Robert Bruce Tague

Robert Bruce Tague (1910/1911–1984) was an American modernist architect and abstract artist who lived in Chicago, Illinois.

Education and military service

Tague studied architecture at the Armour Institute of Technology, receiving a Bachelor of Architecture in 1933 and a master's in 1935. At the New Bauhaus in Chicago, he taught architecture and drafting. Both institutions later became part of the Illinois Institute of Technology.

He served in the United States Army from 1944 to 1946.

Career

Architecture

After seeing George Fred Keck's buildings at the Century of Progress exposition, Tague sought him out as an advisor for his master's thesis. Tague began doing design work for the senior architect, immediately, even before completing his thesis. While employed there as the chief draftsman, he collaborated on buildings with Keck. He was commissioned by Philip Johnson to design a stage for Father Charles Coughlin's Labor Day rally in Chicago on behalf of Union Party presidential candidate William Lemke. which built "hundreds of units" in Chicago. In 1952, he and Crombie Taylor collaborated on the design of a single-family home for Irving Nuger in Elmwood Park. This design was among those included in Quality Budget Houses: A Treasury of Architect-Designed Houses from $5,000 to $20,000 by Katherine Morrow Ford and Thomas L. Creighton, published in 1954.

Visual art

Tague was also an abstract artist. He was known for oil, watercolor and mixed media collage in a sophisticated, modernist style.