Architect John Vinci, soon to receive AIA Chicago’s Lifetime Achievement Award, has surely earned it.

Schooled at IIT when Mies was still teaching there, Vinci would eventually live to restore buildings designed by the modern master, as well as by Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Sullivan.

“I was inspired by [IIT teacher] Albert Caldwell and how he made architecture into a sacred enterprise,” Vinci says. “Then I graduated and went to work for SOM, and within six months I was laid off.”

It was a serendipitous turn of events. At the time, a number of Sullivan’s buildings were about to fall to the wrecking ball – and Vinci joined photographer Richard Nickel in salvaging and preserving ornament, stencils and surfaces inside.

“Then I went to work as an architect,” he says. “I had experienced how buildings go together and come apart – it was a good training and gave me an appreciation for the architecture.”

His work was decidedly modern. His first building, a residence, was deisgned in the IIT style with a few flourishes. It’s all about proportion and objectivity, eschewing glamour in favor of material honesty.

His best-known work is actually not his own. In the early 1970s, the Art Institute of Chicago asked him what to salvage inside Chicago Stock Exchange, a high rise by Adler & Sullivan scheduled for demolition. He suggested the entire trading room at the center of the building, and with Nickel, got to work.

“Everybody thought I was nuts, including Nickel,” he says. “We methodically started taking it apart.”

Vinci finished up in January, 1972. Nickel would soldier on, until a floor beneath him collapsed on April 14, killing him. Vinci would design his friend’s headstone.

“It’s pyramidal and kind of naïve,” he says. “I designed the lettering to be simple, with clear, straight lines and curves. Certainly it’s modernist, no-fuss lettering.”

As for the trading room, it was restored meticulously inside the Art Institute. Its beams, octagonal capitals and columns, and even its stencils – some in 57 colors – shine in mute homage to the architect who designed them in 1893. New mahogany paneling exquisitely mimics the original.

“It’s a room within a high-rise – structurally above these spans were 20 bays of a tall building,” he says. “These beams or girders are holding up a building. So they’re very powerful. Sullivan then took this architectural form and decorated it.”

It re-opened in 1977, thanks to the care and craftsmanship of an architect who’s that rare combination of modernist and preservationist.

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