A colorful man best known for a colorful building, Chicago architect John Macsai designed Lincolnwood’s Purple Hotel and some of Lake Shore Drive’s most eye-catching high-rises. Yet Macsai was equally well-regarded for a puckish sense of humor that transcended his haunting experiences in a Nazi concentration camp.
“He was one of the people who brought the design of Chicago apartment buildings into the second half of the 20th century,” said architect Stuart Cohen, a leader of the “Chicago Seven” architects who challenged orthodox modernism in the 1970s. “John always greeted you with a smile and a slightly off-color joke. He literally would make your day no matter how bad your day had been before.”
Macsai, 91, died Friday of congestive heart failure at his Evanston home, said his wife of 67 years, Geraldine.
From 1955 to 1970, Macsai and his partner, Robert Hausner, helped bring the abstract forms of modernism to the clifflike row of towers along Chicago’s lakefront. Among those designs were a dramatically curving high-rise at 1150 N. Lake Shore Drive and Harbor House at 3200 N. Lake Shore Drive, a standout because of its jutting second-floor window bays.
Yet the building that kept Macsai in the public eye was the now-demolished Purple Hotel, which was the Pritzker family’s first Hyatt property in the Chicago area when it opened in 1962.
A low-slung structure at 4500 W. Touhy Ave., which hosted such celebrity guests as Perry Como, Roberta Flack and Barry Manilow, the hotel was instantly recognizable for the color of the brick panels between its white exterior columns — an aggressive lavender.
It was not Macsai’s choice.
As he told the story, a Pritzker family member wanted the building to be unique. When the family member rejected Macsai’s suggestion to paint the glazed brick a warm beige, the architect brought a color catalog for his client to inspect. The family member flipped through the catalog and stopped when he saw purple. Bringing the catalog was a mistake, Macsai later acknowledged.
“Never do that,” he said when the hotel was being demolished in 2013. “Don’t allow the client that much freedom, because they will screw up.”
Born Janos Lusztig in Budapest, Hungary, in 1926, Macsai showed an early talent for drawing and was primed to become an illustrator or designer. But his life and career path changed when Hitler’s Germany invaded Hungary in 1944.
He was sent to a work camp, where he “built airfields, cleared forests and starved,” he told the Art Institute of Chicago’s Betty Blum during a 2002 oral history interview. His next stop, his family said, was the Mauthausen concentration camp complex in Austria, which American forces liberated May 5, 1945. After the war, not wanting to have a German name, he changed his last name to Macsai, a reference to the Romanian town of his ancestors. A twist of fate brought him to America.
At first, Macsai was rejected for a Hillel Foundation scholarship that would have enabled him to emigrate to the U.S.. But “a man of influence saw him sketching a caricature on a napkin, was impressed by his artistic talents and made room for one more in the scholarship group,” recalled his daughter Gwen.
After graduating with a bachelor’s in architecture from the Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, in 1949, Macsai worked for a string of Chicago architecture firms, including Holabird & Root, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and PACE Associates.
Following his partnership with Hausner and another partnership with architect Wendell Campbell, Macsai in 1975 started his own office. His specialty was housing, and he was the lead author of the 1976 book “Housing,” which focused on the design, building, financing and management of multifamily housing. He merged his office with another firm in 1991 and retired in 1999.
In Chicago, other Macsai high-rises include Malibu East at 6033 N. Sheridan Road and the Waterford at 4170 N. Marine Drive.
In addition to his practice, Macsai taught at the architecture school of the University of Illinois at Chicago from 1970 to 1996 and as an emeritus professor after that. “He was a mentor to so many students and was really beloved,” said Cohen, who also taught at the school.
In Evanston, Macsai’s work included Evanston Place, which the Tribune’s John McCarron in 2004 called “a graceful, red-brick condo block that neatly hides a city-owned parking deck on Chicago Avenue.”
Taking note of the political battles over the suburb’s high-rises, Macsai said: “Many people in Evanston don’t want to accept that this is not a horse-and-buggy suburb anymore. It’s a city and it needs to grow.”
Macsai also wrote an occasional architecture column for the Evanston RoundTable, a community newspaper.
In addition to Macsai’s wife and daughter Gwen, survivors include two daughters, Pamela Baumgartner and Marian Macsai; a son Aaron; 10 grandchildren; and two great-grandchilren.
Services will be at 2 p.m. Tuesday at Beth Emet synagogue in Evanston.
Twitter @BlairKamin
