“Word got out that a black group wanted it, so then the question became who was going to get it instead?” she said. “And then there is that old thing about the University of Chicago wanting to control everything.”
The headquarters were eventually completed and dedicated in 1985, half a decade after the plans were first presented. (A photo of the groundbreaking, by the way, includes the Regents Park towers in the background — another Moutoussamy design.)
As Gil points out in his article, some of Moutoussamy’s works appear to have been direct homages to his time as an undergraduate at the Illinois Institute of Technology, where he studied under Mies van der Rohe, the famous modernist who designed much of the school’s campus and turned it into an architectural powerhouse. Moutoussamy’s own home in Chatham was clad with the distinctive yellow brick also used on many of IIT’s buildings.
I’m an amateur when it comes to architecture, but to me the AKA building is striking in its resemblance to Mies’s Crown Hall, perhaps his crowning achievement at IIT. In both cases, the black frame and large glass windows let lots of light into the building, giving passers-by and occupants a view of one another. Where Crown Hall contains one large space for pedagogical purposes, the AKA building is divided into offices and conference rooms.
The buildings seem even more similar when you discover that the reason the AKA headquarters are taller than Crown Hall is only because another story was added in 1992. (Many of Moutoussamy’s buildings seem compressed along one dimension or another.) But where the campus at IIT can sometimes seem a little too solemn — walking around, there’s almost a feeling of self-importance — the pink AKA flowerpots and the organization’s large sign add a fun touch of kitsch to Moutassamy’s design.
Gil ends his article with a quote from the Chicago architectural historian Elizabeth Blasius, who notes that none of Moutoussamy’s buildings apart from the Johnson Publishing headquarters is landmarked.
“Because of this, none of his works in any of Chicago’s neighborhoods; not the house he designed for himself and his family in Chatham, not the Chicago Urban League Headquarters in Bronzeville, and perhaps most importantly, not the Alpha Kappa Alpha International Headquarters in Hyde Park are protected from demolition or recognized as significant,” she writes to Gil. “It is frankly not enough to have just one building by John Moutoussamy landmarked when there are so many others that deserve recognition and resources.”
