About This Artwork

Stanley Tigerman
American, born 1930

The Titanic, 1978

Photomontage on paper
Approx. 28 x 35.7 cm
Gift of Stanley Tigerman, 1984.802

© 1978 Stanley Tigerman

Stanley Tigerman’s conceptual collage depicts Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s iconic Crown Hall for the Illinois Institute of Technology—which houses the School of Architecture—sinking into Lake Michigan. Tigerman’s work is a critique on the state of architectural pedagogy in Chicago and its environs in the late 1970s. By this time, the Postmodern movement was becoming a viable counterpoint to Mies’s Minimalist aesthetic and was being taught at other schools of architecture in the United States.

Exhibition, Publication and Ownership Histories

Exhibition History

Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago Architecture and Design, 1872-1922: Birth of a Metropolis, cat. no. 53; traveled to Paris, Musée d'Orsay, Oct. 2, 1987–Jan. 4, 1988; Frankfurt am Main, Deutsches Architekturmuseum, Feb. 5-Apr. 25, 1988; and Art Institute of Chicago, July 16–Sept. 5, 1988. cat. no. 343.

Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, At the End of the Century: 100 Years of Architecture, Dec. 18 1999–Mar. 12, 2000. [SO D 1098 (11/18/1999)]

Art Institute of Chicago, Masterpieces of Chicago Architecture, Apr. 2004–Sept. 2005, Gallery 24.

Publication History

Tigerman, Stanley. 1982. Versus: An American Architect's Alternatives. New York: Rizzoli, p. 27.

Zukowsky, John (ed.). 1993. Chicago Architecture and Design, 1923–1993: Reconfiguration of an American Metropolis. Exh. cat. Art Institute of Chicago/Prestel, cat. no. 343, p. 25.

Zukowsky, John, and Martha Thorne. 2004. Masterpieces of Chicago Architecture. Art Institute of Chicago/Rizzoli, pp. 144–45.