In memoriam: Richard Barancik, artful architect and last of the ‘Monuments Men,’ is dead at 98

There is a handsome high-rise on Bellevue Place in the Gold Coast that features a lobby with a colorful mural filled with flora and fauna. Two of the building’s elevators are similarly adorned and, if you look closely enough, you can see a name in each: Jill and Ellen.

They are the youngest children of Richard Barancik, the man who designed and developed this building. They lived there with their father and mother Suzanne Hammerman for many years; their much older siblings Robert, Michael and Cathy grew up in the suburbs with their mother, Barancik’s first wife Rema Stone.

“It was just a little something special for us, a little Easter egg,” said Jill Barancik, a former television producer for Oprah Winfrey and Bill Kurtis.

Her father died in Northwestern Memorial Hospital on July 14. Many of his obituaries focused on the fact that for three months at the end of World War II, Richard Barancik was a member of what came to be famously known as “the Monuments Men,” a group that helped recover art looted by the Nazis.

Jill told me, “He would be shocked by all the attention and as much as it would make him uncomfortable I think he would have understood why it was important.”

But the monuments that an architect leaves are the buildings he designed, and Barancik’s buildings dot the skyline and pepper the country. Among them are the aforementioned 100 E. Bellevue, 990 and 1212 N. Lake Shore Drive, 1310 N. Ritchie Court, office buildings and the 44-story Eugenie Terrace development in Old Town.

His work included office complexes such as the East-West Tech Park in Naperville and Woodfield Lakes in northwest suburban Schaumburg, and Willa Cather Elementary School on the West Side. His work is also in Philadelphia, New York, Indianapolis and New Jersey.

“He was never pretentious about his work,” Jill said. “He had opinions about everything and prided himself on being a contrarian but he never waxed poetic about the meaning of art or architecture. He just loved it but didn’t feel the need to pontificate about it.”

He was born on Oct. 19, 1924, and raised on the South Side, one of the four children of Carrie Grawoig, a homemaker and talented pianist, and Dr. Henry Barancik, a family physician who was chief of staff at South Shore and Jackson Park hospitals. He attended both Hyde Park and South Shore high schools, where he began to draw cartoons for the schools’ papers. After graduation, he started studying architecture before heading off to war.

He was an infantryman headed to the front line but at the war’s end was posted to Salzburg, Austria, where he volunteered to help move stolen works to a repository under the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives program. Thus did he become one of the 350-some “Monuments Men.”

After his short time in that group, Barancik studied architecture at the University of Cambridge in England and the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Back in the States, he entered the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in architecture.

After working for a couple of years for the Chicago Housing Authority, he and Richard Conte started their architectural firm Barancik Conte & Associates. Benefiting from the postwar economic boom, they were soon busy, with a 1953 Parade magazine story noting that the then 28-year-old Barancik had already completed more than $10 million in construction projects.

These projects were marvelously varied, from department stores to massive bowling centers such as Orchard Twin Bowl and All Star Lanes, both in Skokie, to high rises and private homes.

He would continue to design and develop properties here and across the nation. Like many WWII vets, he never boasted about his experiences but did love telling his family about his many adventures during and after the war.

He was retired and living part-time in Pebble Beach, California, when he was interviewed for Robert Edsel and Bret Witter’s 2009 book, “The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History,” which then became the basis for 2014 film directed by George Clooney and starring Matt Damon, Bill Murray and Cate Blanchett.

In 2015, he was one of four Monuments Men members to receive the Congressional Gold Medal.

As Jill says, “I know he was embarrassed by all the attention. He’d say to me, ‘I was just a kid. I was only there for three months.’ But I explained to him that while he had been among the youngest of the group and may not have done any of the ‘heavy lifting,’ he had to represent all the people who couldn’t be there. I think he finally came to understand that. I know he was proud of the honor.”

He would soon be living full-time in Chicago and began to suffer the inevitable losses of his contemporaries and friends, as well as his third wife Claire Holland. He was the last living member of the Monuments Men.

He continued to read voraciously, more than three newspapers a day and, says his daughter, “so many magazines and books.” She grew particularly close to him over these last years of his life, visiting virtually every day, often with her husband, artist Michael O’Briant and frequently with their dog Noodles.

“The pandemic meant we became a bubble so we were together a great deal of the time, ate most of our meals together and I became his confidant, chef, secretary and bodyguard. He was still a big walker, almost every day. He kept up the calisthenics that he had been doing since the Army.

“He really was as sharp as a tack until the very end. He remained always curious, had a playful and irreverent sense of humor, the keenest memory, but living to 98 is not easy. He often referred to himself as ‘the last man standing’ but until this year, he hadn’t been hospitalized since he had an appendectomy when he was 7. And that was in 1931.”

He also in later years returned to the editorial cartooning he had so enjoyed in his youth, creating striking drawings that he emailed to 50-some friends, the last one three days before his death.

One recipient was TV producer and writer Sharon Barrett, who says, “I eagerly awaited Dick’s cartoons, especially during a big news week. They were always so clever and insightful. He was an artist with a sharp satirist’s eye and I have some of my favorites framed on my walls.”

For all his many accomplishments, Barancik remained a self-effacing man. If you were to ever accompany him on one of his fast-paced walks, and encountered one of the buildings he had designed and built, you might hear him say, quietly, “Not bad, not bad at all.”

rkogan@chicagotribune.com