Carl Condit’s bailiwick was urban technology, the noisy, gritty, smelly interactions of transportation, water supply, and sewage disposal with city planning and building. His fascination with and knowledge about railroads, highways, canals, rivers, and buildings were evident in the twelve books and well over fifty articles that Carl wrote during his fifty-year career. The bibliography of his writings runs to seven pages, not including book reviews and letters to editors. His broad interests and skillful writing, lively teaching and thorough research drew many people to him—in print, in correspondence, in classes, in his office.
When Carl Condit received a degree in mechanical and civil engineering (Purdue University, 1936) and then obtained graduate degrees in English literature (University of Cincinnati, 1939 and 1941), his rare abilities allowed him to span many disciplines. In 1944 Carl joined the building squad of the engineering department of the New York Central Railroad, where he “really learned about building. A railroad covers every kind of building, from toolsheds to interlocking towers to enormous, complicated terminal buildings. At the time, the work also included water tanks, water-supply systems, coal docks and buildings peculiar to railroads, roundhouses and so on.”
Northwestern University, located in Evanston just north of Chicago, offered Carl a teaching job in English in 1945, allowing him to return to a city that had drawn him since boyhood. His roles at Northwestern University, his professional home for most of his career, reflected his varied interests: assistant to full professor of English and general studies, to professor of English, history, art history, and urban affairs. His own research and writing provided substance for his courses on urban form and building technologies. Condit retired from active teaching in 1982.
After studying the history of science with Marshall Clagett and Robert Stauffer at Wisconsin as a postdoctoral fellow in 1951–52, Carl started the history of science program at Northwestern in the fall of 1952. Of the history and philosophy of science course that he taught for twenty-four years, he wrote in 1988: “It is the course I miss above all, my last connection with intellectual history.” Outside the classroom, he was active in the History of Science Society for 35 years, serving on its business council for at least three (1953–56.)
His first book, The Rise of the Skyscraper, appeared in 1952 and received favorable attention from Lewis Mumford in The New Yorker as a book “that has long needed doing.” Mumford had been an early mentor-in-print; Carl recalled reading The Brown Decades in 1937. Carl’s first book was followed by The Chicago School of Architecture: A History of Commercial and Public Building in the Chicago Area, 1875–1925 (1964, with later editions and translations), an ambitious reworking of his 1952 volume. It remains a much-used classic in American architectural history. The Chicago School clearly identified leading designers in Chicago and the varied challenges they faced after the 1871 Chicago fire. Many of the buildings built in the aftermath of the fire that Carl championed in his book were by 1964 dilapidated and/or threatened. Demolishing the urban center at the same time that people were being warehoused in new high-rises gave force to a preservation movement that fought mightily for saving buildings and stories from the past. Carl Condit was a leader in those fights, testifying at hearings and marching on picket lines.
Carl’s Chicago, 1910–1929: Building, Planning, and Urban Technology (1973), and a second volume covering the years 1930 to 1970, which appeared in 1974, were unique attempts to consider urban technologies in relation to the development of a single city. His understanding of the physical setting of Chicago was not just armchair knowledge; he used to ride the rails with geological maps and guidebooks. Further, he recognized the costs of city-building for the natural environment and for people outside the decision-making groups. Of Chicago after World War II, for example, Carl wrote: “As a human habitation, Chicago had come perilously close to total failure. …” He recognized the price paid by many people for the priorities of a powerful few: “It is necessary to establish this failure of the privately financed housing industry in order to make a proper urbanistic assessment of the extraordinary achievements of Chicago architects and engineers in the office building boom of the 1960s.”9 By intertwining human need and technical accomplishment Carl added depth to Chicago’s history and presented a challenging view of the city’s present and future potential.
The late seventies found Carl returning to former haunts and continuing interests with the publication of The Railroad and the City: A Technological and Urbanistic History of Cincinnati (1977) and The Pioneer State of Railroad Electrification, 1895-1905 (1977). Then he turned his attention to New York City. His two-volume The Port of New York appeared in 1980 and 1981. In a way, those books provided the context for Carl’s last book, written with Sarah Bradford Landau, Rise of the New York Skyscraper: 1865-1913 (1996). This careful study tells the story of tall commercial buildings in New York up to the Woolworth Tower, neglecting neither style nor technique. Carl donated his notes and bibliography toward a second volume on the New York skyscraper from 1910 to 1940 to the Avery Library at Columbia University.
His writing and teaching wove together throughout the decades, but his activities in professional groups were important as well. In 1949 he became involved in the Humanistic-Social Research Project of the American Society for Engineering Education, as did a number of the founders of the Society for the History of Technology. He was active in SHOT as author, editorial advisor, and program chairman. From 1959 to 1963 Carl sat on SHOT’s executive council, and from 1962 to 1976 he served with Eugene Ferguson as an editor of Technology and Culture. His article on the Ingalls Building in Cincinnati won the society’s Abbott Payson Usher Prize in 1968, and in 1973 he was awarded the society’s highest honor, the Leonardo da Vinci Medal. He was a research associate at the Smithsonian Institution from 1966 to 1967 and served on the institution’s advisory council from 1973 to 1978. In 1971 he received the Civil Engineering History and Heritage Award from the American Society of Civil Engineers; the Chicago Chapter of the American Institute of Architects presented him its Distinguished Service Award in 1980. An example of Carl’s booming and vigorous critique of the contemporary architectural scene can be found in a 1980 letter to the editor of The Chicago Tribune blasting the design of Helmut Jahn’s State of Illinois Building: “The architectural journalists tell us that the building falls under the rubric of postmodernism. . . What is called postmodernism is simply . . . more of the capricious anarchy of forms that is the chief symptom of the disease of neophilia.” As Jahn’s State of Illinois Building rose from its site in Chicago’s Loop, the Chicago Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) presented Carl its Distinguished Achievement Award in 1982, recognizing his lifelong commitment to architecture and urban development that enhanced human lives. In 1988, he served as honorary chairman of the SAH’s national meeting in Chicago. He held honorary degrees from the University of Cincinnati (1967), Knox College (1981), and DePaul University (1983).
Carl Condit died of pneumonia on January 4, 1997. While his health had not been good in recent years, his mind and his eyesight had remained sharp. He continued to read avidly (mostly biographies and novels), attend opera and theater performances, and regale many of us with his criticisms and ideas in letters. For those of us who were privileged to know and learn from Carl, those letters are cherished possessions now. Carl always noted the seasonal highlights and the phases of the moon, so let me in my turn record that I write this memorial on the vernal equinox of 1997. “[A] little Chaucer won’t hurt you,” Carl wrote in 1993, sending me a card with Chaucer’s “most charming couplet”: And smale fowles maken melodye / That slepen all the nicht with open ye [from The Canterbury Tales].
Sharon Irish
Originally published as Sharon Irish, “Carl W. Condit (1914–1997),” Technology and Culture 38, no. 4 (1997): 1026–30, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/tech.1997.0046.
Irish, Sharon. “Essays in Honor of Carl W. Condit.” Technology and Culture 30, no. 2 (1989): 249–54. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/tech.1989.0086.
Kranzberg, Melvin. “A Tribute to Carl W. Condit.” Technology and Culture 30, no. 2 (1989): 255–57. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/tech.1989.0088.
Mancoff, Debra N. “Carl W. Condit’s Publications—a Chronological Bibliography, 1946–1988.” Technology and Culture 30, no. 2 (1989): 258–65. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/tech.1989.0090.
Condit, Carl W. “The Geological Survey’s Guidebook of the Western United States.” Technology and Culture 26, no. 2 (1985): 277–78. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/889769.
Condit, Carl W. “Another View of “The Cathedral and the Bridge”.” Technology and Culture 25, no. 3 (1984): 589–94. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/889994.
Condit, Carl W. “Iron Truss Bridge Failures.” Technology and Culture 22, no. 4 (1981): 846-846. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/890975.
Condit, Carl W. The Railroad and the City : A Technological and Urbanistic History of Cincinnati. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1977.
Condit, Carl W. The Pioneer Stage of Railroad Electrification. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1977.
“The Leonardo da Vinci Medal.” Technology and Culture 15, no. 3 (1974): 447–52. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/892742.
Condit, Carl W. Chicago, 1930–1970: Building, Planning and Urban Technology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974.
Condit, Carl W. Chicago, 1910–29 : Building, Planning, and Urban Technology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973.
Condit, Carl W. “The Evolution of Urban Form.” Technology and Culture 11, no. 3 (1970): 428-433. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/tech.1970.a894107.
Condit, Carl W. “The First Reinforced-Concrete Skyscraper: The Ingalls Building in Cincinnati and Its Place in Structural History.” Technology and Culture 9, no. 1 (1968): 1-33. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/894341.
Condit, Carl W. American Building: Materials and Techniques From the First Colonial Settlements to the Present. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968.
Condit, Carl W. “Comment: Stages in the Relationships between Science and Technology.” Technology and Culture 6, no. 4 (1965): 587–90. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/894640.
Condit, Carl W. “The Structural System of Adler and Sullivan’s Garrick Theater Building.” Technology and Culture 5, no. 4 (1964): 523–40. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/894817.
Condit, Carl W. American Building Art: The Twentieth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 1961.
Condit, Carl W. American Building Art: The Nineteenth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 1960.
Condit, Carl W. “Building and Civil Engineering.” Technology and Culture 1, no. 4 (1960): 349-359. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/895612.
Condit, Carl W. “Sullivan’s Skyscrapers as the Expression of Nineteenth Century Technology.” Technology and Culture 1, no. 1 (1959): 78-93. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/895240.
Condit, Carl W. The Rise of the Skyscraper. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1952.