actual skyscrapers of the Jazz Age whose designers were, indeed, influenced by the architecture of ancient Mesopotamia. During the 1920s and 1930s popular interest in ancient Near Eastern societies -- Sumeria, Assyria, and Babylon -- was on the rise. The trend came about largely through the influence of  archaeological excavations taking place in the Middle East during this time and popularized through press reports and news reels.

Reconstruction of Babylon's Ishtar Gate
Pergamon Museum, Berlin, Germany
Photo by Rictor Norton

Perhaps most influential was the work of German archaeologist Robert Koldewey who excavated at the site of Babylon from 1899 through 1917.  Koldewey brought back thousands of artifacts to Germany including the famous Ishtar Gate which was subsequently reconstructed inside Berlin's Pergamon Museum. His discoveries were disseminated to an even wider audience through his book Excavations at Babylon, which was translated into English in 1914.  Included in the book were color plates of ornamental tile work and reconstructions of Bablyon's buildings, including its ziggurat, largely thought to have inspired the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel.

View of the City of Babylon by Maurice Bardin, 1936
(based largely on renderings published by Robert Koldewey)
image courtesy the University of Chicago Libraries

And Koldewey was not alone in his endeavors.  There were many other archaeologists excavating in Iraq during this time period, sponsored mainly by museums and universities in Europe and the United States. The University of Chicago's Oriental Institute, founded in 1919, was one such institution that sent archaeological expeditions to the Middle East in the early 20th century. The university's archaeologists brought back tons (literally) of artifacts for the Institute's museum including a monumental winged-bull from Khorsabad in northern Iraq...

Oriental Institute poster, circa 1933

The fragmentary nature of the remains of Mesopotamian buildings left a lot of room for speculation, especially in terms of architectural reconstructions.  While the monumental architecture of Egypt was constructed largely of stone, that of Mesopotamia was mostly earthen bricks covered in tile. It probably explains, in part, why there never really was a "Mesopotamian Revival" in architecture like there were Egyptian and Greek revivals. Much of what archaeologists found at sites in southern Iraq -- like Ur, Kish, and Babylon -- were mounds of eroded bricks, foundation walls, and occasionally (as with the Ishtar Gate) fragments of ornamental tile work.     Stone relief carvings and monumental sculpture were more prevalent in northern Iraq, especially at Assyrian sites like Nineveh.

But architects during the 1920s and 1930s found ways of incorporating this "new" visual language -- fragmentary as it was --  into their modern designs.  The best example in Chicago is the Medinah Athletic Club (now the Intercontinental Hotel) designed by Walter W. Alschlager and completed in 1929.  It's architectural ornamentation rivals anything from Ghostbusters...

Medinah Athletic Club (now the Intercontinental Hotel), 1929

In The Sky's the Limit: A Century of Chicago Skyscrapers, Jane Clarke writes that:

"The [Medinah Athletic] club was commissioned by a group of Medinah Nobles; affiliates of the Shriners, a nationwide fraternal and philanthropic organization said to have ancient roots in the Middle East..."

In keeping with the group's mythical Middle Eastern roots, the architects designed the building's ornamentation in what was called a "Saracenic" style, a kind of stylistic synthesis evoking the "mystical East" including Byzantine, Moorish, and ancient Mesopotamian elements.  The 50-story skyscraper was topped with a fanciful penthouse "palace" (reminiscent of illustrations from The Arabian Nights) complete with onion dome (serving as the building's water tower) and minaret which legend says was designed as a Zeppelin docking station:

Penthouse of the Medinah Athletic Club with Zeppelin in background, circa 1930.
photo courtesy the Intercontinental Hotel 

Despite the Medinah Athletic Club's eclectic program of "exotic" ornamentation, the structure was designed as a modern skyscraper. The building's massing is typical of several other Chicago skyscrapers of the period, like 333 North Michigan Avenue (1928) and the Carbide and Carbon Building (1929). It's solid 20-story rectangular base supports a tower that gradually tapers through a series of set-backs.  The building's surface is covered with smooth limestone panels broken by a grid of  "punched" rectangles, only a few of which are ornamented.

A closer look at the ornamentation, especially the building's architectural sculpture, reveals a modern aesthetic inspired by historic precedents.  Case in point: the monumental relief sculptures above the ninth floor:

Monumental sculptural relief, south facade of the Medinah Athletic Club
George Unger and Leon Hermant, circa 1928

The sculpture's design is based on an interesting combination of Bronze Age motifs and artistic influences, including Egyptian, Assyrian, Persian, and even Minoan. The relief was designed by George Unger and carved by Leon Hermant, who rendered the sculpture's lines in a sharp, angular manner, giving the sculpture a more modern sensibility rather than mimicking antique styles.

With the new zoning codes of the 1910s and 1920s allowing for taller buildings with stepped massing, architects in New York and Chicago looked for historic precedents that incorporated set-backs in their design.  The ziggurat or stepped-pyramid was one obvious example. This form is found in ancient Egypt (most notably at Saqqara), the Maya Yucatan (most notably at Chichen Itza), but perhaps more famously in the ziggurats found in dozens of Mesopotamia's cities. Perhaps the two best known examples are the Ziggurat at Ur and the Ziggurat at Babylon, also called the Etemenanki.

Model of Ziggurat  at Babylon also called the Etemenanki
Eckhard Unger, circa 1930

Fairly literal architectural expressions of the stepped-pyramid can be found in some Chicago buildings from the 1920s and 1930s, including the Trustees Systems Service Building (1930) designed by the firm of Thielbar and Fugard.

Ziggurat-inspired roof
Trustees Systems Service Building, 1930
Thielbar + Fugard

Other architects used the idea of the ziggurat more loosely to devise massing profiles that were in line with the new zoning ordinances.  Some of the most dramatic of these were developed by Hugh Ferriss and published in trade magazines and books, including the influential Metropolis of Tomorrow (1929).

Rendering by Hugh Ferris from Metropolis of Tomorrow, 1929.

Sources for this post include:

Picturing the Past: Imaging and Imagining the Ancient Middle East, edited by Jack Green, Emily Teeter, and John Larson. Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, 2012.

"Medinah Athletic Club, 1927-1929" by Jane H. Clarke in The Sky's the Limit, Rizzolli, 1990.