John “Jack” Fleming Hartray died on May 3rd 2025 in Chicago. He is survived by his sister Mary Letson, brother in law Mike Beers, daughter, Dr. Adriana Shilling; son-in-law, Allan Shilling; three sons, Frederick, Alexander and Guido; and daughter-in-law, Irina Carola Verona; ten grandchildren, multiple nieces and nephews; and generations of architects and consultants with whom he shared the challenges and satisfactions of his sixty-year career.
Jack was born on August 11, 1930 in Evanston Illinois to John Fleming Hartray and Ellen Gertrude Hartray (nee Magee). He attended New Trier High School and studied Architecture at Cornell University from 1949 to 1954. While at Cornell he met Emma Spada, an Italian architect and Fulbright scholar, with whom he would later marry. After his degree, Jack served in the Army Signal Corps (1954 to 1956) as photographer and cinematographer in post-war Korea. He would later say that architecture school “put me in a state of mind where I could really enjoy the army.”
After Korea, Jack worked at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) and later visited Emma who had been practicing architecture and teaching in Naples. They travelled through Italy, France and Spain on Lambrettas and were married in Cosenza, Italy in March of 1958. Returning to Chicago, Jack worked at Holabird and Root and CF Murphy (on the Dirksen Federal Building and terminals at O’Hare).
In 1961, Jack diverged from the Mies-inspired orthodoxy of his early career to join the office of Harry Weese. There he worked on the First Baptist Church and the Cummings Engine Company Laboratories in Columbus Indiana, the Crown Center Hotel in Kansas City, the Time Life Building, and the Federal Correction Center in Chicago and the Washington DC Metro, as well as the preservation and rehabilitation of Adler and Sullivan’s Auditorium Theater in Chicago. These projects drew on a wider range of materials and forms and sought innovative integrations of structure, mechanical systems and architectural expression which were well-matched to Jack’s humanist technical creativity. Of all the projects from this period, Jack later singled out the Washington Metro, “because it converted a sleepy southern town into a cosmopolitan place where you can get a good lunch anywhere.”
In 1976 he joined Larry Booth and Jim Nagle to form Booth Nagle and Hartray which later became Nagle Hartray. The office produced projects at a range of scales from single family houses to libraries, residence halls and apartment buildings. Working with a broad range of contractors drove Jack to advance the clarity of the office’s drawing sets and details “so I would not get called out to the site in the snow to resolve a problem.” The practice, now merged with Sheehan Partners, is still active to this day as significant contributor to Chicago’s architecture. Jack retired in 2000.
Jack served on the board and committees of The American Institute of Architects and the National Architecture Accreditation Board where he passionately argued to retain the apprentice path into the profession to keep the it open to broader range of talent and free schools to pursue their own goals outside a state sponsored mandate.
He was directly engaged in architectural education, teaching professional practice at IIT, at one point becoming acting dean. He also lectured and wrote on architecture, using disarming wit to make uncomfortable points ingratiating – like asking the National Institute for Architectural Education if “requiring a passive response to six or seven years of inane criticism (would) produce a subculture devoid of the qualities which made Daniel Burnham a useful citizen?” He wrote a six-year running column for Architectural Technology as the profession’s conscience, coach, and humorist.
Jack delighted in the challenges of the profession and his own, as well as others’, creative solutions to them. This open and collaborative approach to design not only led to many innovative solutions but to his many lifelong friendships from the wide circle of participants. He enjoyed the gaps between reality and theory, even where they created mixed results: “I could never get mad at architects who make a sincere mistake.”
He approached each new problem with the confidence that, if you were not afraid to ask “dumb questions” and could diagram the answers in a 6B pencil, you could point the way to a solution. He saw each historic building restoration and each engineer’s insight or contractor shortcut as lessons to apply in future projects.
Outside of office work he was chosen by the AIA to review building failures of the 1976 Guatemalan Earthquake and, as a form of continuing education, consulted as an expert witness on multiple construction litigations. Throughout his professional life he never lost sight of the profession’s obligations towards social responsibility working on affordable housing and highlighting the limits of the shelter architecture could offer with Architects Designers and Planners for Social Responsibility. While he objected to our belligerent foreign policy, his insights into building technology were also called upon in evaluating the ever-increasing safety requirements of new U.S. embassies. Throughout his life, his attitude was to see life’s adversities as design challenges and to never let them get in the way of enjoying its satisfactions.
