Stanley Tigerman papers and records

A principal in the Chicago architectural and design firm of Tigerman McCurry and a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects, Stanley Tigerman received both his B.Arch. (1960) and M.Arch. (1961) degrees from Yale University. Prior to his studies at Yale, Chicago-born Tigerman (born 1930) studied at MIT and worked in a number of Chicago offices, including those of George Fred Keck, A.J. del Bianco, and Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill (SOM), where upon graduating he returned as chief of design before founding his own firm with Norman Koglin in 1962. With Koglin’s departure in 1964, the firm became Stanley Tigerman and Associates, and then Tigerman McCurry Architects in 1982 when a partnership was formed with wife Margaret McCurry. In the 1970s, Tigerman was one of seven architects in Chicago, known as “The Chicago Seven,” who rejected the orthodoxies of architectural modernism in favor of an architectural eclecticism embracing historical references and semantic meaning.

Tigerman has designed numerous buildings and installations throughout the world, and his range of work evinces a strong social purpose and a willingness to explore different stylistic trajectories. His building credits as principal designer include institutional projects such as the Five Polytechnic Institutes in Bangladesh, The Pacific Garden Mission in Chicago, and The Holocaust Museum and Education Center in Skokie, Illinois. He has completed both mixed use high rise and low rise housing projects throughout the United States, as well as in Germany and Japan, and he has designed exhibition installations for museums in the United States, Portugal, and Puerto Rico. His collaborative works include The Chicago Central Area Plan, the 1992 Chicago World’s Fair, London’s Kings’ Cross and St. Pancras’ High Density Mixed Use Urban Plan, and Chicago’s 2016 Olympic Village Proposal. Of the 400-plus projects defining his career, 185 built works embrace virtually every building type.

In addition to his design work, Tigerman has taught and written extensively, and played leadership roles in professional associations. He has been a visiting chaired professor at numerous universities, including Yale and Harvard, and was the resident architect at the American Academy in Rome in 1980. He has served on advisory committees of the Yale and Princeton Schools of Architecture, the Chicago Art Institute’s Department of Architecture, and was Director of the School of Architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago for eight years, from 1985 to 1993. In 1994, he co-founded with Eva Maddox Archeworks, a socially oriented design laboratory and school where he remained as Director until 2008. He has authored seven books, including Versus: An American Architect’s Alternatives (1982), The Architecture of Exile (1988), and Schlepping through Ambivalence (2011), and has edited such volumes as Visionary Chicago Architecture (2005) and Design on the Edge: Chicago Architects Reimagine Neighborhoods (2011). He was a founding member of the Chicago Architectural Club and, in 1976, chairman of the AIA Committee on Design, at which time he coordinated the exhibition and book entitled Chicago Architects.

Tigerman’s designs have been shown in numerous exhibitions. His work was part of the 1981 “New Chicago Architecture” exhibition at the Museo de Castelvecchio in Verona, Italy, and was featured in “Stanley Tigerman: Recent Works” in 1990 at the Art Institute of Chicago. On three occasions—1976, 1980, and most recently in 2012--Tigerman has been selected as one of the architects to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale. In August 2011, Yale University School of Architecture opened “Ceci n’est pas une rêverie: The Architecture of Stanley Tigerman”, a retrospective of his work that travelled to the Graham Foundation in 2012.

Tigerman’s firm is the recipient of 151 design awards from the National AIA, the Chicago Chapter of AIA, PA Design Awards, and Record Houses and Interiors. In addition, Tigerman received Yale University’s first Alumni Arts Award (1985), the Dean of Architecture Award (1989), the Illinois Academy of Fine Arts Award (1992), and the American Jewish Committee’s Cultural Achievement Award (1996). In 1990, Tigerman was inducted into the Interior Design Hall of Fame, and was honored by the International Union of Bricklayers and Allied Craftworkers with the Louis Sullivan Award in September 2000. In 2002, Mr. Tigerman was presented with an honorary Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the Herrington Institute of Design. Most recently, in 2008, he was named a Civic Ventures’ Purpose Prize Fellow as a founder, with Eve Maddox, of Archeworks, the recipient of the AIA/ACSA Topaz Medallion for Excellence in Architectural Education, and the recipient of the AIA Illinois Gold Medal in recognition of outstanding lifetime service.

Sources: Firm information courtesy of Tigerman McCurry Architects, Ltd.