Blair Kamin & Other Architecture-Related Articles [Archive]

BVictor1

January 14th, 2005, 06:33 PM

Boomerang bridge
New look for North Avenue span is among winners in city competition

By Blair Kamin
Tribune architecture critic
Published January 14, 2005

Offering a major surprise, the City of Chicago on Friday will announce winners in its international design competition for pedestrian bridges along the lakefront, choosing a bold new look for the North Avenue Bridge instead of a plan that would have echoed the gently curving profile of the existing bridge.

The winners, all Chicago-area firms, include little-known Phillips Swager Associates, which suggested a boomerang-shaped bridge at North Avenue, complete with a trellis of solar panels that might provide electricity to light the bridge at night.

The apparent favorite of a jury of experts -- by the Chicago firm Lohan Caprile Goettsch, part of the design team for the renovated Soldier Field -- would have closely followed the form of the present North Avenue Bridge, which has an elongated steel arch and an elegantly thin walkway. Jury members said they selected the Lohan plan because area residents considered the bridge a beloved icon. But city transportation officials decided to go in a different direction.

"We really saw North Avenue as one of the best locations where we had an opportunity to make a bold architectural statement," said Brian Steele, spokesman for the city's Department of Transportation, which sponsored the competition. "The purpose of this design competition was to really push the envelope."

Other winning plans include a curving, single-tower suspension bridge at 35th Street, by Teng & Associates; a pair of double-curved bridges, each shaped like the letter "S," at 41st and 43rd Streets, by Cordogan, Clark & Associates; and a Lake Shore Drive bridge across the Chicago River that strives to be a modern variation of the muscular, truss-supported bridges across the river. It is by Wight & Company with Edward Windhorst Architects.

"This was much more than a beauty contest," said city transportation commissioner Miguel d'Escoto, who joined with city bridge engineers and designers to select the winners. "It was a chance to come up with some creative and visually interesting ways to improve people's access to the lakefront."

The bridges are expected to cost between $5 million and $20 million apiece. The price tag for the Chicago River bridge occupies the high end of that spectrum because it is the lone bridge among the five that will open and close, allowing tall-masted sailboats and other craft to pass beneath it.

Work on the South Side bridges could start as soon as next year or in 2007, city officials said, adding that they have obtained more than $4 million in federal money to pay for design of the 35th and 41st Street bridges. They are seeking design funds for the 43rd Street Bridge.

Access to the lakefront is particularly difficult south of McCormick Place, where the Metra railroad tracks and Lake Shore Drive present a barrier several hundred feet wide, and ramrod-straight pedestrian bridges at 35th and 43rd Streets are crumbling and uninviting. Those bridges are to be replaced.

The new North Avenue Bridge, which city officials say must be built because the existing bridge is in poor condition and does not meet federal accessibility standards, might be built by 2010 or earlier, Steele said.

There is no timetable for the Chicago River bridge, which would rise just east of the existing Art Deco-style Lake Shore Drive Bridge and provide an improved link in the lakefront bike path. Cyclists and pedestrians can use the lower level of the existing bridge, but they are dangerously close to cars and other vehicles.

The design competition attracted 67 entries from such renowned architects as Chicago's Helmut Jahn and the Richard Rogers Partnership of London.

A jury of experts, including curators from the Art Institute of Chicago, historic preservationists, engineers and community leaders selected the finalists. Mayor Daley saw the finalists, but transportation officials made the final selection, Steele said.

Speaking of the jury deliberations about the North Avenue Bridge, one of the jurors, Sidney Guralnick, an engineering professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology, said: "There was an awful lot of comment from neighbors who basically said they wanted to keep the North Avenue Bridge. . . . They considered it an icon, and the jury was very sensitive to that." The Lohan plan, he said, was expected to have "the greatest community acceptance."

But transportation officials went with the Phillips Swager Associates plan, Steele said, for several reasons in addition to its bold form: Its solar panels would provide electricity for the city power grid and could light the bridge at night. The western landing of the bridge would take up less space in Lincoln Park than the Lohan plan. And the eastern landing of the bridge would have a terrace with bench seating that might prove popular to the crowds at North Avenue Beach.

The city will hold public hearings before proceeding to build all the designs, Steele said. He added that construction hinges on the passage of a federal transportation bill this spring, but the city will seek other funding sources if the bill does not pass.

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titanic1

BVictor1

January 16th, 2005, 04:05 PM

ARCHITECTURE

Calatrava hovers over bridge plans
Winners react against attitude that every span must be an icon

By Blair Kamin
Tribune architecture critic
Published January 16, 2005

The winners of Chicago's lakefront pedestrian bridge competition, announced Friday, are a mixed bag -- some wonderfully forward-looking, others decidedly less so, still others promising but in need of refinement. Whatever one thinks of them individually, they have a certain heft as a group, not just because they should greatly improve access to the lakefront but also because they challenge the new orthodoxy in bridge design: A bridge must be a knock-your-eyes-out icon.

That attitude is a byproduct of the brilliant bridges of Zurich-based architect and engineer Santiago Calatrava, whose glistening, high-tech spans have profoundly influenced contemporary bridge design. Calatrava chose not to enter this competition but he nevertheless hovered over it. In many respects, the winning entries react against his approach, or, more accurately, against his legions of imitators, who lack his artistic mastery and seem to think that the drive for icons gives them license to overwhelm their surroundings.

There is a difference, of course, between bridges that meekly blend in and bridges that manage to be sensitive to their environs while still making a strong aesthetic statement. Frank Gehry's snaking BP Bridge in Millennium Park successfully walks that tightrope. So do the better designs in this competition while also resolving the often-competing demands of architecture and engineering, place and passageway.

What follows are detailed observations about the winners in the competition, which was sponsored by the Chicago Department of Transportation and drew 67 entries from such noted firms as London's Richard Rogers Partnership. City transportation officials selected the winners from a group of finalists picked by a distinguished jury. The bridges, which will be for cyclists and people in wheelchairs as well as pedestrians, are expected to cost anywhere from $5 million to $20 million apiece.

North Avenue Bridge: Whatever design was selected for this location was sure to face intense scrutiny because it is supposed to replace the existing bridge, a 1940s classic with an elongated steel arch, that city officials say doesn't meet federal disability standards. But the winning design is so intelligently conceived that it should force even the most ardent preservationists to ask: Might we replace the existing bridge with a better one?

Quite possibly, it appears. The winning design by Phillips Swager Associates, with its sweeping, dune-inspired concrete deck, would make an elegantly simple but visually rich transition between the green spaces of Lincoln Park and the sand of North Avenue Beach. Yet it is no one-liner. The lakeside base of the bridge would offer terraces where crowds could sit and a canopy equipped with solar panels that might generate electricity to light the bridge at night. The design would thus be a living embodiment of ecologically sensitive, "green" architecture.

It took courage and vision for city transportation officials to select this plan. The design by Lohan Caprile Goettsch, the jury's apparent favorite because it closely followed the look of the existing bridge, muddled the question of old versus new. This design sharpens the issue: Are we going forward or are we staying put? City officials say this plan won't be built until 2010 or earlier.

Lake Shore Drive at the Chicago River: The winner, by Wight & Company with Edward Windhorst Architects, tries with mixed success to be a modern variation of the seesawlike bascule bridges across the Chicago River. Its single swooping truss would not overshadow the towers of the existing Art Deco Lake Shore Drive Bridge. The span also would have a toylike festiveness appropriate for the lakefront, with glass walls revealing the giant machinery that would make its leaves move up and down.

Even so, there are hard questions about this bridge, the lone one among the five winners that will be moveable. (Expected to cost $20 million, with no timetable for construction set, it needs to be built so pedestrians and cyclists on the lakefront bike path can avoid the dangerously crowded lower level of the current bridge.)

Because the new bridge would be jammed alongside the lower level of the existing bridge, pedestrians and cyclists are likely to be assaulted with noise from cars and other vehicles. And while the design would belong to the family of bascule bridges across the Chicago River, one has to wonder whether its prominent location, so highly visible from the lake, demanded a more assertive visual statement. Another finalist, Annex/5, offered such a plan, calling for a nautically inspired swing bridge with two thin, diagonally raked masts of different height. It would have dazzlingly talked to the skyline without overwhelming the existing bridge.

Sometimes, you have to break the rules to go forward. The Wight-Windhorst design isn't bad. But it shapes up as a missed opportunity.

35th Street: There were some good choices for this bridge, one of three planned south lakefront bridges that will span the daunting barrier of the Metra railroad tracks and Lake Shore Drive. One was a curving, single-tower suspension bridge by Teng & Associates. The other, by the Rogers Partnership, had a more symmetrical arrangement, with a cable-stayed arch that would support a curving deck and act as a gateway to the lakefront.

The Teng plan won, and not without reason. Its unusual, single-tower design is at once based on the laws of physics and the more subjective calculation that a typical, twin-towered suspension bridge would have been too much for this site. The bridge tower and its cables will form a down-the-alley landmark at the end of 35th Street and a gateway for drivers heading downtown. On the lakefront side, the bridge deck will split and land in two places, offering parkgoers welcome flexibility of movement.

Even so, there is cause for concern.On the park side, the large number of supports beneath the deck makes this bridge seem more like the underside of a highway. The Rogers plan would have touched the land more lightly. In addition, its deck was more user-friendly, with benches where people could take in the view. Perhaps some of those features can be incorporated into the Teng plan. Work on this bridge, as well as the others on the south lakefront, could begin next year or in 2007.

41st and 43rd Streets: It was crucial that this pair of bridges be visually in sync not only with each other, but also with the 35th Street Bridge because the trio will appear as a group to parkgoers and drivers. Fortunately, the winning design for a pair of S-shaped bridges, by Cordogan, Clark & Associates, meets that challenge and offers more: It promises to harmonize with the sinuous pathways of Burnham Park and the planned curving geometry of the mixed-income Lake Park Crescent housing development just west of the Metra tracks.

Typifying the sensible, place-over-icon attitude that drove many of the winning plans, Cordogan, Clark & Associates quoted the words of the 19th Century landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, who urged that roads going through parks have softly curving lines that would bring about "happy tranquility." In that spirit, this bridge, while growing out of the Chicago tradition of expressing structure, would be anything but an object dropped into its surroundings.

While the outlines are good, the bridge's handrails are a potential drawback: They're needlessly fussy, nullifying the architects' desire for tranquility. But this fault can be corrected as the design is fleshed out. Now that South Siders are finally going to be able to walk across new pedestrian bridges to the lakefront, they might as well do so in style.

The Urban Politician

January 16th, 2005, 04:18 PM

wow. Nice article. Blair Kamin rarely gives so much praise, but he really seems to like the north ave bridge, as well as the ones on 41st and 43rd streets. I look forward to seeing more renderings of them.

He seems to generally like the LSD bridge, which is good--but I guess he liked another design even more. Does anyone have a rendering of the other design that he was talking about?

24gotham

January 16th, 2005, 08:46 PM

I saw the film "Tall" last night at the Gene Siskel Film Center. I enjoyed parts of it, and learned a thing or two, but in the end I felt the creator's (Manfred Kirchheimer) opinions were overwhelmingly one sided, and I actually took offense to his brush off of modernism and it's contributions to the design of highrise buildings.

He made it out to be that Louis Sullivan was the true father of highrise buildings, which I agree with partially, He also made a great case for how horrible the impact of the 1893 Worlds Fair caused architecture to be set back by 50 years. How architects shunned Sullivan's advances in the design of skyscrapers (emphasizing verticality, and "Form follows function") in favor of a mish mash of historical architectural references from Europe dating back to ancient times. He then goes on to explain how this impacted the design of skyscrapers well into the 1930's. (ie, the influence of 15th century gothic design on the Tribune Tower.)
But then he slammed pretty much anything built after the depression, and completely ignored contributions from such greats as Mies and his followers. He basically made blanket statements that all modernism was an afront to the design of highrises. That buildings became nothing more than machines for working, and there there is nothing built today that is worthy of greatness.

Just my thoughts...

oshkeoto

January 16th, 2005, 10:40 PM

"Does anyone have a rendering of the other design that he was talking about?"

Someone posted it a while ago, I don't know where it is now--it was pretty awesome, though, in my opinion.

BVictor1

January 21st, 2005, 04:44 PM

AIA honor to Chicago architect

By Blair Kamin
Tribune architecture critic
Published January 21, 2005

Chicago architect Carol Ross Barney on Friday will be named a winner of the American Institute of Architects' Thomas Jefferson Award for Public Architecture, recognizing her efforts to uplift the quality of public architecture in commissions ranging from a post office in Glendale Heights to the new Oklahoma City Federal Building.

The Jefferson award is named for the nation's third president, a distinguished architect who designed his home of Monticello, the University of Virginia and the Virginia State Capitol. Barney received one of three Jefferson awards this year. As one of her nominators put it, her projects are "all icons on shoestring budgets."

Her work has moved from color-splashed postmodern buildings, like the Glendale Heights post office, where bands of red and white brick suggest the American flag, to a more neutrally hued, strongly geometric modernism, evident in the curving glass walls of the new Oklahoma City building. It replaced the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, which was destroyed by a truck bomb in 1995.

The constant in Barney's buildings is her concern for the people using them. Her career, the awards jury said, "demonstrates a strong sensitivity, care and compassion for the public."

Also Friday, the AIA will recognize the Chicago Architecture Foundation with an Institute Honor for Collaborative Achievement, which goes to non-architects "who have had a beneficial influence on or advanced the architectural profession."

To promote awareness of architecture, the foundation developed a "Schoolyards to Skylines" curriculum for kindergarten through 8th grade. The 500-page book is used in 25 states and six foreign countries.

The other winners of the Jefferson Award are Diane Georgopulos of Boston and Charles Atherton of Washington, D.C.

BVictor1

January 23rd, 2005, 04:08 PM

ARCHITECTURE

New Randolph station works within its limits
Renovated station a bright spot in daily commute

By Blair Kamin
Tribune architecture critic
Published January 23, 2005

Mourning the 1960s demolition of New York City's Pennsylvania Station and its soaring Beaux-Arts spaces while simultaneously deploring the cramped, low-ceilinged terminal that replaced it, the architectural historian Vincent Scully once remarked that a traveler coming through the old station entered the city like a god. Through the new one, he added, "one scuttles in . . . like a rat."

That putdown applied equally well to Metra's old Randolph Street Station, an underground terminal located just south of the Prudential Building and just east of the Cultural Center on Michigan Avenue. The strictly utilitarian station had no heat, no air-conditioning and no natural light. When it rained hard, water seeped through the joints of upper Randolph Street overhead and poured into the station. Commuters actually walked through the underground space with their umbrellas up. The unflattering adjectives used to describe the station were all "D"-words -- dark, dingy, dank, depressing.

But now, after an intelligently conceived, precisely executed renovation designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill of Chicago, the Randolph Street Station has been transformed into a bright, open and visually dynamic gateway for thousands of Metra Electric and South Shore Line commuters. With its shimmering, wave-shaped ceilings and ticket counters that evoke the sleek, streamlined Zephyrs of the 1930s, the project is a classic example of architectural inversion, making the underground seem as light and airy as a puffy white cloud.

Glitz not important

No one, it's plain, is going to rank this handsome but spatially modest station on a par with great train sheds of Europe or the luminous, mostly underground station that Zurich-based architect and engineer Santiago Calatrava has designed for ground zero. Yet that was never part of the brief for this $23 million job, which opened in December after years of delays caused by emergency repairs to upper Randolph and the endless rejiggering of Millennium Park, which sits above tracks just south of the station.

A grand architectural statement was out of the question because the 30,000-square-foot station is sandwiched between sloping upper Randolph Street above it and commuter railroad tracks below it. What the architects and their team did instead was to accept and even embrace those constraints in a design that brings a dash of ceremony and ritual to the workaday drudgery of commuting. The result is an object lesson in how to wring visual excitement out of an extremely tight space.

The station is shaped like the letter "Y," with the curving stem of the "Y" leading into the station from the underground pedway at Michigan Avenue and Randolph. After the stem wends its way past still-to-be-rented storefronts, it breaks apart, with one branch leading to South Shore platforms on the right and the other leading to Metra Electric platforms on the left. At the center of the "Y" is a new seating area, with room for up to 65 people. Just behind it are Metra ticket booths. South Shore booths are along the branch of the "Y" leading to that railroad's platforms.

Skidmore designed the project with Teng & Associates, the engineer and architect-of-record, and Metra chief project manager Richard Duffield, an old railroad hand. The firm, best known for Sears Tower, the John Hancock Center and the planned Chicago Trump Tower, was led by design partner Peter Ellis, managing partner Jeff McCarthy and senior designer Jason Stanley.

Faced with the problem of a cavelike interior, Ellis toyed with the idea of punching skylights into upper Randolph, but abandoned it after learning that there was so little leftover space in the road that the skylights would have to be minuscule.

Let there be light

Instead, he and his colleagues asked themselves an extremely challenging question: How could they make this the lightest and most visually arresting underground space in Chicago? No easy thing, that. The city, after all, boasts such subterranean gems as Helmut Jahn's tunnel between the two concourses of the United Terminal at O'Hare International Airport. There, a rainbow of colors washes the curving side walls, and the neon sculpture above the moving walkway is a visual knockout.

Even if the Randolph Street Station doesn't get to United's level, it's still very good because of its highly visible architectural finishes and some not-so-visible engineering moves that have made the station noticeably more spacious and comfortable.

One of the best design elements is the wave shaped-ceiling, which takes advantage of the ever-changing ceiling heights caused by the slope of upper Randolph. Made of perforated stainless steel with a satin finish, these custom-designed pieces form arches that give the station spatial pop, even though they are decorative rather than structural and the lowest of them are just 7 1/2 feet above the floor.

Equally attractive are the blue and white terrazzo floors, in which thin white lines resemble railroad tracks traced across a field of sky blue. The track patterns seem like pure decoration, but, in reality, they serve as signs, articulating pathways to the train platforms. Especially at rush hour, when the tightly quartered station still seems a bit crowded, that helps to move commuters through the station quickly.

There is more stylish railroad imagery in the sleek ticket booths, which evoke the corrugated stainless steel bodies of Metra passenger cars and the Zephyr trains of yore. Yet the booths seem anything but nostalgic because they are equipped with bands of sophisticated LED lights above and below the counters. By late February, the lights will turn red when a passenger is buying a ticket from an agent, green when the agent is available. Already, they cast a serene blue glow that nicely matches the terrazzo's sky blue.

While all this is well handled, the station's success is every bit as much the result of essential but unglamorous engineering moves carried out by Teng.

Spanning Metra tracks

The key step was to extend the concourse eastward on new structural framing that spans the Metra Electric tracks. That made room for backstage heating and cooling equipment. The ticket booth area was moved 50 feet to the east, freeing up room for the new seating area, whose openness makes the entire station appear more spacious. In addition, the newly extended concourse allows South Shore passengers to get to and from their trains within an enclosed space rather than passing over a bridge enclosed in chain link and open to the elements, as they once did.

Much remains to be done at the Randolph Street Station. Metra is evaluating proposals from developers who will lease the shops. The project's second phase, which will extend the new finishes elsewhere in the station, is scheduled to be done by late March. And passengers are letting Metra officials know they would like to see a clock in the station and larger displays of train arrival and department information.

Even so, what has been accomplished so far is impressive. The sensuous, curvilinear geometry of the station celebrates the motion of trains, endowing what had been an utterly bland space with the romance of travel and the energy of modern life. Nothing could be more different from the pallid postmodernism of the renovations done to Union Station in the early 1990s. And nothing could be a more welcome change from the old rathole that once sat beneath upper Randolph.

BVictor1

January 29th, 2005, 10:13 AM

Philip Johnson
1906-2005

America's dean of architecture

From New York's AT&T building to California's Crystal Cathedral, he left imprint on our skylines

By Blair Kamin
Tribune architecture critic
Published January 27, 2005

Philip Johnson, the aristocratic, often outrageous dean of American architecture, helped launch every major building style from the 1930s onward and made his controversial mark on numerous American skylines, including Chicago's.

Johnson, 98, died of unknown causes Tuesday night at his home in New Canaan, Conn., his lawyer, Joel Ehrenkranz, said Wednesday.

An architect, curator and patron, the Cleveland native brought glass-box modernism to America, then led the postmodern revolt against that style with a skyscraper shaped like a Chippendale highboy. He then championed another stylistic shift, popularizing the fragmented forms of such notable contemporary architects as Frank Gehry. He was, at the height of his influence, known as much for his understated elegance, disarming wit and towering prestige as for his multimillion-dollar skyscrapers.

In 1979 Time magazine put him on its cover, with Johnson clutching an image of his then-revolutionary AT&T Building in New York, the so-called "Chippendale skyscraper," and gazing down as if he were Moses holding the tablets of the Ten Commandments.

Nearly five decades earlier, in 1932, Johnson helped mount a design show at New York's Museum of Modern Art that introduced Americans to the sleek, machine-age buildings of Germany's Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and the Swiss-born architect known as Le Corbusier. It was the most significant architecture show of the 20th Century, changing the world's skylines from mountains of stone to shimmering prisms of steel, glass and concrete.

"In his role as a curator, patron and practicing architect, it's hard to draw a line around the extent of his influence on architecture in the 20th Century," Terence Riley, chief curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art, said Wednesday.

In 1979 Johnson became the first winner of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, bestowed by Chicago's billionaire Pritzker family and often referred to as architecture's equivalent of the Nobel Prize.

Gehry, a fellow Pritzker winner and now the nation's leading architect, said Wednesday that Johnson was "a good mentor" and taught him "tough love."

"He was acerbic and difficult sometimes," Gehry said. "He was quixotic and self-deprecating at times. He was all of the human frailties and strengths. But, above all, he was brilliant and loved the profession."

Along with his business partner, former Chicagoan John Burgee, Johnson designed skyscrapers in New York, Chicago, Houston, Atlanta, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Boston, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh and Louisville. His only Chicago office building, known as 190 South LaSalle, features an ornate summit of cresting and finials, as well as a grandly scaled lobby with a gold-leaf ceiling.

Johnson's other projects ranged from his much-praised Glass House in New Canaan (1949), a serene steel and glass box that is part of a private estate containing several structures he designed, to the classically influenced New York State Theater at New York City's Lincoln Center to such sprawling religious structures as the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, Calif. Completed in 1980, that 4,000-seat megachurch was designed for "Hour of Power" television preacher Robert Schuller.

A sample of Johnson's singular style came in 1992 when, during a visit to Chicago, he held court at The 95th, then the name of the restaurant on the 95th floor of the 100-story John Hancock Center.

Wearing his trademark round black glasses, which were set off by his neatly clipped white hair, and turned out in a double-breasted, dark gray Armani suit, with gold cuff links by Paloma Picasso, Johnson made the restaurant's crystal chandeliers and scalloped draperies seem tawdry by comparison.

Asked what he remembered most about Mies, who emigrated from Germany to Chicago in the 1930s, Johnson replied: "Mainly the martinis. He was a four-, five-martini man. He was much more entertaining after the martinis."

For all his quick wit and the glitter of his resume, Johnson was hugely controversial.

Critics labeled him facile and easily bored, which explained, they said, why he flitted from one style to another--never mastering any of them. Johnson also was accused of anti-Semitism, drawing fire for his flirtation with fascism in the 1930s.

As Chicago scholar Franz Schulze documented in his 1994 biography of Johnson, the architect expressed admiration for Adolf Hitler during the 1930s and even attended a 1932 rally in Potsdam, Germany, at which Hitler spoke. When Johnson returned to the United States, he roared off in a 12-cylinder Packard to Louisiana, where he offered his services as a speechwriter to the populist autocrat Huey Long, then the state's governor. (Long's people declined.)

Later in his life, Johnson dealt amicably with Jewish clients and Jewish cultural figures, even designing a nuclear reactor in Israel that was completed in 1960. In the 1980s and 1990s, he helped promote the careers of Gehry and Peter Eisenman, two of America's preeminent architects and both Jewish.

"Obviously, we forgave, but we didn't forget," Gehry said Wednesday. "Nobody forgets. But forgiveness for him was, I guess, easy. He was so powerful a force for the good in our profession that it overwhelmed all the negatives."

Born in Cleveland on July 8, 1906, to Homer and Louise Johnson, Johnson received a gift of Alcoa stock from his father, a wealthy lawyer, and went off to Harvard to study philosophy. As the once-risky stock split endlessly, he became a millionaire and indulged himself in European travel, taking his Cord convertible with him.

By 1932 that travel and his passion for architecture allowed Johnson, then ensconced at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the architectural historian Henry Russell Hitchcock to put on a spectacularly successful show, "Modern Architecture-International Exhibition."

It presented the crisp, glassy structures by Mies, Le Corbusier and other European modernists, codifying those buildings as a style and stripping them of the Europeans' idealistic notion that architecture could change the way people live. The approach became known as the International Style.

"He's the guy who formulated the idea that form follows form," Schulze said. "He was interested not at all in function, but in how the thing looked, how beautiful it was. Architecture for him was almost sculpture."

During the 1940s and 1950s, under the spell of Mies, Johnson worked on the master's lordly Seagram Building in New York, an exquisitely proportioned corporate headquarters faced in bronze. Johnson designed the skyscraper's Four Seasons Restaurant, a classic power lunch venue in Manhattan.

He also produced persuasive Miesian works of his own, such as the Glass House, which owed a great debt to Mies' Farnsworth House near southwest suburban Plano.

The International Style became dominant in the post-World War II boom years--so much so that the skylines in America and around the world became interchangeable forests of glass boxes. That led to a full-scale revolt that was started in the 1960s by such architects as Robert Venturi of Philadelphia and was later joined in force by Johnson.

In 1967 Johnson took another important step that would affect his future, teaming with the more practical Burgee, who worked for the Chicago firm C.F. Murphy & Associates.

At first, influenced by minimalist sculpture, the Johnson-Burgee partnership did such distinguished variations on the steel-and-glass box as the IDS Center in Minneapolis, a 51-story dark glass tower.

Johnson-Burgee followed that success in 1976 with Pennzoil Place in Houston, a pair of twin trapezoids built by the real estate developer Gerald Hines, perhaps the single most important client in Johnson's career. Pennzoil won critical acclaim, in part, because its slant-roofed tops seemed to dance with one another as drivers whizzed by them on Houston's freeways.

Then, in 1978, Johnson shocked the world when the American Telephone and Telegraph Co. unveiled his design for its corporate headquarters in Manhattan--a stone-clad building with the "Chippendale" top and a base whose grandly scaled arches mimicked the exterior of a much smaller Italian Renaissance chapel. The historicist design, which represented a violent break from the very flat-roofed, steel-and-glass modernism Johnson had once so ardently championed, incited furious critical debate.

"A pastiche of historical references," commented Ada Louise Huxtable, then the architecture critic of The New York Times.

Whatever one thought of it, AT&T (now Sony Plaza) introduced the postmodern era of skyscrapers and other buildings that often drew heavily from historical precedents.

In this vein, Johnson designed the 40-story PPG corporate headquarters in Pittsburgh (1984), a glass version of Britain's Houses of Parliament; the 56-story RepublicBankCenter (completed in 1983 and now called Bank of America Center) in Houston, a flamboyant reprise of 17th Century Dutch architecture; and the 64-story Transco Tower in Houston (1985), a black glass tower that remains the nation's tallest office building outside a downtown.

In Chicago, Johnson's granite-clad 190 S. LaSalle St. tower, deliberately recollected the famous Burnham & Root-designed Masonic Temple that once stood at Randolph and State Streets with an ornate summit composed of gables, gingerbread cresting and finials.

Critical response to the tower, which was completed in 1987 and is Johnson's lone Chicago building, was mixed. Chicago Tribune architecture critic Paul Gapp labeled it a cartoonish echo of the Masonic Temple, lambasting its top as "a pallid, wishy-washy piece of postmodernism that cannot be taken seriously."

One year later, Johnson engaged in another stylistic flip-flop, abandoning postmodernism for the approach to design called Deconstructivism, which fragments, warps and skews orthodox, right-angled geometry.

That shift occurred in the Museum of Modern Art exhibition, "Deconstructivist Architecture," which Johnson curated. It featured eight architects, several of whom--the Los Angeles-based Gehry, the New York-based Eisenman, Zaha Hadid of London, Daniel Libeskind (then based in Milan and now New York), and Rem Koolhaas of Rotterdam, Netherlands--since have ascended to the profession's highest levels.

Although the show may have been farsighted, critics savaged what they termed Johnson's appropriation of its subject matter from younger architects.

Johnson later defended himself, saying that "the idea was as much `in the air' as the architecture itself."

Johnson's other designs included private houses, college campuses, public plazas, theaters, department stores and a civic center in Peoria. He also designed a brassy reflective glass exterior for Donald Trump's skyscraper at the southwest corner of Manhattan's Central Park in 1997. It replaced the original 1968 exterior.

After Johnson and Burgee split in the early 1990s, climaxing a long-running conflict over control of the firm, Johnson's output of large-scale buildings dwindled. But his passion for architecture did not.

He did smaller buildings, including a Deconstructivist gatehouse at his Connecticut estate. And he continued working, though at a reduced pace, until last October, when he left the firm known as Philip Johnson/Alan Ritchie Architects because of failing health. He had heart surgery in the early 1990s, an associate of his lawyer said.

During his visit to the John Hancock Center in 1992, Johnson was asked about a criticism frequently leveled at him--that his obsession with style had turned architecture into a succession of fashions rather than a field that responded to pressing human needs, such as decent housing.

"I'm only interested in the cutting edge of architecture," he replied without apology. "Why do I change all the time? I think the world changes its mind faster than I do. I'm just trying to keep up."

He was asked if he would be remembered as a great architect--"No," he replied firmly--or as a great tastemaker.

"A tastemaker, perhaps. Or as a critic, rather. Or a cultural figure," he said with typical self-mockery. "It's hard to say what I do."

Survivors include his longtime companion David Whitney and his sister, Jeanette Dempsey, who lives in Ohio.

BVictor1

January 29th, 2005, 10:18 AM

Architect Philip Johnson dies -- helped change America's look

January 27, 2005

BY VERENA DOBNIK

Philip Johnson, whose austere ''glass box'' buildings and latter-day penchant for incorporating whimsical touches in his designs made him one of the most influential architects of the 20th century, died Tuesday at his New Canaan, Conn., home. He was 98.

"America has lost one of its brightest, most influential and most consistently engaging architects," said Richard Moe, president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, an organization with close ties to Mr. Johnson. "In the course of a long career, Philip Johnson helped turn architecture into a popular spectator sport -- and, in the process, turned himself into a cultural icon."

Easily recognizable with his black glasses, Mr. Johnson was arguably the world's first celebrity architect, known as much for his efforts to promote architecture as high art as he was for his buildings themselves.

Lived in glass cube

Mr. Johnson's work, which spanned more than half a century starting in the 1940s, ranged from the modernism of his home, a glass cube in the woods, to the more fanciful work of his later years, including the AT&T Building in New York, with its curved pediment that made it look like a giant Chippendale chest of drawers.

Mr. Johnson once said his great ambition was ''to build the greatest room in the world -- a great theater or cathedral or monument. Nobody's given me the job.''

In 1980, however, he completed his great room, the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, Calif., a soaring glass structure wider and higher than Notre Dame in Paris. If architects are remembered for their one-room buildings, Mr. Johnson said, ''This may be it for me.''

With his partner, Chicago architect John Burgee, Mr. Johnson also designed the Bank of America building in Houston, a 56-story tower of pink granite, and the Cleveland Playhouse, a complex with the feel of an 11th-century town.

While the majority of Mr. Johnson's notable work was in New York, he did have an impact on the Chicago cityscape.

Designed 190 S. La Salle

With Burgee, Mr. Johnson designed 190 S. La Salle in 1987, his only Chicago building. A focal point of the La Salle Street canyon, 190 is postmodernism at its best. Taking its aesthetic cues from John W. Root's demolished Masonic Temple, the building's style draws on Chicago's rich architectural history and the form of neighboring structures.

Mr. Johnson also played a key role in the preservation of the John and Frances Glessner House on South Prairie. Along with Chicago architects Harry Weese and Ben Weese, Mr. Johnson led the fight to save the celebrated Henry Hobson Richardson design from demolition in 1966.

Mr. Johnson invented the role of museum architecture curator at New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1932. And he coined the term International Style for the work of Europeans Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier.

Philip Cortelyou Johnson was born July 8, 1906, in Cleveland. He graduated from Harvard in 1927 with a degree in philosophy, then toured Europe and became interested in new styles of architecture. In 1940, Mr. Johnson returned to Harvard for graduate school.

In 1979, he became the first recipient of the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize, a $100,000 award established by Chicago's Pritzker family to honor an architect of international acclaim. In 1978, Mr. Johnson received the Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects, the highest honor the American architectural profession awards to its members.

AP, with staff reporter Ben Goldberger contributing

geoff_diamond

January 29th, 2005, 06:17 PM

What a shame. Knew it was coming though. I was just talking, earlier this year, with a friend of mine about how amazing it was that Johnson was still alive.

ChicagoLover

January 30th, 2005, 04:17 AM

I really like 190 S. LaSalle. The lobby is absolutely superb--no question the best part of the building, and one of the most spectacular office building lobbies in Chicago. And the building in general is very well executed detail-wise, from what I can recall.

The owners of the building may have trouble with leasing since I have heard Mayer Brown & Maw.. the major tenant in the building .. is moving to one of the new towers being built in the West Loop, as I recall.

BVictor1

February 6th, 2005, 03:52 PM

New book visits mansions in Chicago past and present

February 6, 2005

BY BILL CUNNIFF Homelife Reporter

A new picture-book -- Chicago's Mansions -- honors vintage homes built all over the city. The book is divided into four chapters: North Side, South Side, West Side and Lost Mansions. Each chapter has black-and-white pictures of dozens of huge homes.

The cover of the book might fool you at first glance. "The casual observer might think this is a picture of Gen. Ulysses S. Grant with Abraham Lincoln," said John Graf, the author, a historian and a Realtor with Re/Max Showcase in Lake Forest. Actually, it's a late-1860s photo of the McCormick family, relatives of Cyrus McCormick, the wealthy inventor of the reaper. "So many of the McCormick family lived in the area that the neighborhood [near Rush and Ohio streets] was known as 'McCormickville,' " he said.

The captions in Chicago's Mansions note the history and the architects of the elaborate residences and the people who lived in them. In the foreword, Robert B. Remer of the Edgewater Historical Society, invites readers to consider the circumstances of the times while looking over the posh mansions.

"Many [owners of the mansions] were first-generation successes who wanted the best for their families, but were never fully accepted in Chicago's top society," Remer said. "Many built where their mansion was perhaps among the first in a trend to add value to their community."

Many of the homes were built when now-revered architects were still unknown. "Frank Lloyd Wright began his career as a draftsman of lovely homes in the development of Edgewater, then a Chicago suburb, in the late 19th century," Remer said.

Let's look at a few examples from each chapter.

NORTH SIDE

The North Side section visits homes in neighborhoods such as the Gold Coast, Lincoln Park, Hawthorne Place, the Hutchinson Street Historic Landmark District, Edgewater, Old Irving Park and Rogers Park.

The four-story, 15,000-square-foot Richardson Romanesque home at 1250 N. Lake Shore Drive has 23 rooms -- and 10 fireplaces.

A four-story gem at 1530 N. Lake Shore Drive -- built to resemble a Florentine villa -- is now the headquarters of the Polish Consulate.

Theatergoers are familiar with the name Goodman. William Owen Goodman made a fortune in the lumber business -- and he was the donor of the popular downtown theater that bears his name. In 1913, Howard Van Doren Shaw designed Goodman's mansion at 1355 N. Astor.

Nearby, the 1892 Charnley House at 1365 Astor, is now the headquarters for the Society of Architectural Historians. "It was designed chiefly by Frank Lloyd Wright, who was a draftsman and designer in Louis Sullivan's office," Graf said.

A mansion at 2466 N. Lakeview was constructed in 1894 for a brewer, but later it was occupied by William Wrigley (of the chewing gum fortune). The mansion and the rear coach house contain 20,000 square feet of space.

The Hutchinson Street Landmark District is a two-block stretch of architecturally significant homes from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Several were designed by George Washington Maher, a prominent Prairie School architect. The residence at 817 W. Hutchinson was built in 1913 for a jewelry company executive.

In Wicker Park, a gingerbread mansion at 2153 W. Pierce was built for a successful German immigrant who wanted a home to remind him of his native country. "This house looks much the same today as when the photograph was taken in 1893," Graf said.

A 1909 mansion at 5940 N. Sheridan Road is surrounded by high-rises.

SOUTH SIDE

This chapter visits homes in the Prairie Avenue Historic District, the Calumet/Giles Prairie Landmark District, Groveland Park, Millionaires Row, Kenwood, Hyde Park, Beverly and the Jackson Park Highlands Landmark District.

The Wheeler-Kohn mansion at 2018 S. Calumet survived the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. The restored home is now a bed-and-breakfast.

A Queen Anne at 4500 S. Michigan, originally built for heirs to meat-packing companies, served as a funeral home for a while. Now, it's operated by the Inner-City Youth Foundation.

A Flemish-style mansion at 442 E. Oakwood was built for a wagon manufacturer.

Civil rights leader Ida Wells once resided at 3624 S. King Drive.

The mansion at 4742 S. King Drive was the home of Robert Sengstacke Abbott, the son of ex-slaves who established the Chicago Defender newspaper.

Moses Born made a fortune in the clothing business, and his residence -- with nine fireplaces -- was built at 4801 S. Drexel in 1901.

A French Renaissance limestone chateau at 4938 S. Drexel was turned into 34 condominiums.

The Richardson Romanesque mansion at 4851 S. Drexel was built for Martin Antoine Ryerson Jr. The Ryerson Library at the Art Institute of Chicago is named in his honor.

A three-story brick mansion at 5026 S. Greenwood has 15 fireplaces. Playwright Kenneth Sawyer Goodman grew up in the home before his parents moved to Astor Street.

Boxing legend Muhammad Ali once resided in an 8,000-square-foot Tudor at 4944 S. Woodlawn.

Wright's Robie House at 5757 S. Woodlawn is a museum open for touring.

A 33-room mansion at 726 W. Garfield was designed in 1901 by Zachary Taylor Davis -- who also designed Wrigley Field and old Comiskey Park.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens once owned the Queen Anne at 9332 S. Damen in the Beverly neighborhood.

A limestone mansion at 10244 S. Longwood was designed to resemble an Irish castle. The home is currently the Beverly Unitarian Church.

A Queen Anne at 10910 S. Prospect features fixtures salvaged from old Chicago mansions.

WEST SIDE

The 1500 blocks of Jackson and Adams and the 200 block of South Ashland make up the Jackson Boulevard Historic Landmark District.

The Queen Anne at 315 S. Ashland was built in 1885 for philanthropist and machinery manufacturer William James Chalmers and his wife, Joan Pinkerton (the daughter of detective agency owner Allen Pinkerton).

An Italianate at 718 S. Loomis was built for baker and biscuit maker David Francis Bremner, a captain for the Union Army in the Civil War.

Architect Frederick R. Schock built a Queen Anne for himself at 5804 W. Midway Park. Schock lived there for almost 50 years.

This chapter also covers the distinguished mansions in Logan Square on the Near Northwest Side. For example, John Rath, who made a fortune in the barrel-making business, hired Maher in 1907. The result was a classic example of Maher's Prairie School design at 2701 W. Logan Blvd.

"Logan Boulevard has been well-preserved," Graf said. "It looks today much like it did 100 years ago."

A medieval tower is an eye-catching element of the William Nowaczewski House at 2410 N. Kedzie.

LOST MANSIONS

This chapter is a sad one. "One cannot help but be amazed and astonished that so many architectural jewels have slipped away into the past -- never to be recovered," Graf said.

Railroad car baron George Pullman's mansion used to be at 1729 S. Prairie. A rare photo shows the reception hall -- with ornately carved mahogany pillars.

Marshall Field -- the founder of the department store -- resided in a red-brick Second Empire mansion at 1905 S. Prairie. "It was completed in 1876 at a cost of $2 million -- an enormous sum at the time," Graf said.

Chicago's Mansions ($19.99, Arcadia Publishing).

BVictor1

February 13th, 2005, 02:32 PM

NEW HOMES: 4th quarter sets record in sales for downtown

Written by William Sluis from staff and wire reports
Published February 13, 2005

A sizzling fourth quarter sent sales of downtown new homes to a record, as transactions for 2004 climbed 80 percent from the previous year.

The strong showing seemed almost too good to be true, defying a weak local job market, worries about the influence of speculators and fears that the downtown area was becoming overbuilt.

Sales for 2004 jumped to 6,298 units. That was 12 percent above the previous record, set in 2000, according to a report from Appraisal Research Counselors.

"I've actually convinced myself that the numbers are for real," said developer Hal Lichterman, president of Chicago-based Kenard Corp.

"Is it going to happen again? I don't think so," he added.

Economists have expressed concerns that mortgage interest rates, which remain near a 40-year basement, could soon spike upward. Currently, rates are nearly unchanged from last year at this time, despite numerous predictions that they would rise in concert with short-term, credit-tightening moves by the Federal Reserve.

The report cited several reasons for the downtown housing boom, including the popularity of new high-rise projects overlooking Millennium and Grant Parks.

It said the buying surge is being fed by empty-nesters and suburban homeowners who are buying in-city condos and second homes, as well as speculators eager to turn a quick profit.

Watch for: Not much slowdown in the downtown market during the current quarter, as mortgage rates hover near rock bottom.

ChicagoLover

February 13th, 2005, 06:01 PM

Since the construction boom has had so much stream behind it, I don't know why the city has been slow in demanding quality from developers. The city should have been just as demanding with Loewenberg as they were with the architects and developers for One Museum Place. That building is phenomenal, yet was designed by a virtual unknown at a firm that does generally derivative stuff. You can squeeze greatness out of them by pushing, as the city did. The city can totally afford to push... so you scare away a few nasty-looking developments.. the cityscape is enriched, and long-term demand is not weakened by a bad reputation earned from Loewenberg's crap.

geoff_diamond

February 13th, 2005, 06:36 PM

so you scare away a few nasty-looking developments.

^-- this is exactly what they're afraid of, I'm sure. They don't want to lose ANY development, no matter how bad.

BVictor1

February 24th, 2005, 02:50 AM

Once grand, now bland
Branch banks are booming. While the services are praiseworthy, the architecture ---- and the effects on neighborhoods ---- is troubling.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/media/photo/2005-02/16403951.jpg
Bank architecture: A brief history
Banks have long served as patrons for distinguished architecture, though they have spawned controversy, too, as in the current building boom of small branch banks in Chicago and around the nation. Here is a brief history of bank architecture and changes in bank building technology during the last century.
February 23, 2005

By Blair Kamin
Tribune architecture critic
Published February 23, 2005

Banks used to be about ritual and permanence. They resembled Greek or Roman temples, with the banker playing the secular priest, dispensing loans instead of benedictions. Banks inspired awe, though their built-for- the-ages classicism was salesmanship, designed to convince depositors that their money would be safer in the vault than stuffed in a mattress.

No more.

Now banks want to look like Starbucks, not the Parthenon. Around Chicago and the nation, branch banks are popping up like mushrooms -- or, more accurately, multiplying like cockroaches. Defying predictions made in the 1990s, when online banking boomed and banks trimmed spending on bricks and mortar, face-to-face banking is back. But its architecture, on the whole, is disappointingly faceless.

In storefronts, strip malls and even parking garages, many of the branches are as visually generic as cell phone outlets, convenience stores or fast-food restaurants. Indeed, the new mini-banks -- let's call them McBanks -- are the early 21st Century's answer to the fast-food restaurants of the late 20th Century: loved for their convenience, loathed for their cookie-cutter McArchitecture.

One might reasonably ask of these small-scale operations: "Why should they offer anything more?" But a better question would be: "Why not?" Today, everything from Apple Computer stores to Chipotle Mexican Grill outlets are feeding our appetite for retail and restaurant design that adds distinctive flavor to the public spaces of cities and suburbs.

Instead of raising aesthetic standards, however, the new banks are raising blood pressure, not simply because they look so bland, but because they have pushed out corner drugstores and other retailers that make neighborhoods livable. They also are drawing fire because they don't generate sales tax revenue, as stores do.

As a result, Chicago and a growing number of suburbs -- among them Buffalo Grove, Highland Park, Hinsdale and Lake Forest -- have passed measures to curb the rising number of branch banks. Lake Forest has gone a step further, tightly regulating how banks should look and even pushing them to offer plans that would allow them to be changed into stores if a bank closes.

Bankers and their design consultants take a different view. They are giving customers what they want, they say--a convenient combination of online, ATM, telephone and in-person banking. Invariably, they use the word "intimidating" to describe the old banks, saying that they were as cold and impersonal as Department of Motor Vehicle branches.

In pointed contrast, the new banks fall all over themselves to glad-hand you. Teller lines and roped-off areas are out. The new banks offer such welcoming touches as conciergelike greeter desks, coffee bars, kids' play spaces, comfy couches, even tellers and managers who dress in the unpriestly garb of "business casual" -- khakis, colored shirts and no ties. Banks from Sarasota, Fla., to San Jose, Calif., now share branches with Starbucks, hoping to attract customers from the popular coffee shop.

"A scone with your loan?" the trade journal, American Banker, quipped in a recent story.

While these amenities undoubtedly appeal to customers, they don't address the one thing that the branch bank boom hasn't altered: Banks, like all buildings, still have the capacity to add to -- or detract from -- the character of cities and suburbs. And that raises some vexing questions: Is it possible for a bank to be approachable and functional without being dumbed down architecturally? Can the new banks add to the character of cities and suburbs -- or will they continue to drown it in architectural red ink?

Banking has long gone hand in hand with real places, not the intangible, faceless universe of the World Wide Web.

The word "bank" derives from the Italian "banco," which means "bench." In the 13th Century, when modern banking developed in Italy, Italian bankers did business on benches in the street.

As computer use boomed in the 1990s, it appeared that banks were ready to sever their historic ties with human interaction. They invested heavily in online operations and sliced spending on new buildings. Actual banks appeared ready to disappear into the ether of the Internet.

But a funny thing happened on the way to a placeless banking universe: Plenty of customers still wanted to look into the eyes of a banker. And banks discovered that branches provided them the perfect platform to sell customers not just checking accounts, but insurance and other financial services that used to be off-limits because of federal regulations dating back to the Depression.

As a result, the number of branch banks around the country has steadily increased to more than 80,000, according to the American Bankers Association, a Washington, D.C.-based trade group. While 36 million U.S. households banked online in 2004, a nearly fivefold increase from 1998, more than 9 of every 10 households still visits a branch bank once a month, according to Tracey Mills, a spokeswoman for the trade group.

Chicago is the epicenter of the branch-banking boom, largely because old Illinois laws that restricted the spread of branch banking have been relaxed. Bank One, for example, added 60 branches last year, giving it 310 branches in the six-county Chicago area and northwest Indiana. Upstart Washington Mutual, based in Seattle, claims 150 in the region.

Yet as a close look at the Washington Mutual branches shows, the new face-to-face banking is entirely different from the old bank temples.

The only thing remotely Greek or Roman about a Washington Mutual branch is the bank's code name for the design --"Occasio," which is Latin for "favorable opportunity."

"Our customers, as we interviewed them, didn't talk to us about building something that resembled a mausoleum," explained Karen Curtin, Washington Mutual's senior vice president for innovation and customer insight. "Banks can be intimidating. They wanted a place where they would come in and feel comfortable."

Who can argue with that? The first Occasio, which was conceived for Washington Mutual by Dayton-based Design Forum, was introduced in Las Vegas five years ago. Since then, the Occasio branches have spread like kudzu, including a downtown branch at 431 N. Orleans St., just north of the Merchandise Mart.

The bank is shoehorned into a street-level storefront of an exposed-concrete parking garage. An Irv's menswear store used to occupy the space, bank employees said.

The exterior -- it's a stretch to call it a facade -- has windows that let passersby see inside instead of the massive columns that offered the old banks real and symbolic protection. The lone feature that distinguishes the little bank's exterior is a bright blue awning. If you squint, it could be the awning for a White Hen.

The inside is more intriguing. There's a hint of old monumentality in a halo-shaped ceiling fixture that hovers like a spaceship. But the rest of the space is decidedly untraditional, breaking down the barriers that made old banks so stuffy.

Kiosklike "teller towers" let customers stand alongside tellers. Equally unusual are a children's play space and a warm color scheme (purples, greens and yellows), the latter of which has more in common with a Starbucks than the chaste white marble banks of yore. There are no granite counters, barely any masonry, in fact, unless you count the tile floor. Here, the dressed-down banker, clad in khakis and a colored shirt, strives to be your friend, not your priest.

Give the Occasio branches their due: They organize banking in a way that responds to the relaxed American lifestyle and they do so in a way that is visually fresh -- crisp and clean-lined rather than tarted up with paste-on stone columns. They are performing well economically, Curtin said, though she declines to provide specifics.

Still, there's a disturbing sameness to them. It doesn't so much defile city and suburban downtowns with tastelessness as drag them down with cookie-cutter banality.

Multiply that banality over and over, as McBanks cluster in city neighborhoods such as Lincoln Park or suburbs such as Lake Forest and you wind up with a bigger problem: too many banks, too little character.

At the Armitage Avenue-Halsted Street intersection in Lincoln Park, for example, a Citibank, a North Community Bank and a mansionlike Bridgeview Bank hold down three of the four corners. To the west along Armitage, a Fifth Third Bank, a Bank One and a National City Bank have squeezed into storefronts.

Merchants are right to view the influx warily, and not just because most of these banks look like yokels at a party of chic urbanites. The influx threatens to sap Armitage of its retail identity, displacing one-of-a-kind boutiques with could-be-anywhere banks. In addition, as the merchants argue, the banks can put a damper on retailing because they close before the other stores and aren't open (excluding ATM service) at night or on Sundays.

"Once you start losing retailers, you lose the attractiveness for shoppers to come to that area. Why would someone make a trip into the city to shop if all there is is banks?" said Charles Eastwood, chief of staff for Ald. Vi Daley (43rd), in whose ward the district is located.

In response, Daley introduced an amendment to the city's new zoning code that the City Council passed Feb. 9. In its final form, it requires a bank to get a special-use permit if it wants to build a new branch within 600 feet of an existing bank in an area designated a "pedestrian retail street." The law covers several North Side retail strips, such as Armitage.

"Merchants there say they would rather have their worst competitors open up a shop across than the street than have another bank come in," Eastwood said.

The Chicago law marks one way to curb the numbing effects of McBanks, but it is a blunt instrument compared with the more sophisticated set of tools being used in the North Shore suburb of Lake Forest.

Those tools were put in place after Cincinnati-based Fifth Third Bank announced in 2003 that it would construct a new branch in the suburb's western business district.

The plan upset residents because the district already had three banks and the new one would displace a dry cleaners, an interior design shop and other retailers. Officials were concerned that Lake Forest would be left with a glut of buildings suitable for nothing but banks -- and that these buildings would sit empty if not all the banks survived.

"It certainly raised our awareness of what banks could do in the community," said Catherine Czerniak, the suburb's director of community development.

After imposing a 90-day moratorium on new bank construction, Lake Forest passed a law requiring a special-use permit for new banks. But unlike Chicago's new measure, the law gives the suburb leverage to control such things as whether a new bank's materials and design are compatible with its neighbors. It also allows Lake Forest to pressure banks so their buildings can be changed to other uses, particularly stores.

The first bank to be built under these requirements is a new Bank of America at 780 N. Western Ave. Designed by Timothy Morgan Associates of Lincolnshire, it sits a couple of blocks north of Howard Van Doren Shaw's brilliant, Arts and Crafts-style Market Square shopping center. It looks nothing like a grand old banking temple or a new strip mall bank.

Instead, the two-story structure is a curious mix of permanence and impermanence. A simplified version of an old-fashioned Main Street commercial building, it sports brick arches along its top story. But the street-level window bays beneath them are the most revealing detail. In case the bank goes out of business, a store could easily put those show windows to good use. It's not hard to imagine mannequins in them.

"You could see this being a Gap or an Abercrombie & Fitch," said Tom Broadfoot, an assistant manager at the bank. Even the vault could be re-used, he joked, if the bank became a jewelry store.

The new Bank of America is a decent, civilized building, modestly matching the scale and character of the storefronts along its street while ceding pride of place to the picturesque towers of Market Square. This is good contextual architecture, free of postmodern pastiche or mock traditionalism. The building is by no means as architecturally imposing as the mansionlike Northern Trust bank a few blocks away, but it is certainly a better fit for the suburb's downtown than yet another McBank.

All this suggests a different direction for bank design, one that recognizes that the old days of grand bank temples are gone, but that a bank's responsibility to shape the public realm remains as significant as ever.

If banks are going to be built according to some pre-existing formula, cities and suburbs have every right to require them to tweak -- or even break -- that formula. And if it costs a little bit more, well, who better than banks to come up a few extra dollars?

Yet the desire for banks with some architectural oomph should not lead public officials down the road to the sentimentality of Disneyland's Main Street. Indeed, some of the best retail and restaurant designs today are assertively modern.

Take the new Apple store at 679 N. Michigan Ave., a sleek cathedral of computing. Or, to cite something less expensive, how about the restaurants of the Chipotle Mexican Grill chain, where the visual energy of the interior typically extends outward to the storefront?

At the chain's outlet at 316 N. Michigan Ave., a curving piece of russet-colored metal projects from the facade, announcing the restaurant's presence like an old-fashioned porch. It's far more engaging than a Washington Mutual branch just down the street.

It speaks volumes about the current predicament that a glorified burrito joint could set an example for a bank. But to ignore that telling contrast would be to lose a chance to upgrade the architectural currency of the nation's banks -- and, with it, the flavor and character of the public realm.

Bank architecture: A brief history

Banks have long served as patrons for distinguished architecture, though they have spawned controversy, too, as in the current building boom of small branch banks in Chicago and around the nation. Here is a brief history of bank architecture and changes in bank building technology during the last century:

- 1908: Chicago architect Louis Sullivan completes one of his great small-town Midwestern banks, the National Farmers' Bank in Owatonna, Minn., about 60 miles south of Minneapolis. With its intricate ornament, the bank celebrates rural Midwestern life.

- 1924: Cementing the look of LaSalle Street as "Wall Street Midwest," the classical Illinois Merchants Bank Building, designed by Graham, Anderson, Probst & White of Chicago, opens at 231 S. LaSalle St. (It later becomes the Continental Illinois Bank Building.)

- 1932: The Philadelphia Savings Fund Society builds the first International Style skyscraper in America, a new headquarters in Philadelphia designed by architects George Howe and William Lescaze.

- 1934: Constructed during the height of the Depression by the estate of Marshall Field, the LaSalle Bank Building becomes the Loop's largest office building with one million square feet. The Art Deco skyscraper, by Graham, Anderson, Probst & White, consists of four 23-story wings topped by a tower that brings its height to 45 stories.

- 1946: The Exchange National Bank of Chicago opens the era of automotive banking with the nation's first drive-in bank at 130 S. LaSalle St. The drive-in has 10 teller windows with bulletproof glass and automatic slide-out drawers.

- 1954: Bank architecture moves a step further from the classical, fortress of finance model with the opening of a modernist, glass-walled bank for Manufacturers Trust Co. in Manhattan. It is designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill of New York.

- 1967: A Barclays Bank branch near London unveils the first rudimentary automatic teller machine. Two years later, Chemical Bank opens America's first ATM in Rockville Centre, N.Y.

- 1969: The First National Bank of Chicago constructs its muscular, tapering skyscraper at Madison and Dearborn Streets. The design, by Perkins & Will of Chicago, accommodates narrow office floors at the top and a wide banking hall at the base.

- 1980: The World Savings and Loan Association completes a North Hollywood, Calif., branch designed by an upstart Southern California architect, Frank Gehry. The freestanding structure consists of a skylit, one-story banking hall, framed by tall, bookend-like facades.

- 1993: Nearly nine years after the federal government and a consortium of other big banks bail out once-troubled Continental Bank, the bank's grand banking hall in the former Illinois Merchants Bank Building at 231 S. LaSalle St. reopens after a $10 million renovation. Bank of America now occupies the building.

- 2000: Reflecting the ever-growing trend toward banks modeled on retail stores, Seattle-based Washington Mutual opens its first "Occasio" branch bank in Las Vegas. Conceived by Dayton-based Design Forum, the Occasio branches feature bright graphics, children's play areas and a ring of kiosk-like "teller towers" instead of a conventional teller line.

-- Blair Kamin

http://www.chicagotribune.com/media/photo/2005-02/16403875.jpg
The Old Way
The templelike Bank of America Building at 231 S. LaSalle St. (formerly Continental Illinois Bank) exemplifies howbanks used to look: majestic, solid and designed to convince you that your money would be safe.
(Tribune photo by Alex Garcia)

http://www.chicagotribune.com/media/photo/2005-02/16403898.jpg
The New Way
Small, storefront banks in Chicago and its suburbs like this Fifth Third Bank at 900 W. Armitage Ave., have created controversy because of their generic design and because they have displaced clothing stores and other retailers.
(Tribune photo by Alex Garcia)
February 23, 2005

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1908
Chicago architect Louis Sullivan completes one of his great small-town Midwestern banks, the National Farmers’ Bank in Owatonna, Minn., about 60 miles south of Minneapolis. With its intricate ornament, the bank celebrates rural Midwestern life.
February 23, 2005

http://www.chicagotribune.com/media/photo/2005-02/16403971.jpg
1934
Constructed during the height of the Depression by the estate of Marshall Field, the LaSalle Bank Building becomes the Loop’s largest office building with one million square feet. The Art Deco skyscraper, by Graham, Anderson, Probst & White, consists of four 23-story wings topped by a tower that brings its height to 45 stories.
February 23, 2005

http://www.chicagotribune.com/media/photo/2005-02/16403983.jpg
1969
The First National Bank of Chicago constructs its muscular, tapering skyscraper at Madison and Dearborn Streets. The design, by Perkins & Will of Chicago, accommodates narrow office floors at the top and a wide banking hall at the base.
February 23, 2005
February 23, 2005

ChicagoLover

February 24th, 2005, 04:19 AM

I didn't understand Kamin's issue with bank branch proliferation in the area. What's wrong with a storefront bank branch? And the picture progression makes it seem as if Kamen is committing a common fallacy: comparing the usual practice of today with the best of the old. He does this by placing the picture of Louis Sullivan's small town Minnesota bank next to the Fifth Third bank on Armitage.

To be sure, bank architecture used to be much more extravagant and interesting than it is today. But I find that banks are one of the few buildings to invest in the facades of their buildings. The branches are often elegant. And storefront branches in neighborhoods like Lincoln Park are a welcome respite from suburban branches that are sometimes dominated visually by parking lots with drive-ins.

This supposed "trend in bank aesthetics" is simply a reflection of a much larger trend elegantly simplified as "grand to bland." And I think the exceptions to this general trend consist disproportionately of bank buildings. The few elegant structures that exist on suburban strips like Randall Road are banks.

In my current *physical* home in State College, PA, there are a number of bank branches under construction. In each of these, there are at least architectural efforts made. This is more than you can say for many if not most strip malls, and ALL Walmarts which dominate small town America shopping.

As with Kamen's article on the design choice for the McDonalds, I don't agree.

And I wish someone would explain to me why retail merchants have trouble with proximity to bank branches. (And if someone wants to pay with cash, what's the problem with a convenient ATM nearby?) My goodness, what a problem to have! There are so many places in this city in which a bank branch would be so welcome. I cannot believe there is ever a credible threat of bank branches "taking over" a streetscape. I love Armitage for its idiosyncratic retail, but a few branch banks and Starbucks aren't going to take that away. If you are going to have retail vitality in an area like that with low-to-midrises, where as a city planner or chamber of commerce you are trying to achieve as contiguous a retail strip as possible with little or no vacancies, banks would seem to be ideal "filler" complimenting your more interesting shops. No sizable retail strip that isn't completely dominated by tourists year-round is going to contain only stores of the Lush.com variety! Kamen is off his rocker with this one...Beg to differ?

BVictor1

February 24th, 2005, 06:06 PM

Part 2 of 2

The new McBanks: Devaluing design
The mini-banks threaten the existence of large historic banks that serve as visual anchors for their communities.

By Blair Kamin
Tribune architecture critic
Published February 24, 2005

The once-grand bank is a picture of ambition humbled by circumstance.

Visible on its limestone walls, just beneath its tiled dome, are the words: "Security Strength Stability." Yet today, the 79-year-old edifice at the corner of Oak Park Avenue and Cermak Road in west suburban Berwyn sits empty, surrounded by a chain-link fence. Berwyn redevelopment officials are looking for a new tenant who will restore the building to its Roaring '20s glory.

The Berwyn bank symbolizes just how fleeting architectural permanence can be -- and how the economic Darwinism of the marketplace can play havoc with historic banks, no matter what the reassuring words on their walls.

Today, the chief economic threat to these monuments to Mammon is coming from the proliferation of McBanks, those small, inexpensive, architecturally challenged branch banks that are spreading across the Chicago area and the nation.

The trend has prompted concern among city and suburban officials because the branch banks frequently gobble up storefronts occupied by retailers and pay no sales taxes. But it has another disturbing side: The mini-banks threaten the existence of large historic banks that serve as visual anchors for their communities.

In Chicago, the rush away from architectural monumentality has done severe aesthetic damage to the modern banking hall at the base of Bank One's distinctive Loop skyscraper. The once-enthralling space now conspicuously lacks visual punch.

In St. Louis, an Art Deco landmark, the nine-story South Side National Bank building, remains empty, its fate uncertain six years after its owner announced plans to tear it down and replace it with a Walgreens and a branch bank.

"McBanks don't need big edifices," said Ken Nuernberger, a principal at ND Consulting Group in St. Louis, a real estate and development firm that studied the reuse of the South Side National Bank building, remains empty, its fate uncertain six years after its owner announced plans to tear it down and replace it with a Walgreens and a branch bank.

"McBanks don't need big edifices," said Ken Nuernberger, a principal at ND Consulting Group in St. Louis, a real estate and development firm that studied the reuse of the South Side National Bank building for the city of St. Louis. "They're building simple things: drive-throughs and small little places to do your deposits."

The small banks keep overhead low, he said, adding: "Before, you had to look substantial for people to put their money in your bank. Now virtual banks are OK. We'll see an acceleration of old banks being available for conversion."

To be sure, not all historic banks are about to bite the dust. Some have been converted to chamber of commerce offices, clothing stores, even an ice cream parlor, which is what the late Chicago architect Louis Sullivan's Home Building Association in Newark, Ohio is now. Others actually have remained banks, their interiors handsomely adapted to modern needs.

Chicago architect Paul Florian of Florian Architects, for example, has done an exquisite renovation of the richly decorated interior of the Hyde Park Bank, deftly juxtaposing functional contemporary elements with the banking hall's fabulously ornate shell. The project, which earlier this year won a national Honor Award for Interior Architecture from the American Institute of Architects, brilliantly shows how old banks can be revamped to meet current needs.

The question is whether this extraordinary effort will turn out to be a model or an exception.

There is no better place to examine the tensions roiling banking architecture than the soaring, ground-floor banking hall at Bank One Plaza, the muscular concrete tower at the corner of Dearborn and Madison Streets. Designed by Chicago architects Perkins & Will, the 60-story tower opened in 1969 -- at the end of one era in banking and shortly before the start of another.

The skyscraper's tapering shape was designed to house narrow office floors at its top and a much wider banking hall that sprawled across its ground floor. Granite teller counters stretched endlessly. In keeping with the modernist ideal of free-flowing space between inside and outside, the hall formed an extension of the sunken outdoor plaza immediately to its south.

But the wide-open layout reflected more than modernism's influence: It grew directly from Illinois banking law at the time, which prohibited branch banks. The bank needed to handle thousands of transactions each day. And architecturally there was only one way to do that -- scores of teller stations.

Yet Illinois eased its branch-banking restrictions in the 1980s, reducing the need for banks to have a single grand hall. That shift and new technologies such as ATMs and online banking would eventually render the hall obsolete.

According to Lamar Johnson, managing director at the Chicago office of San Francisco-based Gensler, which worked with Bank One's in-house designers to revamp the hall, the room had 82 teller stations before the renovation. No more than 20 were in use at a time.

"The world has changed," said Tom Kelly, a Bank One spokesman. "The space doesn't make sense."

Only the most hidebound preservationist would insist that Bank One freeze the character of its outmoded hall forever. If it were to change, though, the $64,000 question was: How?

New elements designed to make the hall less foreboding and more welcoming could either accentuate its visual power or sap it. The outcome -- largely driven, it appears, by Bank One's own team of designers -- turns out to be the latter.

True, the changes have produced a space that is easier to navigate -- an entrance was punched into the building's north side, improving access from Madison, and a conciergelike desk now sits just inside the entrance, allowing a greeter to direct customers. But the visual carnage of the renovation, completed last fall, is devastating.

The granite teller counters, which were handsomely integrated into the hall's overall design, have been ripped out. The teller area itself, once located near the tall ceilings along the building's perimeter, has been pushed toward the building's center, where it is jammed beneath a lower ceiling.

Most of the hall's old gutsiness is gone, replaced by such prim features as a ring-shaped band that floats beneath the ceiling and is done in Bank One's "Little Boy Blue" corporate colors. For a bank that promises maximum-strength checking, this is minimum-strength architecture.

Things will get better in the spring when Bank One opens the now-closed south side of the hall as a public concourse with its own Starbucks and a small retail outlet. As designed by Gensler, these new elements will better complement the hall. And the visual continuity between the hall and the plaza will be restored when a temporary wall behind the teller stations comes down. But those features cannot erase the damage done.

The outcome at the Hyde Park Bank is much more satisfying, largely because Florian and the bank's aptly-named president, Timothy Goodsell, confronted the same problems and came up with a far more creative solution.

Found on the second floor of the 11-story office building at 1525 E. 53rd St. that was designed by Chicago architect Karl Vitzthum, the 1929 bank hall had become every bit as functionally outdated as Bank One's. It looked terrible, too, with warrens of office furniture cluttering the space. Uneven lighting split the room into disjointed parts -- the hall and its once-gilded ceiling, which had turned a sickening brown.

"It was like a fine instrument that was out of tune," said the noted Chicago preservationist Tim Samuelson, who lives in Hyde Park.

Wondering whether a grand room like this still made sense in an era of small, storelike banks, bank executives thought of converting the hall to other uses and moving personal banking to the ground floor, where it would be more accessible to foot traffic. But they decided to stay put, shrewdly realizing that the hall could set them apart from cookie-cutter McBanks.

It does so wonderfully. Florian's renovation simultaneously unifies the previously chopped-up space and gives it a new level of articulation that fits today's banking practices.

Contemporary sconces and lamps in restored chandeliers bounce light off the re-gilded ceiling, making the hall look like a single, uninterrupted space. Yet Florian broke down the scale of the hall by placing personal banking and lending service areas on the hall's flanks. He spotlighted these economically significant zones with such attractive features as a stainless steel light wall, a red onyx desk and a raised light floor.

The modern asymmetry and openness of these elements serve as an antidote to the hall's overwhelming formality. Nowhere is that more evident than in the new teller pavilion, which is faced in travertine that blends wonderfully with the walls of the old hall but doesn't form a wall between banker and customer. The teller pavilion even has circular, color-coded LED lights that let customers know when tellers are available.

The project shows definitively that there is a middle ground between grandeur and intimacy, history and freshness. And, though it proved expensive, costing nearly $4 million, it has generated a special kind of value for the bank and its depositors, most of whom are African-American.

Goodsell, the bank president, recalled: "An African-American man stopped in and said: "I've never seen anybody invest this kind of money in a business that caters to African-Americans. Most of the businesses that come into the African-American community--they're not well-managed, they don't look nice. The fact that you put this kind of money into this building really makes me feel good.'"

It's too early to tell if the renovation has increased deposits, Goodsell said. But he added: "It sent a message: We're in this for the long haul."

Are such success stories easily duplicated?

Not necessarily, as the saga of the South Side National Bank building in St. Louis reveals.

The 1929 building, located 2 miles southwest of downtown St. Louis, is comparable in scale and character to the Hyde Park Bank -- a neighborhood landmark, with a narrow tower popping up from its broad base. On the outside, Art Deco decoration, including an eagle whose talons grasp a shield, symbolizes strength and authority. Inside is a high-ceilinged, banking hall with Art Deco chandeliers and old-fashioned teller stations. But such features may mean little to bankers aiming to lower costs.

In 1999, South Side National Bank officials announced a plan to demolish the bank and replace it with a new branch and a Walgreens on the prominent corner site.

Historic preservationists protested, saying the plan would replace the cherished urban symbol with a generic, suburban-style Walgreens. Things appeared to be going their way in 2002 when St. Louis-based Allegiant Bank, which had merged with South Side National Bank, donated the building to a neighborhood group.

The group lined up a developer to convert the building to rental apartments, but the plan proved unworkable, said Nuernberger, the real estate consultant, largely because the floors in the building's tower have only 2,400 square feet each and would produce relatively little income. As the group struggled to realize its vision, Nuernberger said, Allegiant Bank continued to operate street-level and drive-up ATMs around the building. Eventually, it closed the banking hall.

"They didn't buy the plant," said Nuernberger. "They bought market share. They have another bank down the street. They could still have banking on that corner without it being a banking facility."

After three years of inaction, there may be hope. Late last year, St. Louis officials said, the non-profit transferred ownership of the building to a local developer who plans to build condominiums on the building's upper floors and lease the building's bank hall to commercial tenants.

"It's going to happen," said the local alderman, Jennifer Florida. She could not provide specifics, however, about whether the developer has obtained financing and signed deals with tenants.

As the St. Louis case and the story of the Berwyn National Bank show, nothing is permanent, least of all bank architecture.

In its glory days, the Berwyn bank financed the mortgages of thousands of Czech and Slovak immigrants, who built sturdy bungalows in the western suburb. Now, ironically, those modest homes may outlive the grand, neo-classical bank, whose exterior decoration includes haunting rows of steer skulls. Beneath the skylight atop its dome, its interior remains soaring and light-filled. But it's empty, stripped of its teller cages and the murals that once adorned its walls.

Despite its promise of "Security Strength Stability," the Berwyn bank closed in 1932, just six years after it opened. It reopened in 1937 and remained a bank only through the 1970s, when it became a social club, according to Lori Thielen, president of the Berwyn Historical Society.

Last year, the Berwyn Development Corporation, a non-profit group that serves as an economic development and planning arm for the city, selected Chicago-based Centrum Properties to find a bank or some other use for the city-owned building.

As Thielen pointed out, developers have recycled banks into new uses all over the United States.

"Let's use it," she said during a recent tour, pointing out that the bank might also become a restaurant or, perhaps, a clothing store.

Such flexibility appears wise indeed in this era of the McBank, which is producing more and more generic branch banks and seems to value the old bank temples less and less. Yet the ruthless cost-calculus that may eliminate some of the old banks should come as no surprise. The old banks themselves were driven by economics, fashioning a grand architectural illusion that was designed to lure deposits out of the mattress and into the vault.

"If a bank can't be found, then another use would be sought," said Kevin Kelly, the executive director the Berwyn Development Corporation. "We're open-minded."

Tours available, if you're worth $3 million

As painful as it is to see historic banking halls get insensitive makeovers, it hurts just as much when these grand rooms are beautifully restored, but not open to the public.

After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Charlotte-based Bank of America restricted access to the soaring, Beaux-Arts banking hall in its building at 231 S. LaSalle St.

The stated reasons: the new terrorist threat and a desire not to disturb employees who work in the space. But it's hard to accept that the bank hall, as visually impressive as it is, could be on Al Qaeda's hit list.

The move deprives the public a chance to experience a room fit for a victory procession by a Roman emperor. Now, one has to have the bank account of a Roman emperor to get in.

The space is open to private banking clients, who are "individuals and families with investible assets of at least $3 million excluding equity in a primary residence," bank spokeswoman Diane Wagner said.

Nearly as long as a football field, as tall as a four-story building, with 28 columns of light pink Carrara marble and colorful murals that celebrate international trade, the second-floor Bank of America hall was originally designed as a retail banking facility by the Chicago firm of Graham, Anderson, Probst & White.

When it reopened in 1993 to serve corporate and private banking customers, a spokesman for Continental Bank, which occupied 231 S. LaSalle at the time, promised that the public would be allowed into the reception area to take a peek.

But following Sept. 11, a sign appeared near escalators leading up to the hall. It informs visitors that the hall is only for private banking customers and bank employees.

"Obviously, with post-9/11, those are precautions we've had to institute," Wagner said. "People are working up there. To have a large cache of people who come up and be loud would disrupt the working environment."

Other LaSalle Street landmarks eventually found a way to strike a balance between security and public access.

The Rookery at 209 S. LaSalle, closed its light court after Sept. 11. Now security guards let visitors into the lacy, light-filled two-story space -- so long as they remain on the first floor.

-- Blair Kamin

24gotham

February 25th, 2005, 03:11 AM

The only things I can add to this is that, in the olden day's, banks actually kept massive amounts of cash onsight, now day's , it's all electronic. Banks don't have much actual cash at the individual branches, they don't need to build such substantial buildings.
The other thing is that neighborhood branches have never been huge, it's alway's been the main headquarters of a bank, or it's regional main locations. Back again in the olden day's there were hundreds of banks whereas today, there are about a dozen main banks, and the rest will be swallowed up by the time you finish reading this sentence.

BVictor1

May 22nd, 2005, 05:06 PM

ARCHITECTURE
At IIT's Crown Hall, no detail too small

By Blair Kamin
Tribune architecture critic
Published May 22, 2005

I have a confession to make: For a few hours last week, I thought about devoting this column to Donald Trump's ludicrous scheme to more or less rebuild the twin towers at the World Trade Center. But why waste time on Trump's publicity stunt, which seemed aimed at putting the developer/reality TV star in the media spotlight right before the season-ending episode of "The Apprentice"?

Restoring a pair of monolithic, anti-urban hulks to the lower Manhattan skyline makes no sense. And Trump's critique of the planned Freedom Tower -- "crap architecture," he labeled it -- was a disgustingly coarse way to talk about the hallowed site of Ground Zero.

Something happened in Chicago last week that eventually will emerge as far more significant than Trump's self-aggrandizing press conference: The start of the most ambitious phase of renovation at Crown Hall, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's modernist masterpiece at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Mies was the anti-Trump before there was a Trump. "I don't want to be interesting," he said. "I want to be good."

Crown Hall is one of the finest embodiments of Mies' philosophy of "less is more" and one of the seminal structures of the 20th Century. Located at 3360 S. State St. and home to IIT's College of Architecture, it evokes a Gothic cathedral, with its clearly expressed structure opening a monumental, column-free interior. Call it the High Church of High Modernism. It is the prototype for thousands of convention centers and low-slung suburban office buildings, most of which utterly fail to match its incredibly refined sense of proportions and details.

Which is why the latest phase of renovating this 49-year-old National Historic Landmark -- which entails replacing Crown Hall's steel-and-glass curtain wall, as well as giving it a fresh coat of "Mies black" paint -- is such tricky business.

Mies believed in an architecture of "almost nothing." He stripped buildings to their structural essentials and, in the process, created spaces of transcendent order. He was easy to copy, but almost impossible to match. One false move -- one tiny imprecision -- and everything would fall apart.

So you can't envy the architects on the job: Mark Sexton of Krueck & Sexton Architects and historic preservation consultant, Gunny Harboe of McClier. They're walking an aesthetic tightrope.

We'll know by the third week of August, when the $3.6 million project is scheduled to be complete, if they made it across without falling off. For now, conversations with them reveal just how painstaking, and sometimes controversial, the renovation has been -- and how, more than 35 years after Mies' death, some at IIT are still asking: How would the master have done it?

Take the work that's already been done on Crown Hall's iconic front entry, the South Porch. The porch has a seemingly floating deck between two flights of stairs. Mies designed the porch with treads and the deck made of travertine marble, a material that tends to buckle under the pressure of Chicago's notorious freeze-and-thaw cycles.

Given a choice today, some wondered, would Mies use granite, a hardier material, instead? "The answer was, he didn't," Harboe says. He quotes the preservationist architect John Vinci: "You don't second-guess a dead architect."

So travertine it was.

And the porch was easy compared to the issue of replacing Crown Hall's windows and the steel frames, or stops, that stop the windows from falling out.

Experiment with windows

Look closely and you'll see that the building actually has two types of windows: A big, upper-level sheet of glass, called an upper light, and beneath it, a pair of windows called lower lights. The transparent upper light lets Crown Hall be flooded with daylight. The translucent lower light allowed Mies to screen the clutter of an architecture school from people looking at Crown Hall from the outside.

In the 1950s, this was a novel experiment in a modernist curtain wall. And like most experiments, it produced unexpected results.

When the wind blew hard against the upper lights, they bowed inward, like a big storefront window. One night, Sexton says, one actually crashed down onto a student's desk. A 1975 renovation by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill of Chicago replaced all the building's glass.

To provide the strength required by current building codes, the latest version of the upper lights had to be thicker -- 1/2 inch rather than Mies' 1/4 inch. But the thicker glass gets, the more it's likely to turn green. Green glass at Crown Hall would be an aesthetic disaster. Its windows are supposed to be absolutely clear. The architects solved that problem by specifying a special low-iron glass. It is expected to be properly transparent.

The lower lights offered their own challenges: Students typically tape drawings to them, leaving a gummy residue as well as fingerprint smudges. The laminated glass used for the lower lights in the 1975 renovation made them too reflective, like mirrors, rather than the equivalent of Japanese shoji screens that would admit a softly diffused light. To restore that effect, the architects selected a single pane of 1/4-inch glass with a sandblasted inner face. It will come with a sealer that should make tape residue and fingerprints easy to wipe away. The supplier even provided a warranty that the sealer won't turn yellow.

"When you have `almost nothing,' that level of subtlety is everything," Harboe says.

All that was simple compared to the most hotly debated issue of the renovation: How to hold the big glass of the upper lights in place. Current building code requires the architects to create a taller recess for the glass than the 5/8-inch recess of Mies' original. Now, the norm is 3/4 of an inch.

Getting it right

So the architects designed a stop that is 5/8 of an inch thick on the outside and 3/4 of an inch thick on the inside, where it forms the recess. The stop slopes upward by 1/8 of an inch. You can't see the slope. But you can feel it with your hand. Mies' stop, of course, was flat and right-angled. The new stop will form one of the few diagonal lines in this incessantly right-angled structure. And some of IIT's faculty members, who worked with Mies, don't like it.

"Mies would never do anything like that," says George Schipporeit, the co-designer of Lake Point Tower. "The philosophy in his office was to use things naturally that came out of the technology. Everybody who knows Mies or worked in his office . . . considers this to be an affectation."

His solution: Make the entire stop 3/4 of an inch tall, an idea Sexton rejects because it would make the now-elegant stops seem clunky.

You can call this hair-splitting, but it's certainly a more nuanced and intelligent way to talk about architecture than the blunt words we heard last week from the man who's perpetually having a bad hair day. What this debate reveals is Chicago's passionate commitment to architecture, which extends beyond how a building looks to how the building is made and the ideas behind it. In New York, they manufacture architectural fashion. But here, the discourse goes deeper -- and no detail is too small for consideration, not even a difference of 1/8 of an inch.

Frumie

May 22nd, 2005, 09:13 PM

ARCHITECTURE
At IIT's Crown Hall, no detail too small

By Blair Kamin
Tribune architecture critic
Published May 22, 2005

You can call this hair-splitting, but it's certainly a more nuanced and intelligent way to talk about architecture than the blunt words we heard last week from the man who's perpetually having a bad hair day. What this debate reveals is Chicago's passionate commitment to architecture, which extends beyond how a building looks to how the building is made and the ideas behind it. In New York, they manufacture architectural fashion. But here, the discourse goes deeper -- and no detail is too small for consideration, not even a difference of 1/8 of an inch.

And "architectural fashion" like all things fashionable quickly fades. Blair's got it just right.

BVictor1

June 19th, 2005, 01:27 PM

Beloved building vulnerable because it is not a landmark

By Blair Kamin
Tribune architecture critic
Published June 19, 2005

"London has Big Ben, Paris has the Eiffel Tower, and Chicago has the Wrigley Building," the architectural historian Sally Chappell once wrote.

That is an overstatement, perhaps--Sears Tower and the John Hancock Center are the city's real skyscraper icons. But it has more than a grain of truth: No skyscraper in Chicago is more beloved than this one.

That is because the Wrigley is at once a dazzling aesthetic object, its distinctive clock tower soaring above its splendid riverfront site, and part of a grand gateway to North Michigan Avenue. Yet, strangely, the building is not an official city landmark.

Anyone who has read the best-seller "The Devil in the White City" will see something of the shimmering white buildings of the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 in the Wrigley's sparkling white terra cotta cladding, which seems even more brilliant when it is illuminated by banks of spotlights at night.

And there are other ties to Daniel Burnham, the mastermind of the 1893 world's fair. The Wrigley was designed by Burnham's successor firm, Graham, Anderson, Probst & White, which turned out such familiar Chicago structures as the Federal Reserve Bank Building. But the Wrigley is far more festive, bedecked with urns and floral ornament, than that sober LaSalle Street palace.

The Wrigley actually is two buildings that stand side by side "as fraternal, but not identical, twins," as Chappell has quipped--a trapezoid-shaped office block, finished in 1921 and topped by a slender tower based on the Giralda Tower in Seville; and a shorter but equally graceful addition, also trapezoidal, completed in 1924.

This arrangement winningly solves the problem posed by the building's essentially triangular site, which ruled out the sort of right-angled office building so common to the Loop. From some vantage points the Wrigley seems to cut through space like a steamship's prow. From south of the Michigan Avenue Bridge, due to a slight bend in the street, it appears to stand right in the middle of the boulevard--a commanding, but never domineering, presence.

For years the Wrigley has been a popular landmark, even lauded in song ("the Wrigley Building, Chicago is," Frank Sinatra sang in "My Kind of Town"). Yet it has never been made an official city landmark because, according to published reports, the Wrigley family vehemently opposed any attempts to confer landmark status and city officials elected to go along because there was no danger of defacement or demolition.

The Wrigley family has taken care of the building, and the city continues to have no interest in pursuing a landmark designation for it, Mayor Richard Daley said Saturday.

"They spent their own money," he said of the Wrigleys. "That family has really kept that icon up. ... There isn't one piece of public taxpayer money involved. That's pretty significant."

While it seems unlikely that any developer would tamper with the Wrigley Building's image, historic preservationists expressed concern should the building be converted to condominiums

"Given how people love balconies, that is a concern," said Jim Peters, director of planning for the Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois. "Imagine balconies hanging off the Wrigley Building. There'd be nothing to stop that."

Perhaps. But the toughest issue might come from the blazing spotlights: How would residents sleep with all that candlepower trained on their windows? How thick a shade can you buy?

geoff_diamond

June 19th, 2005, 07:14 PM

If they ever even THINK about turning off those spotlights, I will flee this City so fast it's not even funny.

BVictor1

July 10th, 2005, 01:01 PM

ARCHITECTURE

Throwing tradition a curve
The Pritzkers' new Hyatt Center takes the edge off Chicago's relentless right angles

By Blair Kamin
Tribune architecture critic
Published July 10, 2005

Because it is Chicago's first post-9/11 skyscraper and its developers include the billionaire Pritzker family, which each year awards architecture's equivalent of the Nobel Prize, the new Hyatt Center office building was bound to attract a high level of scrutiny.

Would the Pritzkers produce a building that lives up to the prize's lofty rhetoric about contributions to humanity through the art of architecture?

Would the skyscraper creatively balance security and openness or would it be a fortress, like the proposed new Freedom Tower at ground zero? That question took on fresh urgency Thursday after a series of explosions ripped through London's subway system and destroyed a double-decker bus, killing at least 37 people.

The suavely curving, 49-story office building, it turns out, is very good, though not the show-stopping aesthetic statement some had hoped for and the Pritzkers themselves had planned before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks prompted them to change their architect and ambitions in midstream.

Designed by Henry Cobb of the New York City firm of Pei Cobb Freed, the Hyatt Center cleverly accepts the constraints of tight budget and security features and, in the manner of a skilled practitioner of judo, turns them to the advantage of the cityscape.

The tower's curving walls of steel and glass lend it a distinct skyline presence, making it seem like a ship cutting through space. But it really excels at ground level, where its curves open its narrow, blocklong site to a small but artfully composed public plaza that has instantly established itself as a serene oasis amid the dense commercial canyon of South Wacker Drive.

Joining with the open space at the bottom of an equally fine new skyscraper across Monroe Street, the 52-story 111 South Wacker Drive, the Hyatt Center forms an elegant, pedestrian-friendly gateway to the Loop.

The design reveals how architects can deftly layer security features into their buildings rather than letting the need to fortify overrun the desire to beautify. And while its curves appear to be a heretical departure from the relentless right angles of Chicago's street grid and skyline, the skyscraper actually fits into the city's vaunted tradition of hard-nosed, but high-quality, commercial design.

Located at 71 S. Wacker, two blocks north of Sears Tower and set to have its ceremonial opening July 19, the Hyatt Center originally was to have been designed by Lord Norman Foster, the Pritzker Prize-winning London architect renowned for his spectacular, ecologically conscious office buildings. It was to be a corporate headquarters with a lavish budget. The design was to make "a special shout," in the words of the Pritzkers' development partner, John W. Higgins, chairman of Higgins Development Partners of Chicago.

Foster's plan called for a rectangular office block linked by bridges to a rectangular core for elevators and other services. A towering atrium would have soared between the offices and the service core.

But on Sept. 12, 2001, Penny Pritzker, president of the Pritzker Realty Group, called Foster and told him the project was dead. The first Gulf War in 1990-91 had had severe economic consequences for the Pritzkers' Hyatt hotel chain, and "we knew this was worse," she said in an interview last week. The prospect of a major downturn in the hotel business made going forward with Foster's ambitious design unthinkable.

In many respects, it is remarkable that the Hyatt Center turned out as well as it did, given what then transpired.

The tower was, in effect, downgraded from a corporate headquarters to a speculative office building that would have to attract tenants and be built on a tight budget and a tight time frame. In response to 9/11, the building's security features were ratcheted up. And a new architect of less starpower was brought on -- Cobb, a distinguished elder statesman whose best-known work is Boston's John Hancock Tower, an abstract, mirror-glass high-rise that seems to disappear into the sky.

Cobb seemed like a conservative choice. Yet his skill would be a decisive factor in making the project a success.

Cobb flew to Chicago and walked the long, rectangular site, which, he quickly realized, would be hemmed in on the north by Helmut Jahn's 1 S. Wacker office building and on the south by the 111 S. Wacker project.

No corner offices

He also read a document, known as a program, that laid out the functional needs of a key prospective tenant, the law firm of Mayer, Brown, Rowe & Maw. Critically, the lawyers weren't demanding corner offices, which inevitably lead to boxy or serrated exteriors.

Cobb jumped on that detail, sketching a plan for a fish-shaped office tower that offered several advantages: It would have no corner offices, offer more expansive views than a conventional box, carve out room for the plaza and be architecturally distinctive. Mayer Brown and the developers bought the idea, though the curving building would cost slightly more than a conventional box.

So did other key tenants, including IBM, Charter One and Goldman Sachs, the global investment banking, securities and investment management firm.

While Cobb already had completed a curving office tower at La Defense in Paris and some wondered whether the Hyatt Center would be a retread, the soundness of Cobb's concept is apparent now that the tower is complete.

The curve is the key to the building's skyline success. Without it, the tower's horizontal bands of stainless steel and glass would be a visual bore. Yet the curve energizes the bands, making them appear to sweep around the tower and making the tower itself seem as if it is steaming forward, like a great ship.

Even though the Hyatt Center is less than half as tall as Sears, it nonetheless has an assertive skyline presence, its ship shape clearly visible from such everyday vantage points as the Kennedy Expressway, the boat cruise on the Chicago River and Grant Park.

Equally important is the way the tower's curves end -- not in a rounded prow but in solid, angled steel-covered walls that suggest the mouth of a fish. Resolutely vertical, these end walls establish a simmering tension with the horizontality of the bands, giving the tower the right dose of Chicago toughness.

In another well-handled detail, window frames are set flush with the facade, avoiding costly projections and enhancing the tower's continuity of line. "Let's face it," says Cobb, "if you're doing a budget building, keep it smooth. What makes it affordable is the fact that it doesn't have relief."

The lone fault is in the surface of the stainless steel, which suffers in some places from the dimpled effect architects call "oil canning."

Obligations of skyscrapers

Cobb often speaks of the social obligations of skyscrapers, saying they should be good citizens, especially as they meet the street. His performance at ground level lives up to that challenge. He and Chicago landscape architect Peter Schaudt have deftly balanced security needs and a desire for openness in the interconnected spaces of the Hyatt Center's public plaza and lobby.

Casual passersby may not realize that the planter boxes in the plaza are designed to keep a car- or truck-bomb away from the building's concrete-encased supporting columns. Yet the boxes do that double duty, an assignment they carry out far more gracefully than a graveyardlike row of bollards.

The free-form curves of the planters sensitively extend the office tower's curving geometry. And the planters offer a good combination of perimeter sitting areas and intimate, circular nichelike spaces. Still, few people seem to be sitting on the bent-grass lawns that fill them.

Inside, Cobb has turned the need for metal detectors to his advantage, shaping an entry sequence that actually improves upon the modernist convention of the wide-open, but spatially undernourished, office building lobby.

Instead, he gives you this eventful sequence: You pass beneath low canopies on the Wacker and Franklin Street ends of the building and arrive in one of a pair of skylit, 50-foot-tall outer lobbies.

From there, if you are an office worker or an approved visitor, you go through a low-ceilinged metal detector area before heading into another expansive space -- the tower's curving inner lobby, which extends the length of the building and is lined with a veil of bamboo trees and bubbling fountains as it leads to the elevators.

While the public isn't allowed to venture into the serene inner lobby, it still gets the visual bonus of an indoor extension of the plaza's green space.

The tower's office floors appear to be attractive work places, an impression confirmed by a Mayer, Brown lawyer who offered the following observations: Lawyers appreciate their new quarters' openness and light-filled quality. Uninterrupted, curving hallways encourage people to interact. Still, the building's curving shape hasn't really eliminated the hierarchy once created by corner offices. Senior lawyers took offices with the prime views, looking northeast toward the skyline and the lake.

In other words, everything at the Hyatt Center is operating normally, or at least as normally as one can expect within the new realities of the post 9/11 world. While Cobb's tower may not set the architectural world on fire, it is nonetheless a distinguished contribution to the Chicago skyline and to the broader culture. Following the unveiling of the fortresslike Freedom Tower, it offers an alternative vision, one in which our fears -- and, thus, our buildings -- remain in proper proportion.

- - -

The Loop gets bold, inviting gateway

The Spanish Revival Wrigley Building and the neo-Gothic Tribune Tower shape a stylish entrance to North Michigan Avenue. Now the Hyatt Center and its equally appealing counterpart across Monroe Street, the new office building known as 111 South Wacker Drive, are putting a fresh spin on this tradition, using the abstract forms of modernism to usher into and out of the Loop commuters who use the nearby train stations.

Even though the two buildings were designed in different manners by different architects for different developers -- and neither team communicated with the other -- they work surprisingly well together. Maybe the late, great Chicago modernist Ludwig Mies van der Rohe had it right when he said, "Build, don't talk."

Designed by Jim Goettsch of the Chicago firm of Lohan Caprile Goettsch and developed by the John Buck Co. of Chicago, the 52-story 111 S. Wacker is a muscular skyscraper that reveals its internal structure rather than concealing it, as the Hyatt Center does. Yet like the Hyatt Center, it makes a civilized, curvaceous clearing at ground level.

The big move is structural: V-shaped diagonal columns, expressed in the facade's lower portions, transfer the building's loads to beefy columns that meet the ground. The spans between these columns measures a jaw-dropping 80 feet, providing a remarkable degree of openness even though the building's footprint occupies nearly the entire site.

An oval-shaped lobby that slips beneath the building's boxy office and parking garage floors adds to the sense of spaciousness. It is wrapped in an extraordinarily transparent wall of cable-supported glass, almost making the distinction between inside and outside disappear. At the Hyatt Center, space flows around the building's curving, shiplike form. Here, space flows right through the lobby.

The visual drama is enhanced by what passersby can glimpse inside -- a stepping, curved ceiling that echoes the contours of a parking garage ramp that passes directly above it. Perhaps the ceiling's accent lights are a bit bright. Yet one can forgive that fault when the lobby is seen in the broader picture of the show that 111 S. Wacker puts on at ground level and the amenities it places there, including granite-clad benches.

111 S. Wacker and the Hyatt Center are as urbanistically responsible as the handsome pair of gateway towers that lead into the Loop at the eastern end of Monroe, the University Club at 76 E. Monroe and the Monroe Building at 104 S. Michigan Ave. Both were designed by Chicago architects Holabird & Roche in the early 20th Century, with complementary Gothic details and gabled roof silhouettes. At Wacker and Monroe, though, the gateway moves are at the bottom, not the top. It makes sense: Put the gateways at the base, right where pedestrians can see (and use) them.

-- B.K.

----------

bkamin@tribune.com

BVictor1

July 17th, 2005, 01:22 PM

ARCHITECTURE

`No' to Buckingham Fountain crosswalk closing
Vehicles triumph, pedestrians lose

By Blair Kamin
Tribune architecture critic
Published July 17, 2005

See the beauty of Buckingham Fountain, all Beaux-Arts splendor with jets of water shooting out of its sea creatures' mouths. Now see the ugly wood-and-wire snow fences that city officials put up along the curb to close the Lake Shore Drive crosswalk linking the fountain to the Queen's Landing lakefront promenade.

Wham! Bam! Thank you, city traffic managers.

You've managed, in a single bone-headed stroke, to make life supremely inconvenient for thousands of walkers, bicyclists and joggers, and to blight a lakefront landmark. Why not just take your Los Angeles-style, auto-dominated logic to its extreme and change the Drive's name to the Lake Shore Expressway? That way, there would be no doubt that the car is king and the pedestrian's status is strictly second-class.

In case you missed the front page of Thursday's Tribune, transportation reporter Jon Hilkevitch revealed that Mayor Richard M. Daley's newly created Traffic Management Authority quietly closed the crosswalk before the recent Taste of Chicago festival. Their coldly calculated reasoning: To move more cars more efficiently through downtown. Pedestrians, who for years have used the crosswalk to get from the fountain to Queen's Landing, now must schlep to alternative crossings at Jackson and Balbo Drives.

No public hearing

This isn't Queen-for-a-Day treatment. This is a bunch of city bureaucrats treating a high-profile lakefront crosswalk, one that serves an integral functional and formal role in Grant Park, as though it led across Ashland Avenue. There was no public hearing (none was required). The public lost out because the traffic managers didn't balance the needs of people on foot with the needs of people behind the wheel.

Recalling how a red carpet was rolled across Lake Shore Drive in 1959 so Queen Elizabeth II could cross from her yacht to Buckingham Fountain (thus the name "Queen's Landing"), Michael Burton of the Campaign for a Free and Clear Lakefront told Hilkevitch: "It is ironic that the queen of England was welcomed at that very spot by the first Mayor Daley, but everyday people can't get across Lake Shore Drive there under our current Mayor Daley."

Let's be honest: The Buckingham Fountain-Queen's Landing crosswalk was far from ideal. Crossing the Drive at street level required a certain bravery. We're talking ten lanes of traffic. It was a jungle out there, with the revving of the car's engine substituting for the lion's roar.

Still, the crosswalk was something, an imperfect stopgap measure that would do its serviceable best until city officials could cobble together funds to build a light-filled underground passageway comparable to the one that leads from Grant Park to the Museum Campus. Under the Illinois FIRST public works program, they reached a deal with the state in 1999 to build the underpass for $19 million. Yet construction never began, and now, city officials say, funding would have to be secured from the federal government or the state. The lack of action makes one wonder how high on the civic priority list this project actually ranks.

Not very high, it appears.

A few years ago, renowned Spanish architect and engineer Santiago Calatrava presented a plan for two pedestrian bridges between Buckingham Fountain and Queen's Landing to Daley. But that proposal was shelved. And what the mayor's people have taken now is a step backward -- a disappointing departure from Daley's recent support for pedestrian-friendly moves along the lakefront, which range from the delightfully snaking Frank Gehry-designed pedestrian bridge at Millennium Park to the city's recently concluded architecture competition for pedestrian bridges across the Drive.

The damage done by the closing of the Buckingham Fountain-Queen's Landing crosswalk, however, is aesthetic, not just practical. And it is wreaking its subtle havoc in the very heart of Grant Park.

`Site specific'

Completed in 1927 and principally designed by architect and planner Edward Bennett, co-author with Daniel Burnham of the legendary 1909 Plan of Chicago, Buckingham Fountain is "site specific," as artists and architects are given to say today. It punctuates the Congress Parkway axis, a key feature of the 1909 plan, like a giant exclamation point. It symbolizes Lake Michigan. Its four pairs of whimsical sea creatures represent the states around the lake. Anything that interrupts the openness between the fountain and the lake diminishes the power of both. Yet that is precisely what the ghastly snow fences do. Against the elegant backdrop of the formal, French-inspired gardens that form the setting for the fountain's jewel, they are about as low-rent as low-rent gets. They are, at least, temporary, according to Monique Bond, a spokeswoman for the city's Office of Emergency Management and Communications, the agency that includes the new Traffic Management Authority. "We need to look at what is going to be aesthetically pleasing," she says, adding that some people are hopping over the snow fences in order to cross Lake Shore Drive.

Could a Daley-style, fake wrought-iron fence be in the offing for Buckingham Fountain?

Could anything be more inappropriate for a site whose very core is about the free flow of space between the fountain and the lake?

One of Daley's singular innovations has been his willingness to bring design from the fringe of public policy to the center. Despite exceptions such as the brutal high-rise condos that flank North Michigan Avenue, he has succeeded in making architecture an essential instrument, rather than an afterthought, of urban development. Yet precisely the opposite has occurred at Queen's Landing. This is a triumph of the City Functional over the City Beautiful, one that leaves Chicago's pedestrians and Grant Park's civic centerpiece in the lurch.

ChicagoLover

July 17th, 2005, 05:43 PM

I think this is much less of a big deal than Kamin is making it out to be. Until a viaduct or a tunnel is built, crossing LSD with or without a crosswalk is extremely unpleasant.

The Urban Politician

July 17th, 2005, 11:33 PM

I think this is much less of a big deal than Kamin is making it out to be. Until a viaduct or a tunnel is built, crossing LSD with or without a crosswalk is extremely unpleasant.

^The loss of the crosswalk, in practical terms, isn't such a big deal. But Kamin is right in that it signals a horrible step in the wrong direction and allows traffic engineers to once again put the car ahead of the pedestrian in importance.

He is right to complain, and I'm glad he did. He has a loud voice in the local media, and it's appropriate that he become the pedestrian's champion. A bridge or tunnel is ideal, but for the time being it doesn't make sense to make Queens Landing even less pedestrian-friendly than it already is

ChicagoLover

July 18th, 2005, 01:21 AM

"It is ironic that the queen of England was welcomed at that very spot by the first Mayor Daley, but everyday people can't get across Lake Shore Drive there under our current Mayor Daley."

How is it ironic that special arrangements are made for the Queen of England?

BVictor1

August 7th, 2005, 01:24 PM

ARCHITECTURE
Triage returns the Manhattan to its roots
Project restores many old charms

By Blair Kamin
Tribune architecture critic
Published August 7, 2005

It is oddly revealing, one week after assessing Santiago Calatrava's daring proposal for a 115-story Chicago tower, to be writing about the renovation of a 16-story skyscraper that caused just as much of a sensation in its day -- the Manhattan Building at 431 S. Dearborn St.

Today, no one bats an eyelash at 16 stories. But in 1891, when the Manhattan made its debut amid a height-challenged city of squat Victorians, 16 stories was headline news. "Hercules," the crowds visiting the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 called the Manhattan, referring to both its height and a fortresslike sense of girth that matched such contemporaries as the Rookery and Auditorium Buildings.

Designed by skyscraper pioneer William Le Baron Jenney, the bearded bon vivant who campaigned with Generals Grant and Sherman during the Civil War, the Manhattan reigned briefly as the city's (and, perhaps, the world's) tallest building. Its long list of innovations includes being one of the first skyscrapers to use skeletal construction throughout.

But yesterday's urban mountains are today's foothills. The skyline's ever-evolving character suggests a link to Einstein: When it comes to skyscraper height, everything's relative.

Gone condo

The interesting thing is that this is the Manhattan's second renovation. The first, a gut rehab completed in 1982 by the Chicago firm of Hasbrouck-Hunderman, turned the then-moribund high-rise from offices into apartments, helping fuel the resurgence of the Printers Row historic district. The building went condo in 1997. The recently completed fix up, which took three years, cost $4.5 million and was carried out by the BauerLatoza Studio of Chicago, shows how a new generation of preservationists is tending to Chicago's aging landmarks.

As time marches forward, the landmarks march backward, coming tantalizingly closer to their original state -- or at least as close as condo association budgets will allow. Now, as before, the preservationist must practice triage, deciding where to spend precious funds. Only these days, there are fewer battles to fight with boorish bureaucrats and clueless contractors. Consider some of the horror stories from the first renovation.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which helped finance the project, wanted cheap, through-the-wall air-conditioning units stuck into the Manhattan's facades. The preservation architect on the job, Wilbert Hasbrouck, objected. HUD backed down.

And how about this one? Contractors were taking sledgehammers to the Manhattan's original elevator grilles and balustrades, with their gorgeous naturalistic metalwork. Hasbrouck told them: "You can't do this . . . Those things are worth a lot of money." Much of the metalwork was donated to museums. A few of the grilles adorn the building's civilized lobby, with its dazzling plaster ceiling.

In those days, the now-gentrified neighborhood was "pretty rough," with homeless people camping out on the dark streets, Hasbrouck recalls. But urban pioneers came anyway, attracted by the advertising pitch: "Live in a landmark and walk to work."

Nearly 20 years later, there were new enemies to confront: Water penetration and a lack of building maintenance. They were causing chunks of terra cotta and other pieces of old masonry to rain down on the Loop. While that didn't happen at the Manhattan, the dangerous trend provided the impetus for its second renovation.

After the City Council passed a beefed-up facade-maintenance ordinance in 2000, the condo association of the 105-unit building made emergency repairs and hired BauerLatoza to inspect the Manhattan and design a renovation. Its team, led by principal Edward Torrez, has done fine work, making the Manhattan look as robust as ever.

The architects restored or replaced many of the building's terra cotta pieces, including those that help form the smiling and frowning masks that stare down at pedestrians from the bottoms of round bay windows. Asphalt roofs atop the bays were replaced with copper. Crumbling hollow-clay tile on the building's upper north and south walls gave way to new walls of oversize brick. The brick looks a bit too reddish right now, but it should duplicate the Manhattan's earlier brown-toned look once it gets the appropriate amount of smudging from Chicago's polluted air.

Fixing flaws

Some cosmetic surgery was needed to correct faults of the first renovation.

Hasbrouck replaced old wood window frames with aluminum -- a step, he says, that he would rather not have taken, but was necessary because of a tight budget. For BauerLatoza and their clients, ditching the aluminum windows would have been prohibitively expensive. Yet the architects made lemonade from lemons, adding a beadlike window surround that's based on Jenney's original design. It gives the windows a new sense of depth and texture.

Happy ending? Not quite. A preservationist's work is never done.

There is more on the "we'll get around to it next time" checklist, such as washing the building's exterior, which remains particularly dirty on the back side that faces the Harold Washington Library Center. Also on that list: Bringing back the striking naturalistic ornament that once adorned the now-bare columns framing the Manhattan's entry.

"I would have loved to restore those," says Torrez, with a deep sigh. He adds: "I'm afraid people are going to say in 20 years, `Why didn't they wash this [building]?'

"You have to do what you have to do."

That's the way real historic preservation jobs get done. One only hopes that they are all carried out with the same skill and sensitivity the architects showed old "Hercules." For triage, this looks pretty good.

- - -

Short anatomy of a skyscraper

Perhaps it's a bit ungainly -- more about being big than being tall, as one historian has said -- but the 114-year-old Manhattan Building at 431 S. Dearborn St. is nevertheless one of Chicago's most significant early skyscrapers. Here are some of the building's distinctions and innovations:

- Briefly was Chicago's (and, perhaps, the world's) tallest building.

- One of the first skyscrapers to use an internal skeleton of metal throughout.

- A pioneer in using structurally sophisticated wind bracing.

- For many years, the lone skyscraper with setbacks, in which the mass of the building steps back from the property line, an innovation adapted by Chicago architect Louis Sullivan.

- Also a pioneer in cantilevered foundations, which transferred the building's loads away from the property line and worked with the setbacks to prevent the Manhattan from overloading its smaller neighbors.

- A forerunner of the famous, three-part "Chicago window" of the Chicago School of Architecture, with projecting window bays that brought the maximum amount of light into the interior.

- Declared an official Chicago landmark in 1978.

-- Blair Kamin

spyguy

August 20th, 2005, 05:52 PM

Gehry likes it, helps buy it
A trip in the '50s to Chicago, gossip at a dinner gala and Canadian roots lead to the famed architect's ownership stake in the Inland Steel Building

By Blair Kamin
Tribune architecture critic
Published August 20, 2005

Celebrated architect Frank Gehry admired Chicago's revolutionary Inland Steel Building and its glistening stainless steel exterior when he was a "kid" looking at great buildings in the 1950s.

Now Gehry owns the building after an unlikely chain of events that began at the opening of Millennium Park and continued at the Southern California home of billionaire Chicago philanthropist Cindy Pritzker. It culminated Thursday when a group of investors that includes Gehry purchased the 19-story landmark, now known by its address of 30 W. Monroe St.

The deal shows how far-reaching the celebrity of the Los Angeles architect has become after the artistic triumphs of his own metal-clad but far more curvaceous buildings. Those include the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles and the Jay Pritzker Pavilion at Millennium Park.

Yet it also adds to the luster of Inland Steel.

"It's been a real inspiration to me--the metal and stuff," the 76-year-old Gehry said of the Inland Steel Building in a telephone interview from his Los Angeles office. "It was one of the first things that turned me on to that."

Gehry has only a tiny ownership stake in 30 W. Monroe. His 4 percent share will be split equally in the trusts of his two sons, he said, adding that he put up no money of his own. Yet he and his investment partners, who call themselves Freddy Steel LLC, agree that his stake is, in essence, a finder's fee and that deal would have not have happened without him.

"They gave me that percentage for bringing them the project," Gehry said.

"We wouldn't have accessed the deal without him," said Harvey Camins, chief executive of Chicago real estate brokerage Camins Tomasz Kritt LLC. The purchase price, he said, was less than $200 per square foot, or about $45 million.

The seller, St. Paul Travelers Cos., wasn't ready to part with the 232,450-square-foot structure, which has several architect tenants. But when the company heard Gehry was among the suitors, the owners said, doors opened.

"They also believed it was an icon," Gehry said of his role in persuading St. Paul Travelers to sell. "Selling it to me made them feel it was a reasonable insurance that it wouldn't be trashed."

Designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP and completed in 1958, the Inland Steel Building is less well known to the public than Skidmore's domineering skyline bookends, the Sears Tower and John Hancock Center. But architects revere it for its numerous pathbreaking features, including column-free floors and its sparkling cladding of stainless steel.

The ample use of the metal, previously restricted to details like window frames, caught Gehry's eye in the late 1950s when he made a pilgrimage to Chicago to see the Prairie Style houses of Frank Lloyd Wright. He even liked the creases in the stainless steel's surface, an imperfection known to architects as "oil canning."

"It added character," he said, adding that the oil canning helped inspire him to wrap his early works in cocoons of such non-refined materials as chain-link and corrugated metal.

But it wasn't until last summer's opening of Millennium Park, seven years after the Guggenheim in Bilbao made him an international celebrity, that Gehry contemplated owning 30 W. Monroe.

A woman sitting next to him at a gala dinner told him--incorrectly--that the building was in disrepair, losing tenants and destined to be torn down.

"I had another drink and forgot about it," Gehry said.

Three weeks later, he was sipping vodkas at a dinner at Pritzker's house in Rancho Sante Fe, Calif. Another guest was Perry Herst, a retired executive with Tishman West and a former Chicago real estate executive.

Herst wondered if he and Gehry could do a project together, the architect recalled.

Gehry blurted out the possibility of buying the Inland Steel Building and converting it to residential condominiums.

Nothing came of it, at least right away.

Last fall, Herst called his cousin, Alfred D'Ancona, president of the Chicago firm that bears his name, and asked him to inquire about Inland Steel.

D'Ancona, who would become one of the buyers, called Camins, who had recently brokered the sale of the neighboring 33 W. Monroe office building.

Camins called the St. Paul-based insurer about a possible sale.

"They said they wouldn't even talk to me about it until I disclosed that Frank Gehry was part of the team," he said.

Camins arranged for Gehry and St. Paul Travelers' senior vice president for real estate investment, Jim Adams, to meet for lunch in Chicago.

"Right after they met each other and started talking, it came out that they were both Canadian and both hockey fans and hockey players," Camins said. "The combination of that and Jim Adams' being a big fan of Frank got us to the next step."

Yet even as Gehry and his partners celebrate the purchase of the modernist gem and declare their intent to retain its luster, they must deal with the realities of being landlords. The building's largest tenant, Ispat Inland Inc., now part of Netherlands-based Mittal Steel Co. Nv, is expected to move to the soon-to-be-completed 1 S. Dearborn office building north of 30 W. Monroe.

One way to lure a new main tenant, Camins said, would be a deal to rename the building. But don't expect it to be called the Frank Gehry building. The idea, often used in real estate, would be to put the tenant's name on 30. W. Monroe.

"It's going to be the building formerly known as Inland Steel," he said.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/chi-0508200092aug20,1,3751321.story?coll=chi-leisure-utl

The Urban Politician

August 20th, 2005, 06:06 PM

^Screw that crap.

If that guy was so fascinated, why the fuck did he go to LA, along with that tramp Cindy Pritzker

What a bunch of posers--they just want to sit around palm trees and surf. Get real, dude

Suburbanite

August 20th, 2005, 06:33 PM

^Just because a person doesn't live in Chicago doesn't mean they can't be fascinated with some of it's property and certainly doesn't make them posers.
You should understand that well enough yourself.

ChicagoLover

August 20th, 2005, 07:14 PM

You know the Pritzkers have homes in Chicago. They simply *also* have vacation homes elsewhere. There are a number of extremely wealthy Chicagoans who maintain homes in Rancho Santa Fe or somewhere else in Cali. Like Oprah and her Montecito manse ( which I hear she spends more time in than in Water Tower Place -- argh.)

Well, billionaires don't actually "live" anywhere do they? They "maintain several homes" around the country, if not the world. Hell, if I were that rich, I would have a homebase in Chicago--Trump Tower of course, but I couldn't help having another place somewhere with a completely different landscape -- definitely not Florida though, which I find dull; most likely California--Santa Barbara or something.

It is still irritating though, so I sympathize. Why did Gehry move out there? Well Gehry is a deconstructivist architect, yes?, and the decons were centered in Santa Monica. So maybe it was a professional decision in that sense. He admired Chicago modernism, but he was interested in forging in new directions, and the West Coast was more open to that (unfortunately).

spyguy

August 21st, 2005, 05:37 PM

Crown Hall dazzles in Mies simplicity
IIT renovation a design triumph

By Blair Kamin
Tribune architecture critic
Published August 21, 2005

The renovation of Crown Hall, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's masterpiece at the Illinois Institute of Technology, will be celebrated with a splashy gala Thursday night -- and the result truly is worth celebrating, not only because it looks so good but also because it tells us so much about Mies that we didn't know before.

To come upon the freshly renovated pavilion, with its original steel frame painted crisp "Mies black" and its new panes of glass dazzlingly clear, is to step back in time to a simpler America, of Davy Crockett coonskin caps and Levittown Cape Cods, where a building like this would have seemed utterly revolutionary. To see it is to see Mies as the daring figure he truly was, not the cigar-smoking demigod who built gray flannel-suit architecture for the Establishment.

Carried out by Mark Sexton of Krueck & Sexton Architects and consultant Gunny Harboe of McClier, the three-month, $3.6 million project is a triumph of historic preservation, one that underscores the need to save some of the very midcentury modernist landmarks that postmodernists unfairly maligned a generation ago. Chicago's Stanley Tigerman even created a photo collage, "The Titanic," which showed a listing Crown Hall sinking into the sea.

Located at 3360 S. State St. and home to IIT's College of Architecture since its opening in 1956, Crown Hall has weathered such foolish bashing and gone on to become a National Historic Landmark and an official Chicago landmark. It is the high church of "less is more," as perfectly proportioned as a symmetrical Greek temple, but far more skeletal, like the French Gothic cathedrals whose flying buttresses opened the way for diaphanous walls of richly colored stained-glass.

Even this Notre Dame of High Modernism needs TLC from time to time, however, which put Sexton and Harboe in a tricky position: Modern building codes called for thicker windows and stronger window frames than those Mies used. But if the architects changed the look of the Crown Hall one iota, they'd set off an international firestorm. Some old hands at IIT, who worked with Mies, publicly questioned details of the renovation.

Yet now that the project is complete, it's clear that the architects have achieved the right balance between bringing Crown Hall into the 21st Century and restoring its mid-20th Century aesthetic -- and thus bringing to life the ideas Mies and his building so brilliantly conveyed.

A dazzling object

The renovated Crown Hall is, first and foremost, a dazzling aesthetic object, and not simply because its fresh coat of heavy-duty industrial paint (a brand called Tnemec, cement spelled backward) makes it stand out like a man in a black tuxedo against the blue August sky.

The building's new sheathing -- big upper-level windows and, beneath them, smaller pairs of translucent windows with a sandblasted inner layer -- correctly restores Crown's transparency, an essential part of what Mies, in his mystical High Lama way, called the architecture of "almost nothing."

The upper windows are thicker than their predecessors, but they do not look green, as thick windows are wont to do, because they are made of special low-iron glass. And instead of resembling shiny plastic panels, as the lower windows did after a mid-1970s renovation by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the new ones suggest Japanese shoji screens, working in sync with the big sheets of glass above them. As Sexton correctly observes: "The building is a unified whole. Before it looked like glass and plastic."

Combine this new openness with the new crisp outlines of the steel frame, previously a dull gray, and you have a stunning combination of skin and bone, void and solid. It must have blown away people in the 1950s who still thought of buildings as masses of masonry, not prisms of steel and glass.

Because of the renovation, Crown Hall no longer seems standoffishly insular. It is a welcome shock to walk by and see the ghostly outline of a construction worker behind one of the new lower walls. This is not the isolated "object building" criticized by the postmodernists. It is subtly, but unmistakably, a part of the city.

Surprises inside

Inside are more pleasant surprises, from the buffed black terrazzo floor to the spray-painted white ceiling tiles (nicely cleaned up from the mess they were before). What they add up to is a space of transcendent calm, at least until the next round of architecture students starts piling up mounds of drawings and models.

The newly sharp view out the big upper windows reveals the surrounding trees of Mies' landscape architect Alfred Caldwell. Their organic, sinuous outlines create a poetic contrast with the machinelike, right-angled quality of the architecture. Again, you see that this is not a building in a vacuum. Mies' designs invariably were site-specific. They just didn't imitate everything around them, as the postmodernists did.

But the most welcome change comes in the softly diffused light admitted by the lower windows.

Skidmore's renovation used laminated glass, which made these windows too reflective, like mirrors. Their replacements are far more translucent. You can look through them and see inklings of the greenness of the grass and the blueness of the sky. It is an Arctic spectrum of different shades of white -- a very narrow spectrum compared to the hot orange walls of Rem Koolhaas' IIT campus center, but a spectrum of icy beauty nonetheless.

And what of the most controversial detail of the renovation, the thin metal frames, or stops, that prevent the upper windows from falling out?

In a marked departure from Mies' incessantly right-angled architecture, Sexton designed these replacement parts with a teeny diagonal. They are 5/8 of an inch thick on the outside (to maintain the proportions of the original) and 3/4 of an inch thick on the inside (to provide enough "bite" to meet modern building codes).

This custom-designed detail didn't sit well with old hands at IIT who argued it departed from Mies' philosophy of using materials off-the-shelf or straight out of the factory. As if to support their point, the renovation's glossy new paint makes visible the stamps of the companies that made Crown Hall's steel, Bethlehem Steel and U.S. Steel.

Visual purity

But if there is certain philosophical impurity to the new stops, they do nothing to impinge upon Crown Hall's visual purity. Besides, Mies himself could be far more flexible than his disciples. He demonstrated that most memorably in the 860 and 880 North Lake Shore Drive apartment buildings (featured in today's Tribune magazine), where he abandoned rigid rationalism for the subjective step of attaching decorative I-beams to the facades. Why did he do that? Without the I-beams, he said, the buildings simply "did not look right."

A genuine problem at Crown Hall, as Sexton acknowledges, are the garishly white vertical bands of fabric that hold together Crown Hall's new window blinds. They stick out like extra-fat pinstripes on a dark suit. They need a lot of yellowing from the sun so they can fade into the background. Fortunately, as Sexton notes, they will be removed in the next phase of Crown Hall's renovation, which calls for the building to be made more "green," or energy-efficient.

Despite that fault, the renovation of Crown Hall is a major success, one that represents the latest step forward for IIT's once-forlorn urban campus. But the ramifications of what has been done extend far beyond the South Side. They remind us why Mies was the great figure he was -- he was both poet and pragmatist, bold in his art yet sensitive to his surroundings. He was the most influential architect of the 20th Century yet only now, at the beginning of the 21st, can we see his vision with the full clarity it deserves.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/chi-0508210452aug21,1,4734363.story?coll=chi-leisure-utl

spyguy

August 23rd, 2005, 05:20 PM

Thorne gains top Pritzker job
Exits Art Institute for executive post

By Blair Kamin
Tribune architecture critic
Published August 19, 2005

Martha Thorne, currently associate curator of architecture at the Art Institute of Chicago, has been named executive director of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, often called architecture's equivalent of the Nobel Prize, it was to be announced Friday.

Thorne said in an interview that she will leave the museum "in a short time," probably before the end of this year.

Thorne's ascent to the paid, part-time Pritzker post marks the first time since the award was established in 1979 that it will be administered from Chicago, the hometown of the prize's sponsor, the billionaire Pritzker family.

Previous executive directors -- including the late Brendan Gill, the New Yorker magazine's architecture critic, and the immediate past executive director, Bill Lacy, former president of Purchase College -- have been from the New York area.

The executive director is not a voting member of the Pritzker Prize jury, but helps shape its deliberations by acting as a secretary to the jury and arranging trips to the buildings of distinguished architects who are candidates for the coveted award.

Given annually, the Pritzker Prize comes with a $100,000 grant and honors a living architect for "contributions to humanity . . . through the art of architecture."

"`Facilitate' is a word that I like," Thorne said. "I see my role as seeing that [jury members] have all the information they need to make their very thoughtful decisions."

The jury consists of an international assortment of respected figures from the field of architecture, including architect Frank Gehry, critic Ada Louise Huxtable and the jury's chairman, Lord Peter Palumbo of Great Britain.

Thorne, who has been at the Art Institute since 1995, was a candidate to become the museum's new chief architecture and design curator. But the museum in June announced that the job would go to Joseph Rosa, who held the same post at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Thorne's international experience -- she worked in Spain for the Ministry of Public Works and Transportation and curated several exhibitions at the Art Institute with an international scope -- helped her secure the Pritzker job.

"She joins the Pritzker Prize with a broad understanding of international contemporary architecture," Thomas Pritzker, president of the Hyatt Foundation, the formal sponsor of the award, said in the statement making the announcement.

Of the 29 Pritzker laureates selected since 1979, he pointed out, just eight have been from the United States.

At the Art Institute, Thorne curated an exhibition on the first 25 years of the Pritzker Prize. Her other shows included "Modern Trains and Splendid Stations" and "Bilbao: The Transformation of a City." She also co-authored "Masterpieces of Chicago Architecture."

"I am looking forward to once again being more involved in the international community," Thorne said. "I couldn't ask for anything better -- to live in Chicago and to have the whole world as your potential palette to look at what is going on in architecture."

Thorne's office will be in the Pritzkers' new Hyatt Center office building. Nominations for the prize can be directed to her atThe Hyatt Foundation, Suite 4700, 71 South Wacker Drive, Chicago, IL 60606.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/chi-0508180335aug19,1,732079.story?coll=chi-leisure-utl

ChicagoLover

August 23rd, 2005, 06:42 PM

I thought it was reported a while back by the Tribune at one point that the Hyatt Foundation was (inexplicably) in Los Angeles. I'm glad to learn that its office seems to be in Chicago.

Maybe some of you know Martha Thorne. I met her just a few times when I lived in Chicago, but I was impressed with what I saw. Despite her international experience and arcane art knowledge, Thorne was was quite accessible and friendly. She was urbane, but not arrogant.

I participated in a discussion about architecture following a lecture that accompanied an exhibit on Helmut Jahn that she curated. Although that was the only contact I had had with her, she always greeted me warmly in the surprising number of times I saw her in passing at the downtown library or walking down the street. Later when I volunteered a bit at the Art Institute, she was very kind to me, and I was just a youngin'.

Although the architecture exhibit space at the Art Insitute is woefully inadequate, the curatorial offices are pretty interesting for those who haven't seen them. I think Stanley Tigerman designed them either at cost or pro bono.

spyguy

August 29th, 2005, 11:48 PM

CHICAGO'S `SHOPPING MALL BY THE SEA'
AN ANALYSIS

By Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin
Published August 28, 2005

Navy Pier at l0 years old looks different from Navy Pier at 5 or even Navy Pier at 9. It looks that way because Millennium Park, which just celebrated its first birthday, has demonstrated with its dazzling interactive sculptures and Frank Gehry-designed band shell that mass and class, fun and art need not be mutually exclusive.

At Navy Pier, they are.

Between the picturesque historic towers that frame it like bookends, the pier is a jumble of banal new buildings that replaced its old passenger and cargo sheds.

The pier has become the very overcommercialized "festival marketplace" its planners said they didn't want it to be. Think of it as Chicago's very own shopping mall by the sea, which proves the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas' observation that shopping has thoroughly infiltrated contemporary public space.

And yet, the sheer mass of humanity that descends upon the once-crumbling municipal dock is singularly impressive.

Consultants once feared it might be hard to attract visitors to Navy Pier because Lake Shore Drive separates it from the rest of downtown. But the pier resembles a giant magnet, luring visitors like so many loose paper clips. Last year's attendance of 8.75 million, while a bit off the pier's peak of 9 million in 2000, is nearly triple the number of visitors Millennium Park expects to draw this year.

At a time when American life seems more segregated than ever, the pier's ability to bring together millions of people from disparate walks of life is a major achievement and a stunning reaffirmation of Daniel Burnham's vision of the lakefront as a grand gathering place.

Why do they come?

There is the spectacular lakefront setting, of course, with its drop-dead views of the downtown skyline. But what really lures people, I suspect, is the "something for everybody" set of attractions, from the IMAX Theatre to the Chicago Shakespeare Theater, from the food court to fine dining. The list seems longer than the 3,000-foot-long pier itself.

All that stuff places the pier in a long line of kitschy, but enormously popular, urban waterfront developments, from Atlantic City to Coney Island to Pier 39 in San Francisco. At such places, the water isn't the main focus of attention, but merely a pleasant backdrop for eating, shopping, going on rides and ogling the cute guy or girl.

There is almost no place on the pier for solitude. Even at the far east end, where you can gaze out at sailboats and a lighthouse, you are regaled with the same peppy, piped-in music you hear at the dentist's office.

Of course, Millennium Park also has been accused of being clamorously urban, an extension of the city rather than a respite from it. But its focal points are genuine high art--and it isn't trying to sell you something every five seconds.

Far from repelling people, however, Navy Pier's over-the-top hucksterism seems to attract them. Just as people flocked to Atlantic City for the action of the city, not the peacefulness of the Atlantic, so the pier lures its crowds with the promise of urban razzmatazz.

Its version of city life, however, is strictly sanitized.

The pedestrian promenade on the pier's south side, Dock Street, is a street, all right, but it's Street Lite--with no stoplights, no intersecting streets, no cars, no trucks, no buses, no dirt, no demonstrators and no homeless people asking you for spare change.

My colleague at the Boston Globe, Robert Campbell, perfectly captured this kind of urban never-neverland when he called an earlier festival marketplace, Boston's Faneuil Hall, a "halfway house for suburbanites" dipping their toes into the waters of the big, bad city.

In Navy Pier's defense, it cost much less than Millennium Park (roughly $200 million, including additions in the last 10 years, versus $500 million) and its overall profile remains appropriately low-slung, echoing its original look. The architects who designed the renovation, the team of Benjamin Thompson & Associates of Cambridge, Mass., and Chicago's VOA Associates, even won a special-recognition award from the Chicago chapter of the American Institute of Architects in 1996.

But the award was no great shakes; it was the third-highest level of recognition in the AIA program that year. And there were better designs that would have made better use of the limited funds for the pier's renovation. One, by Chicago architect Laurence Booth, would have erected a single, multiuse glass building in the pier's midsection, creating a far more graceful silhouette than the pier's disparate collection of structures.

Almost no one disputes the pier's effectiveness as a stage-set for human activity. But there are artful stage-sets and there are stage-sets that make you cringe. The pier's merit stops where its architecture begins.

The curvy, white-tented Skyline Stage, with its protruding leglike supports, looks like a giant mutant beetle that's alighted on the lakefront. The brick-clad buildings that echo the pier's historic structures are practically devoid of character. The seven-story parking garage in the middle of the pier is a hideous hunk of concrete. The chief value of the Shakespeare Theater, with its fussy saw-toothed facade, is to hide this monster. A series of light towers that was supposed to tie together the pier's parts in "an envelope of light," as one of the architects put it, was cut and replaced with anemic space-frame flag towers. And then there's the pier's cramped indoor arcade, with its endless array of carts peddling tchotchkes.

True, the Ferris wheel is a handsome icon, especially at night, but it's no match for the much-larger, and far more impressive, original Ferris wheel that appeared at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Navy Pier's Ferris wheel is a retro icon. Millennium Park gives us new icons.

Still, the Ferris wheel is my favorite spot at the pier. If nothing else, it raises you above the pier's mediocre architecture and crass commercialization.

The teeming crowds and their smiling faces, on the other hand, are a delight to behold.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/chi-0508280322aug28,1,7880101.story?coll=chi-leisure-utl

spyguy

September 8th, 2005, 11:13 PM

Wright-Sullivan gems gutted
Twin bungalows--both claimed by Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Sullivan--suffer Katrina's wrath

By Michael Martinez and Blair Kamin, Tribune staff reporters. Tribune national correspondent Michael Martinez reported from Ocean Springs, with Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin in Chicago
Published September 8, 2005

OCEAN SPRINGS, Miss. -- A pair of bungalows that provided a tangible link to two of the giants of Chicago architecture, Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright, thrived for more than a century on this stretch of the Gulf Coast whose marsh grasses and offshore islands evoke a bigger cousin of the Great Lakes.

Then came Hurricane Katrina.

Now, one of the bungalows is "vaporized," in the words of its owner, and the other is severely damaged. The two were part of a four-building waterfront compound, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, that Sullivan and Wright both claimed to have designed.

The destroyed bungalow was for two decades a vacation getaway for Sullivan, renowned for his Carson Pirie Scott store on State Street and his pioneering skyscrapers. A companion servant's quarters a few paces away also was destroyed. Only a concrete pad indicates something sat there.

From the bungalow's veranda, Sullivan could gaze through overhanging white wisteria onto the waters of Davis Bayou, drawing inspiration for his urban high-rises from the rural paradise.

Now the bungalow is a carpenter's scrap pile, scattered as far as 100 yards away from its original location. Everything is gone except an urn planter, brick foundation pieces and the famous tree where, in a well-known photograph, Sullivan struck his iconic pose looking toward the sea.

"This is like somebody coming into Independence Hall and burning the Declaration of Independence. It's irreplaceable," said Paul Minor, 59, a Biloxi personal injury lawyer who meticulously renovated the house after purchasing it in 1986.

The only relatively good news is that the two other structures in the district--the second bungalow and a nearby guesthouse--are still standing, but with significant damage. While Wright never lived in any of the buildings, his fingerprints may be on them because he was Sullivan's chief draftsman.

The bungalows "are so wrapped up with Sullivan and Wright," said architectural historian Paul Sprague, a former Chicago resident who lives in Florida. "For Sullivan, this was a place he escaped from Chicago. It was a place he renewed himself. He had it for 20 years. As far as the history of architecture is concerned, it plays a part in the evolution of his work."

What remains of the Sullivan bungalow is haunting. Like Stonehenge, a chimney rises 15 feet and stands alone. At its feet is the rubble of an architectural gem beloved by Sullivan for its mystical powers--"the paradise, the poem of spring, Louis' other self " is how he wrote about it in his autobiography shortly before he died in 1924.

Like sifting through pieces of a broken dream, Minor walked through rubble that included precious materials such as 100-year-old heart pine wood. He had spent a small fortune on such details to restore parts of the interior to duplicate the original design.

When he first saw that the "house was vaporized," he said, "I went to my knees."

"I truly thought I had the best house ... along the Gulf Coast. This is true Southern living where you take advantage of the serenity and the beauty of the gulf," he said.

Added his wife, Sylvia, 58: "The Louis Sullivan house is no more. It's just--floosh!--gone. It's disintegrated."

(It has been a tumultuous summer for Paul Minor, who stood trial last month on charges of bribing state judges. He was acquitted of some charges, but the jury couldn't render verdicts on other counts. The federal prosecutor's office hasn't yet announced whether it will seek to re-try Minor.)

Late in Sullivan's life, when he was in desperate financial straits, Sullivan wrote that his bungalow was destroyed by a "wayward West Indian hurricane." In fact, he was using hyperbole to describe how he was forced to give up the one-story, shingle-covered home to Chicago terra cotta manufacturer Gustav Hottinger, who had lent him money.

This time, the hurricane was real, and it crashed into the compound, which is about 100 yards from the beach.

The four structures, clad in cypress shingle siding colored a dull blue, were built in 1890. The bungalow that was not owned by Sullivan was rebuilt in 1897 after a fire.

While hardly masterpieces, the bungalows were part of the legacy of two extraordinary architects: Sullivan, renowned for his swirling ornament and for coining the maxim "form ever follows function," and Wright, even more admired for his Prairie Style houses and such dazzling monuments as the corkscrewing Guggenheim Museum in New York City. Their intertwining stories, however, have a trace of bitterness.

Early in his career, Wright worked for Sullivan, calling him "Lieber Meister," or "beloved master." But in 1893, Sullivan fired Wright after learning that Wright, his chief draftsman, was designing "bootleg" houses without his permission.

Their disagreements even extended to the authorship of the side-by-side bungalows in Ocean Springs--one built as Sullivan's vacation house, the other a getaway for Chicago lumber dealer James Charnley, who also commissioned a masterful Wright-Sullivan house in Chicago's Gold Coast.

But architectural historians agree on this much: Sullivan first visited Ocean Springs in 1890 to recover from the exhaustion caused by his work on Chicago's Auditorium Building, 430 S. Michigan Ave., the handsome multipurpose structure that was completed in 1889.

"He was completely taken with the Gulf Coast and the beauty of the natural landscape," said Tim Samuelson, a Chicago architectural historian who assisted the renovation of the Sullivan bungalow in the 1980s. "It gave him inspiration. It gave him rest. It fueled him and allowed him to come back to the city and renew his work."

After meeting Sullivan in New Orleans in 1890, Charnley and his wife led him to Ocean Springs, according to William Storrer, author of "The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright." They transferred five of their 21 acres to Sullivan, Storrer writes, and asked Sullivan to plan a house for them.

Wright later claimed credit for the bungalows, noting that Sullivan's firm, Adler & Sullivan, "refused to build residences" and that the few the firm did design "fell to my lot."

The top of the "T" consisted of a full-width veranda that would catch the breeze coming off the Biloxi Bay; the stem of the "T" had a kitchen and, in the more elaborate Charnley bungalow, an octagonal dining room. The houses had broad overhanging eaves that sheltered them from the hot Southern sun.

In 1905, Architectural Record magazine described how visitors sitting on the veranda of the Sullivan bungalow could look over "great clusters of white wisteria hanging from the roof" toward a rose garden, trees and "across the stretch of water of the bay glittering with countless gems beyond the prices of the ransom of kings."

The post-Katrina scene could not be more different.

The Charnley bungalow's sills are knocked three or four feet off its piers. The bungalow exhibits the wending grooves of termite infestation in massive 12-inch-by-12-inch pine sills upon which floor joists sat.

Inside, the exotic, whorled designs of burly pine paneling are exposed to open viewing; the paneling covers the walls and ceiling. The roof over the eastern wing has collapsed. An interior floor has buckled, as if it now sits on a massive barrel. The absence of front doors and porch make it look as though the house's teeth were kicked in.

For all the damage, local historian and Ocean Springs Record columnist Ray Bellande, 62, thought the Charnley bungalow could be saved as he surveyed the tattered structure.

"It could be restored, but it would take a lot of money and a lot of patience," Bellande said.

A companion cottage to the Charnley bungalow received less damage. Its front, octagonal-roof entrance was knocked off its foundation, but the remainder was relatively intact, including a shelf loaded with hardback books about Frank Lloyd Wright.

spyguy

September 13th, 2005, 01:03 AM

Rosa has designs on being hands-on boss
Art Institute post rare opportunity

By Blair Kamin
Tribune architecture critic
Published September 11, 2005

There's passion in the raspy voice of Joseph Rosa, the new architecture and design curator at the Art Institute of Chicago, as he talks over the phone about his new job, which starts Thursday.

"It's a wonderful time to be coming to Chicago," says Rosa, speaking from a vacation in Virginia. "It's one of the few cities with talented young designers as well as visionary patrons for the arts."

Rosa, 45, is taking over one of the architecture world's plum curator jobs at a key moment: The Art Institute is anticipating the opening of its $258 million Renzo Piano-designed expansion, which will include new architecture galleries, in 2009. And the museum's president, James Cuno, has officially redefined the job, established by the former chief architecture curator John Zukowsky in 1981.

Now it's architecture and design, not just architecture, which means fresh emphasis on furniture, product design and other related fields. To be sure, Zukowsky already had taken the department in that direction.

"John laid an amazing foundation in establishing the department and building it into what it's become," Rosa says. "The next step of being curator of architecture and design is expanding it."

High on his priority list: Broadening the museum's collection of drawings, sketches and architectural models, already strong in Chicago masters, to include other architects of national and international significance -- say, Le Corbusier or Louis Kahn. The city's contributions to architecture will appear more significant when seen in a global framework, he says, adding, "You're only as good as your collection."

Rosa may influence how, not just what, museum-goers see. While Zukowsky, an architectural historian, left exhibition design to Chicago architect Stanley Tigerman and other notable designers, Rosa may do the installations himself. "In most of the shows I've done, I've been the exhibit designer," he says.

Rosa brings solid credentials to the job. He spent a decade as an architect, including time in the office of avant-garde New York architect Peter Eisenman. He has written several books, including one on Southern California architect Albert Frey. He arrives in Chicago after three years as architecture and design curator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, two years as curator of the Heinz Architectural Center in Pittsburgh and five years as the chief curator at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C.

His most notable show, "Folds, Blobs and Boxes: Architecture in the Digital Era," was the first major museum exhibition to examine how computers are changing the form of buildings, how they're built and how architects design them. Done in Pittsburgh, it included work of Chicago architect Doug Garofalo, who Rosa calls the latest in Chicago's "continuous line of critical thinkers."

His big show in San Francisco, "Glamour: Fashion, Industrial Design, Architecture," provocatively juxtaposed evening gowns, light installations and building designs, demonstrating a cross-pollination between fields. "Good architects and designers can't be separated from other art practices," he says, citing the influence of sculptors such as Richard Serra on Frank Gehry. Such thinking may shape a permanent installation in the new architecture and design galleries, Rosa hints, adding that the mix could include decorative arts.

For now, he has a chance to shape a team that likely will rival the architecture and design department at New York's Museum of Modern Art in staff size and, one hopes, ambition. A new design curator will be hired, along with a new architecture curator to replace Martha Thorne, the former associate architecture curator who has left the museum to become executive director of the Pritzker Architecture Prize.

But there's a nagging question about the architecture collection: How will Rosa augment it at a time when the museum's financial priorities may be dominated by the new wing? "It's kind of like getting registered for marriage," he replies. "You put together your wish list and you see what you can acquire."

http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/arts/chi-0509110314sep11,1,4888597.story

spyguy

September 13th, 2005, 01:06 AM

FALL ARTS PREVIEW `05 PLANNER

ARCHITECTURE

BLAIR KAMIN makes no small plans for a wide variety of the new and renewed in the city and suburbs.

Chicago has a typically jam-packed architecture scene this fall, with new towers reshaping the skyline, old gems getting polished and star architects lecturing and appearing on panels. The lively lineup extends to the suburbs and around the nation, where new museums are opening. And, of course, there's the plan to build a skyscraper taller than Sears Tower.

WILL CALATRAVA'S TOWER FLY? Expect the civic debate to heat up over Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava's proposed twisting tower along the lakefront. The developer, Chicago's Christopher Carley, is scheduled to meet with city planning officials Tuesday. The 2,000-foot-tall hotel and condominium skyscraper will likely need a height variance from the city.

THE MAYOR'S CURVY NEW HOME. The 57-story Heritage at Millennium Park flaunts curving concrete walls that pick up on the explosive energy of Frank Gehry's Jay Pritzker Pavilion at Millennium Park. Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley will be among the residents. The architect is John Lahey of Solomon Cordwell Buenz & Associates of Chicago.

A WINDOW ON THE SKYLINE. The 40-story One South Dearborn office building, which opens in November, arrives with a distinctive top: A large, win-dowlike opening, carved into the upper portion of the building's glass wall. It glows

like a lantern at night. The architects are Rick Keating of Pasadena, Calif., and Chicago's Jim DeStefano.

RESTORING A SULLIVAN GEM. A restoration of Louis Sullivan's masterful Carson Pirie Scott store at 1 S. State St., led by Chicago preservation architect Gunny Harboe of McClier, will bring back key exterior details, including a terra cotta cornice, that were removed after World War II. Watch for it in late November.

SHAPING MEMORIALS. Prominent designers take part in a Sept. 19 Art Institute of Chicago panel on memorial architecture. They are New York's Peter Eisenman (the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin); Providence, R.I.'s, Friedrich St.Florian (the National World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C.); London's Neil Porter (the Princess Diana memorial fountain in London) and Chicago's Stanley Tigerman (the planned Illinois Holocaust Memorial in Skokie). Tickets for the 6 p.m. event are $15. Call 312-443-7300.

RETURN OF THE CHICAGO SEVEN. The maverick architects of the 1970s, who challenged the modernism of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and demonstrated a pluralistic view of Chicago architecture, reunite to discuss the future of design. They'll speak at the Museum of Contemporary Art Sept. 27 at 6 p.m. Free to the public, but reservations are recommended. Call 312-397-4010.

MIES IS MORE (NOT A BORE) Robert Venturi, the eminent Philadelphia architect, once took his own shot at Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, quipping "Less is a bore." He later took it back. Now he seems poised to really take it back with a Nov. 9 lecture "Mies is More -- Learning From Mies" at the Illinois Institute of Technology's Crown Hall, 3360 S. State St. The 6 p.m. lecture, part of the Chicago Humanities Festival, is free, but reservations are required. Call 312-494-9509.

"THE DONALD" AND OTHER SUPERTALL TALES. Adrian Smith and William Baker, the Skidmore, Owings & Merrill of Chicago architect-engineer team for the Trump International Hotel & Tower in Chicago and the supertall Burj Dubai skyscraper in the United Arab Emirates, lecture on those buildings at the Chicago Architecture Foundation, 224 S. Michigan Ave., on Sept. 27. Tickets for the 6 p.m. event are $20. Call 312-922-3432.

TAKING FLIGHT IN GLENVIEW. The Kohl Children's Museum of Greater Chicago opens its new Glenview home to the public Oct. 20. Designed by Laurence Booth of Chicago's Booth Hansen, the new building has a dramatic, V-shaped roof, which, Booth says, is intended to wash the building's ceiling with natural light and intrigue children.

NEW MUSEUMS ELSEWHERE. In San Francisco, the de Young museum opens its copper-faced building by Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron on Oct. 15. The High Museum of Art in Atlanta opens a three-building expansion by Italian architect Renzo Piano, designer of the Art Institute of Chicago's expansion, on Nov. 12.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/arts/chi-0509110319sep11,1,6854682.story?page=6

spyguy

September 22nd, 2005, 11:34 PM

Chicago foundation studies growth

By Blair Kamin
Published September 22, 2005

The Chicago Architecture Foundation's headquarters at 224 S. Michigan Ave. is a lively place for exhibitions, lectures and architectural tours. For visitors, it is often a point where they can orient themselves to Chicago, especially when they look over the giant Skidmore, Owings & Merrill model of downtown (now being restored) and its forest of skyscrapers.

"The way we describe it is a train station with people coming and going," says the foundation's president, Lynn Osmond. "It's really not collections-based."

Now, the foundation is eyeing an expansion of its headquarters or even moving to another site downtown -- but not anytime soon.

The foundation has received a $50,000 grant from the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity to study the feasibility of expanding or moving. The driving force is tourism. State officials "recognize that architecture is a big feature for Chicago and Illinois," Osmond says.

The foundation has hired Lord Cultural Resources, a consulting firm, to prepare a report due in March. Related architecture organizations could wind up under the same roof.

One possibility is that the offices of the Chicago chapter of the American Institute of Architects, now in the Merchandise Mart, could be folded into the complex. Offices of the building trades also might be included, Osmond said, as they are in architectural centers in some European cities. Exhibition and public program spaces also could be expanded.

Any expansion or relocation will likely depend upon the market for architecture tours and the ability of the foundation, which has an annual budget of $7 million and a staff of 44, to finance such a move, Osmond says. The foundation draws 605,000 people annually to its programs, exhibits and tours, she estimates, including 125,000 a year to its architecture river cruise.

But nothing is likely to happen tomorrow.

"Our lease is up here in 2011," Osmond says. "When you talk about planning these facilities, it's a seven-to-10 year planning stream."

Driehaus award applications

One of the finest, and least noticed, architecture awards programs in Chicago is the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation Award for Architectural Excellence in Community Design. This prize makes the point that the benefits of good design shouldn't be restricted to the wealthy; they also can be enjoyed by people in poor and middle-class neighborhoods.

Last year's winner of the $15,000 top prize in the awards program, sponsored by the foundation of the civic-minded chairman of Driehaus Capital Management Inc., communicates this idea with intelligence and humanity.

It's the home of Southwest Women Working Together, a non-profit group that aids battered women. Located in West Englewood and designed by Wheeler Kearns Architects of Chicago, the project creates an oasis of calm, not only for the women it serves, but also for its violence-plagued neighborhood.

The architects restored an abandoned funeral home, adding a simple, but handsomely proportioned, new brick-faced building alongside it. The two are connected by a new glass passageway. The buildings shape a tranquil outdoor garden. The protective, but light-filled interior contains rooms where the women can meet with counselors and get job training. The design helps rebuild human lives as well as a neighborhood.

With its relentless focus on latest spectacle buildings by such stars as Frank Gehry or Santiago Calatrava, today's architecture scene is apt to overlook thoughtful work such as this.

Applications for this year's Driehaus award for community design are due Oct. 14. Projects must be in Cook County and completed within the last three years. The awards are organized by the Local Support Initiatives Corporation/Chicago,which also organizes a related program called the Chicago Neighborhood Development Awards.

Search for new director

Richard Solomon, the late director of the Graham Foundation, the Chicago-based foundation that plays a leading role in encouraging new thinking about architecture, was a cherished friend, so these words are not easy to write: The Graham's board of trustees has announced a search for a new director.

The job entails managing the foundation's grant program; overseeing public programs; and expanding the foundation's mission, as Solomon did by organizing an innovative design competition for 21st Century parkland along Chicago's lakefront. Candidates for the full-time position can apply to the Graham Foundation's search committee before Nov. 15.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/chi-0509220272sep22,1,1584048.story?coll=chi-leisure-utl

spyguy

October 2nd, 2005, 11:42 PM

Adding up the other Chicago 7
Intelligence, wit mark reunion

By Blair Kamin
Published October 2, 2005

The hair is grayer or whiter than it was nearly 30 years ago, but there they were onstage -- the Chicago Seven architects who broke out of the steel-and-glass box so closely associated with master modernist Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Well, not all of them. Stanley Tigerman was conspicuous by his absence. "We didn't agree on anything," architect Thomas Beeby said Tuesday night. "The fact that Stanley didn't come tonight is an indication [of that]."

This was a night devoted to discussing the contemporary scene of Chicago architecture, not telling war stories, yet it was impossible not to reach back into the past. "It wasn't Mies that got boring. It was the copiers that got boring," architect James Nagle told the audience at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art, referring to Mies' imitators. "You got off an airplane in the 1970s, and you didn't know where you were."

It was, all things considered, a pretty tame evening, lacking the conflict of the old days, but not the intelligence, the wit and, most important, the critical spirit that helped the Chicago Seven alter the course of the city's architecture.

They fired shots at a variety of targets, most of which had more to do with bad urban planning than bad architecture. "What the hell's the difference if you have a nice Millennium Park if you've got a snarl?" Nagle said, linking the Chicago area's toothless regional planning and its traffic-choked highways.

But they also made fun of themselves, most endearingly when architect Stuart Cohen, whose handsome houses dot the North Shore, responded to this question from the moderator, architect Doug Garofalo: How had the architects' interests changed? "Pathetically, I am interested in what I was interested in 25 years ago," Cohen said.

The other Chicago Seven

There was the real Chicago Seven, of course, and then there was its architectural counterpart. The former consisted of seven anti-Vietnam War activists, including Black Panther Party activist Bobby Seale, who were tried for inciting a riot during the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. After a sensational trial, during which Seale called Judge Julius Hoffman a "fascist dog" and Hoffman ordered Seale bound and gagged in the courtroom, the initial round of convictions was reversed on appeal in 1972.

The Chicago Seven architects had an equally strong rebellious streak, though they directed their attacks against aesthetic, not political, authority -- the design demigod, Mies, who had died in 1969, and his acolytes. They expressed their viewpoint not with a building, but with an exhibition, the now-legendary "Chicago Architects" show of 1976. That was fitting because the Vietnam War and the energy crisis of the early 1970s had so debilitated the economy that young architects had plenty of time to think.

The show came about in response to another exhibition, "100 Years of Architecture in Chicago" that opened in Munich in 1973 and was due to run at the MCA in 1976 as part of America's bicentennial celebration. Despite the inclusive approach suggested by its title, "100 Years" was exclusive to a fault. It focused largely on Mies, his followers and forebears, ignoring the diverse stylistic strands of such Chicago architects as David Adler and George Fred Keck. All had played major roles in shaping the city and its suburbs since the 1920s.

In turn, Tigerman, Cohen and two other architects, Laurence Booth and Benjamin Weese, created a latter-day salon des refuses, a counter-exhibition in the lobby of the just-completed Time-Life Building.

The dueling shows opened simultaneously in 1976, drew huge crowds and attracted national attention. The "Chicago Four," as the quartet became known, had made its case: The city's design past was eclectic, not monolithic. They revealed, as Illinois Institute of Technology architectural historian Kevin Harrington put it in his fine introduction Tuesday, "that the architecture of Chicago is not the work of half a dozen heroes whose names are somewhere up in lights."

Four became Eleven

The Four quickly became the Chicago Seven with the addition of Beeby, Nagle and James Ingo Freed. Helmut Jahn joined the informal alliance, making it the Chicago Eight. Then, it became the Chicago Eleven with the addition of Gerald Horn, Kenneth Schroeder and Cynthia Weese, the lone woman in the group. The group continued to press its attack against conventional thinking with symposiums, exhibitions, even a national design competition to redesign Tribune Tower. All this was occurring against a backdrop of great ferment in architecture.

In 1977, the critic Charles Jencks published his book "The Language of Post-Modern Architecture," which argued for creative collisions of contemporary and antique elements in contrast to the stripped-to-the-essentials purity of the International Style. In 1978, Philip Johnson, once among Mies' most ardent disciples, shocked the world by proposing just such a building -- his Chippendale-topped AT&T skyscraper in New York.

At the same time, Tigerman designed a widely circulated photo collage showing one of Mies' masterworks, Crown Hall, sinking into the waters. The "Titanic," it was called, and its implication was clear, as my predecessor, architecture critic Paul Gapp, wrote 20 years ago: "The seemingly unsinkable International Style had collided with the iceberg of Postmodernism, and nothing would ever be the same again."

That remains true, even if modernism (and Mies) are now enjoying a resurgence and it is postmodernism that has fallen into disrepute.

Talking important too

In a town that blindly followed the Miesian credo of "Build, don't talk," the Chicago Seven introduced a fresh spirit of critical engagement, one which recognized that talking -- and thinking -- are every bit as important as building. They also broke the grip of large corporate firms, allowing small- and medium-size firms a bigger role in designing Chicago. Tigerman, in particular, opened up the city's once-insular design scene, bringing in leading figures from the coasts, such as his friends Frank Gehry and Robert A.M. Stern.

The rub, of course, is the Seven's link with the ascent of postmodernism, a connection that sticks more to some architects in the group than others. None of the six present Tuesday (Schroeder, Nagle, Beeby, Cohen and the two Weeses) talked about postmodernism, as if they feared guilt by association.

After its dominant years in the 1980s, postmodernism wore thin because of its superficial in-jokes, pastiches of historical references and bland mimicry of older buildings, which deadened the very history that postmodernists supposedly were celebrating. Today, architects are fleeing the postmodern banner, not flocking to it. Showing the "Titanic" collage Tuesday, Harrington drew laughter when he noted how Tigerman has suggested in recent interviews that the viewer doesn't know whether the listing Crown Hall is rising or sinking.

Yet at their best, the Chicago Seven were responding to one form of modernism and suggesting another, an architecture based on a creative continuum between past and future rather than buildings that are strictly "of their time."

"You have to go back in order to go forward," Benjamin Weese said Tuesday night, sagely echoing Johnson's once-startling epigram: "You cannot not know history." True, the Chicago Seven have laid some large eggs based on these words, such as Beeby's leaden Harold Washington Library Center. But on the whole, Chicago is better off for the revolution they fought nearly 30 years ago.

BVictor1

October 14th, 2005, 04:31 PM

ARCHITECTURE
Power tower
With or without Daley as a tenant, new skyscraper is an impact player on Loop skyline

By Blair Kamin
Tribune architecture critic
Published October 14, 2005

Whether or not Mayor Richard M. Daley ultimately decides to move there, the Heritage at Millennium Park should command Chicago's attention.

Rising directly across Michigan Avenue from its namesake park, the 59-story, nearly 631-foot condo tower is taller than the old Prudential Building, which used to be the city's tallest skyscraper. It also happens to be one of the tallest residential buildings next to the Loop, offering the latest sign, besides Donald Trump's supertall riverfront hotel-condo tower, that skyscrapers now are as likely to be places where people live as where they work.

The impact of these behemoths, of course, should be measured by something other than a yardstick. What kind of shape do they etch on Chicago's vaunted skyline? How will they greet pedestrians who experience them close-up?

Flaunting a double-curved facade that ripples through the sky like a flag waving in the breeze, the Heritage answers these questions in a way that makes it a success, though hardly an unqualified one. While admirable on many levels, from its energetic but civilized skyline presence to the richly textured face it shows the street, it lacks the black-tie elegance demanded by its showplace site.

Developed by Mesa Development LLC and designed by John Lahey and Gary Klomp-maker of the Chicago firm of Solomon, Cordwell Buenz & Associates, the Heritage can be found at 130 N. Garland Ct., a single-block street between Michigan and Wabash Avenues. In 2004, the building took on added prominence when the Tribune revealed that Daley and his wife, Maggie, would move to the tower from their town- house in the South Loop's Central Station residential complex. Daley did not dispute the report at the time. But now, the move seems uncertain.

Connie Dickinson, a Mesa spokeswoman, declined to discuss whether Daley will move to the building, saying that the Heritage's owners never publicly discuss condo buyers. City Hall sources said they were unsure of Daley's intent.

What is clear, at this point, is the Heritage's visual prominence, especially as it soars over the neighboring Chicago Cultural Center, the Beaux-Arts edifice at Michigan Avenue and Randolph Street.

The tower's base, which includes six parking levels and ground-level retail space, is more than 100 feet tall, about as high as the cultural center. The base is clad in precast concrete and a limestone that echoes the cultural center. Above it, the tower ascends in two parts, each with walls of painted exposed concrete.

Soars to summit

The southern side rises 27 stories, in keeping with the height of the clifflike wall of historic skyscrapers along Michigan Avenue and the neighboring Garland Building along Wabash Avenue. The interlocking northern side soars to the building's summit, stretching the Heritage above the ostentatious, diamond-topped skyscraper at 150 N. Michigan Ave. and approximating the scale of the big modern towers, including the Aon Center, along upper Randolph Drive.

A tower of this height easily could have dominated its surroundings, turning the cultural center into the equivalent of a footrest. Instead the Heritage enhances its environs, largely because it is a collection of clearly articulated parts, not a hulking monolith, like the exposed concrete residential towers that have blighted River North.

The tower's primary urban design strength is that it forms a hinge, a visual transition between the two scales (and two eras) of skyscrapers along Michigan and Randolph. The abstracted rows of columns atop its two sides evoke the colonnades of the cultural center and the old People's Gas Co. building at 122 S. Michigan Ave. Yet the tower's height and simplified forms relate well to the modern towers along Randolph.

At the same time, the Heritage excels at ground level, where its curving limestone facade along Randolph builds a visual bridge between the masonry facades of the cultural center and the east side of Marshall Field's. The curve leaves breathing space for pedestrians and for Richard Hunt's exuberant new sculpture, "We Will," at the corner of Randolph and Garland. Near the sculpture is an entrance to the Heritage's pedway, an attractive, brightly-lit contribution to the network of tunnels connecting downtown buildings.

There are more good strokes along Wabash, where the Evanston firm of McGuire Igleski & Associates, Inc. has done fine work restoring the facades of four historic buildings, three of which were built after the Great Fire of 1871 and designed by architect John Van Osdel. The other is from 1916. Their freshly cleaned ornament is dazzling, from green urns to white sea horses.

With only the skin of these buildings left (they clad the Heritage's parking garage and ground-level stores), preservation purists are sure to cry "facade-ectomy." But what has been saved in history and human-scale outweighs the loss of architectural integrity.

As architecture, the Heritage is somewhat less persuasive, in part because it speaks with a mixed tongue.

It is, on the one hand, traditional, with abstracted columns, flaring cornices and a rough-hewn, block-filling base. Yet it also strives to be contemporary, indulging the current fashion for forms that move or appear to be moving. Its concave southern side and convex northern side give the building a pronounced curvilinearity, making the building appear like a flag waving in the breeze. It the latest Chicago high-rise, along with the fine new Hyatt Center office building, to depart from the rigid right angles of the city's skyline and street grid.

There is nothing necessarily wrong with aesthetic mixing and matching, of course. The curving green-glass office building at 333 W. Wacker Drive, which sits upon a stone base, introduced this postmodern approach into Chicago in 1983 and remains greatly admired. But the Heritage does not match this standard, even though it is has considerable appeal.

The building's curves effectively communicate that it is a residential tower, softer and less formal than an office building. In the bargain, the curves pick up on the Baroque energy of Frank Gehry's Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park.

An optical illusion

The architects further enhanced their design with color, using an olive green to make the exposed concrete fade into the background. Bright white paint accents horizontal bands that appear every three floors on the tower's south side and every six floors on its north side.

The combined effect of these and other nuances fools the eye, making the Heritage appear much trimmer, more glassy and less ponderous than it really is. It is more a soaring tower than a brute slab, and that is a major plus for the Michigan Avenue skyline.

Still, there are significant problems, especially on the building's sides and back. Here, white becomes the predominant color, yet unfortunately, it draws attention to the tower's articulated, but bulky, concrete columns, especially those at the corners.

A different league

Even though it's been painted, the exposed concrete isn't up to the standards of Michigan Avenue, where buildings tend to be as elegantly outfitted as men in tuxedos. Lahey and Klompmaker wisely have shifted to a glass-sheathed design for their next mega-tower across from Millennium Park, an 800-footer at 21-29 S. Wabash Ave.

On a happier note, the Heritage's entrance along narrow Garland Court is wonderfully secluded, cut off from downtown's hustle and bustle. The base has fine proportions and is visually integrated with the tower, avoiding the "plop architecture" of high-rises indiscriminately thrown atop their parking garage podiums.

The Heritage's living spaces also are well handled, including its clean-lined lobby. Upstairs, typical condo units have 9-foot ceilings and large windows that create a feeling of expansiveness. The views to the east and Millennium Park, needless to say, are drop-dead.

This is, in short, a skillfully done skyscraper, but not quite in the city's top tier. While it rises far above the low standard of Chicago's leaden residential towers, it doesn't manage to set a new standard, as 333 W. Wacker did in its day. Perhaps the architects will accomplish that in their next skyscraper across from Millennium Park. Still, we can be thankful that they have endowed the skyline with a residential tower that does more good than harm.

- - -

The Heritage at Millennium Park

Location: 130 N. Garland Ct., directly west of the Chicago Cultural Center.

Height: 59 stories, nearly 631 feet. Architects: Solomon, Cordwell Buenz & Associates, Chicago. Number of condo units: 358 (all but one sold).

Price of units: About $325,000 for a one-bedroom to $4.6 million for a penthouse.

Sources: Solomon, Cordwell Buenz & Associates; Draper and Kramer; news stories.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/media/photo/2005-10/19950351.jpg
The Heritage at Millennium Park soars over the neighboring Chicago Cultural Center.
(Tribune photo by Michael Tercha)

Frumie

October 14th, 2005, 05:53 PM

the "plop architecture" of high-rises indiscriminately thrown atop their parking garage podiums.

"Plop architecture" Nice. An apt addition to Chicago's architectural lexicon.

ChicagoLover

October 15th, 2005, 07:09 PM

I still think the Heritage would look better if they had painted the entire front facade white. Nonetheless, I agree with Kamin in thinking this is a solid addition to the skyline, in a very prominent place that required something of quality.

And they say all but one of the units is sold. Is that unit being reserved for Daley??

spyguy

October 16th, 2005, 06:02 PM

Kohl Children's Museum a unique `duck' that soars
Glenview structure grabs your attention

By Blair Kamin
Tribune architecture critic
Published October 16, 2005

The most important critics who will assess the new Kohl Children's Museum of Greater Chicago, the children who will use it, still have to weigh in. But I like it and I suspect they will too. It's a fun building with fun interactive exhibits, even if it isn't a great work of architecture. It looks like a bird taking flight. The architect, Laurence Booth of the Chicago firm Booth Hansen, strenuously denies such symbolism. You decide whether you believe him.

Located at 2100 Patriot Blvd. in north suburban Glenview and opening to the public Thursday, the $18 million museum occupies what used to be a taxiway at the Glenview Naval Air Station, which closed in the 1990s. It's part of the Glen, an instant town-within-a-town of traditional brick homes, offices, schools and shops. With an occasional exception, like the old Air Station control tower that anchors the main shopping street, the Glen's architecture is polite to the point of dull. If Booth had followed its example, as Glenview planners asked him to do, he would have produced a children's museum that looked like an old-fashioned school.

Yawn.

"A children's museum has to have a spark," Booth says, driving his boxy, bright yellow station wagon around the building.

He's is in the car for a reason. He's trying to show that the museum responds to its real context: The road, not the fake traditionalism of the Glen. That's where the action tends to be in suburbia, as Philadelphia architect Robert Venturi and his cohorts taught us in 1972 with their pioneering book, "Learning from Las Vegas," a study of the signs and buildings of the Vegas strip.

"People had to drive by and say, `What's that?'" says Booth, who worked on the job with project director David Mann.

That, they are all but certain to do. The new building, which doubles the amount of exhibition space at the museum's former home, a converted bowling alley along Green Bay Road in Wilmette, is very look-at-me.

Pure eye candy

Though it is essentially a plain rectangular box, the kind of unpretentious, warehouselike structure that Venturi called a "shed," it flaunts yellow stucco walls (shades of Booth's car?) and one very jazzy roofline. Facing southward, toward a big intersection, a huge A-framed roof of galvanized metal fans outward like a megaphone, sheltering the main entrance. To the west, housing some of the main exhibit spaces, are twin pavilions with overhanging metal roofs, each of which resembles an upright "V." It's pure eye candy. As enticing as a chocolate bar.

Booth says he was simply trying to bring light into the exhibit spaces, using upper-level clerestory windows beneath the eaves. The museum was designed, he insists, from the inside out. "We were folding paper back and forth to get those forms," Mann adds, comparing the process to making origami.

If you take him and Booth at their word, you'd say that the museum is not a "duck," the term Venturi used to describe outlandishly shaped structures where function is twisted to serve form.

Still, this is the age of the spectacle building and museums, even children's museums, want eye-catching forms that will get people in the door. If the Kohl Children's Museum isn't a "duck," it's a souped-up shed, with its sculptural roofs, rather than signs or decoration, striving to get your attention.

It does what it does pretty well. The building is exciting without being cartoonish, simple but not simplistic. It makes a landmark for adults, yet it's whimsical (and memorable) enough that children should be able to trace an outline of it once they get home. Its sculptural presence owes something, perhaps, to the Swiss-born architect Le Corbusier's great Expressionist chapel at Ronchamp, France. But that's probably a stretch. The Midwestern flatlands of the Glen aren't exactly the hills of rural France.

Clever incorporation of green

There's something else to like about this building: It's very green. Suburbia is often associated with wasting resources -- sprawling subdivisions eating up farmland and forcing people to drive everywhere, even to the corner store to get a carton of milk -- but the museum shows us a more enlightened suburbia.

Yes, you're going to have to drive to it unless you live in the Glen, but it's full of energy-saving green features, from its light-colored roof, which reflects heat instead of absorbing it (thus reducing the load on the building's air conditioners), to its low-flow toilets, which use less water than typical fixtures. Better yet, the Chicago landscape architect Peter Schaudt has handsomely integrated green elements into the design, most notably the earth mounds that subtly echo the building's rooflines.

Even if you never set foot inside, then, this building contributes something to the landscape. But if you do go -- the target audience ranges from newborns to 8-year-olds, along with their parents and caregivers -- you're likely to enjoy it, though you may cringe at some of the exhibits. It's not that they're not well designed for kids, but that they look so much like the very thing Booth was trying to get away from -- the Glen, with its phony traditionalism.

Entering beneath the A-framed roof, which is somewhat grotesquely oversize on its north end, you are compressed within a small, low-ceilinged foyer. Then, taking a page from Frank Lloyd Wright, Booth plays a classic "press and release" game, leading you into a lobby where the space explodes as you look up to the A-frame's underside. It houses a big, lodgelike room with a cocoa bar and a gourmet pretzel shop, which allows kids to twist and bake their own pretzels. In a facile homage to Ronchamp's mystical interior, Booth slices a variety of odd-shaped windows into the east-facing wall.

From there, the inside of the museum lays out with admirable clarity: A child-size main street, including such familiar Children's Museum exhibits as the kid-size Dominick's supermarket, stretches westward. Popping out from it to the south and housing a variety of exhibits, like a Chicago-themed science exhibit called City on the Move, are the pavilions with the V-shaped roofs. Jack Rouse Associates of Cincinnati did the conceptual design for almost all of the exhibits while Layman Design of Glenview and Derse Exhibits of Milwaukee handled the details.

Unifying the disorder

Though I found the main street's cute traditional buildings jarring inside Booth's sleek shell, I'll accept the explanation of Sheridan Turner, the museum's president: Kids will overlook this clash of design cultures; they'll be comfortable with something familiar. Perhaps he had no choice, but Booth wisely accepted the kaleidoscopic disorder of the exhibits, making his interior a kind of umbrella, a container with a strong enough visual order to overcome the variety of its contents. The sloping underside of the roofs, faced in boards made of ground-up wheat stalks, are particularly good in this respect, assertively leading the eye down the main street.

Booth's clerestory windows in the pavilions admit natural light to the exhibit spaces, which animates them and should make kids and their parents or caregivers feel less tired. Throughout, the spaces have been planned with people in mind. Four infant areas are integrated into the exhibit areas, for example, allowing parents or caregivers to simultaneously watch older children and infants. The modest scale of the two pavilions cleverly replicates the homey size of the museum's old quarters in Wilmette, preventing the new building from seeming overwhelming.

The exhibits themselves, which teach kids to do things like build a house, rock babies to sleep, or take orders at a restaurant, continue the emphasis on interactive, hands-on activity that has made the museum so popular. They also are a welcome antidote to computers, which tend to isolate children rather than encouraging them to take part in parallel or cooperative play. And while the main street seems visually out of sync with Booth's architecture, other exhibits, like a water works designed by Claro Creative Studios of Glendale, Calif., have an abstract look that works well with the building.

One big caveat: The proper time to tell whether all this really works is a month or so down the road once the kids have field-tested the museum. You can do prototypes till the cows come home, Sheridan says, but the test is real-life use by real live kids. Even if some of the exhibits have to be tweaked, however, the building flies. Just don't tell the architect it's ready for takeoff.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/chi-0510160365oct16,1,5586344.story?coll=chi-leisure-utl

The Urban Politician

October 16th, 2005, 06:50 PM

^Fuck that. Blair Kamin needs to stop wasting his time on suburban garbage disposal units like that.

A Children's Museum in suburbia? That's like everything I've ever hated in my life all piled together

spyguy

October 16th, 2005, 07:12 PM

Just a question, but do you plan on having children TUP?

The Urban Politician

October 16th, 2005, 09:03 PM

Just a question, but do you plan on having children TUP?

^ My fiance REALLY wants to have kids and I want to put it off.

Eventually I'll cave in and have them, but I'll be damned if they grow up like the sheltered suburban dipshits that have populated this country of late.

spyguy

October 21st, 2005, 11:07 PM

Beauty is in the eyes of the jury
AIA awards pay tribute to 32 projects, large and small

By Blair Kamin
Published October 21, 2005

The reconstruction of the east-west segment of Wacker Drive and an airport train station in Germany by Helmut Jahn will be among the top award-winners when the Chicago chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) presents its annual design excellence awards Friday night.

But small is beautiful in this program too: Half of the winners in the distinguished building category are residential works, several of them private homes.

Two projects in Millennium Park, the Joan W. and Irving B. Harris Theater for Music and Dance and the Crown Fountain, will be recognized during the program, as will the innovative Perspectives Charter School on Chicago's Near South Side by Ralph Johnson of Perkins & Will.

Booth Hansen will win three awards, the most of any firm, including two for its renovation of Louis Sullivan's Ganz Hall in the Auditorium Building.

A total of 32 projects will be honored at Navy Pier's Grand Ballroom, marking the 50th year of the awards. Jurors of architects selected the winners from a field of 239 entries in three categories -- distinguished building, interior architecture and "divine detail," which recognizes a specific architectural element. Projects completed within the last 3 1/2 years were eligible.

Harmonizing with the old

One of the hallmarks of Mayor Richard M. Daley's tenure has been his attention to beautifying civic infrastructure, so it is not surprising to see the Wacker Drive reconstruction recognized with an honor award, the highest honor in the distinguished building category.

Much more than a road-rebuilding effort, the project brought back a range of handsome historic features, from ornate "Boulevard Electrolier" streetlights to a voluptuous limestone balustrade. It also inserted new elements, such as classically inspired median and sidewalk planters, which harmonize perfectly with the old.

The architectural firms recognized for the reconstruction are Johnson Lasky Architects, DLK and Muller & Muller.

Another honor award-winner, Jahn's train station at the Cologne/Bonn airport in his native Germany, links two terminals with high-speed trains. The station's platform is underground but Jahn and his firm, Murphy-Jahn, brought daylight inside with a gently curving glass roof.

In comments provided by the AIA, one juror said: "The architect has spun a beautiful gossamer web of glass and metal over this tunnel."

A third honor award recipient, the Perspectives Charter School located at the apex of a triangle at the intersection of Archer Avenue and 19th Street, resembles a ship slicing through space, with an economical cladding of corrugated steel. The building's triangular exterior wraps around an innovative multipurpose room, which serves the grades 6-to-12 public school as a cafeteria, study hall and assembly hall.

"It's a fresh take on schools," one juror observed. "It's very contemporary and at the same time open and light."

Midwestern horizontality

Two houses will win awards -- a three-story single-family home in Chicago's DePaul neighborhood, by Wheeler Kearns Architects and the Carus Residence in Peru, Ill., by Brininstool + Lynch, whose sleek modern forms evoke the horizontality of Midwestern farm buildings.

"They did a beautiful job bringing the outdoors in," one juror said of the Carus house.

Several projects will receive the next highest honor in the distinguished building category, a Citation of Merit.

They are: the Harris Theater for Music and Dance, by Hammond Beeby Rupert Ainge; a cottage in Green Lake, Wis., by Nagle Hartray Danker Kagan McKay Penney; the Independence Grove Visitor Center in Libertyville, by David Woodhouse Architects; and the Chicken Factory in Chicago, a former poultry processing plant expanded into a home/business center, by Booth Hansen.

Other Citation of Merit winners for distinguished building will be: 915 N. Wolcott St., a Chicago house by Studio Dwell Architects; a Northbrook home, House on the Edge of a Forest, by John Ronan Architect; Valparaiso University's Christopher Center for Library and Information Resources in Valparaiso, Ind., by EHDD; and the Shure Technology Annex in Niles by Krueck & Sexton.

Winning a special recognition honor in the distinguished building category will be the Harold Washington Unity Co-Operative in Chicago, an 18-building apartment development on 12 sites around Humboldt Park, by Landon Bone Baker Architects.

Jurors called the project "an excellent example of restoring the urban fabric of a neighborhood; it gives back to the area rather than repeating what's been done."

In the interior architecture category, the honor award winners will include the U.S. Federal Building in Oklahoma City, by Ross Barney + Jankowski while Booth Hansen's Ganz Hall restoration will win a citation of merit.

In the divine detail category, an honor award will go to the Crown Fountain, recognizing Krueck & Sexton's innovative combination of glass block, water and LED technology, and a special recognition award will go to Booth Hansen's Ganz Hall for its meticulous electric light fixtures.

The jurors in the distinguished building and interior architecture categories were architects from outside Chicago while the jurors in the divine detail category were from Chicago.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/chi-0510200318oct21,1,1064349.story?coll=chi-leisure-utl

geoff_diamond

October 22nd, 2005, 07:05 PM

Should we really be awarding any sort of award to the Wacker Drive recon when pieces of its beaux arts railing are crumbling before our eyes (after just a few years in service)?

wickedestcity

October 27th, 2005, 04:48 AM

The Chicago Tribune Blair Kamin Architecture column

By Blair Kamin, Chicago Tribune Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News

Oct. 21 - The reconstruction of the east-west segment of Wacker Drive and an airport train station in Germany by Helmut Jahn will be among the top award-winners when the Chicago chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) presents its annual design excellence awards Friday night.

But small is beautiful in this program too: Half of the winners in the distinguished building category are residential works, several of them private homes.

Two projects in Millennium Park, the Joan W. and Irving B. Harris Theater for Music and Dance and the Crown Fountain, will be recognized during the program, as will the innovative Perspectives Charter School on Chicago's Near South Side by Ralph Johnson of Perkins & Will.

Booth Hansen will win three awards, the most of any firm, including two for its renovation of Louis Sullivan's Ganz Hall in the Auditorium Building.

A total of 32 projects will be honored at Navy Pier's Grand Ballroom, marking the 50th year of the awards. Jurors of architects selected the winners from a field of 239 entries in three categories -- distinguished building, interior architecture and "divine detail," which recognizes a specific architectural element. Projects completed within the last 3 1/2 years were eligible.

HARMONIZING WITH THE OLD: One of the hallmarks of Mayor Richard M. Daley's tenure has been his attention to beautifying civic infrastructure, so it is not surprising to see the Wacker Drive reconstruction recognized with an honor award, the highest honor in the distinguished building category.

Much more than a road-rebuilding effort, the project brought back a range of handsome historic features, from ornate "Boulevard Electrolier" streetlights to a voluptuous limestone balustrade. It also inserted new elements, such as classically inspired median and sidewalk planters, which harmonize perfectly with the old.

The architectural firms recognized for the reconstruction are Johnson Lasky Architects, DLK and Muller & Muller.

Another honor award-winner, Jahn's train station at the Cologne/Bonn airport in his native Germany, links two terminals with high-speed trains. The station's platform is underground but Jahn and his firm, Murphy-Jahn, brought daylight inside with a gently curving glass roof.

In comments provided by the AIA, one juror said: "The architect has spun a beautiful gossamer web of glass and metal over this tunnel."

A third honor award recipient, the Perspectives Charter School located at the apex of a triangle at the intersection of Archer Avenue and 19th Street, resembles a ship slicing through space, with an economical cladding of corrugated steel. The building's triangular exterior wraps around an innovative multipurpose room, which serves the grades 6-to-12 public school as a cafeteria, study hall and assembly hall.

"It's a fresh take on schools," one juror observed. "It's very contemporary and at the same time open and light."

MIDWESTERN HORIZONTALITY: Two houses will win awards -- a three-story single-family home in Chicago's DePaul neighborhood, by Wheeler Kearns Architects and the Carus Residence in Peru, Ill., by Brininstool + Lynch, whose sleek modern forms evoke the horizontality of Midwestern farm buildings.

"They did a beautiful job bringing the outdoors in," one juror said of the Carus house.

Several projects will receive the next highest honor in the distinguished building category, a Citation of Merit.

They are: the Harris Theater for Music and Dance, by Hammond Beeby Rupert Ainge; a cottage in Green Lake, Wis., by Nagle Hartray Danker Kagan McKay Penney; the Independence Grove Visitor Center in Libertyville, by David Woodhouse Architects; and the Chicken Factory in Chicago, a former poultry processing plant expanded into a home/business center, by Booth Hansen.

Other Citation of Merit winners for distinguished building will be: 915 N. Wolcott St., a Chicago house by Studio Dwell Architects; a Northbrook home, House on the Edge of a Forest, by John Ronan Architect; Valparaiso University's Christopher Center for Library and Information Resources in Valparaiso, Ind., by EHDD; and the Shure Technology Annex in Niles by Krueck & Sexton.

Winning a special recognition honor in the distinguished building category will be the Harold Washington Unity Co-Operative in Chicago, an 18-building apartment development on 12 sites around Humboldt Park, by Landon Bone Baker Architects.

Jurors called the project "an excellent example of restoring the urban fabric of a neighborhood; it gives back to the area rather than repeating what's been done."

In the interior architecture category, the honor award winners will include the U.S. Federal Building in Oklahoma City, by Ross Barney + Jankowski while Booth Hansen's Ganz Hall restoration will win a citation of merit.

In the divine detail category, an honor award will go to the Crown Fountain, recognizing Krueck & Sexton's innovative combination of glass block, water and LED technology, and a special recognition award will go to Booth Hansen's Ganz Hall for its meticulous electric light fixtures.

The jurors in the distinguished building and interior architecture categories were architects from outside Chicago while the jurors in the divine detail category were from Chicago.

ChicagoLover

October 27th, 2005, 03:38 PM

^ Geoff, how bad is it? Is it.. "makes it look old, venerable and quaint" bad, or worse?

geoff_diamond

October 28th, 2005, 01:42 AM

Much worse. Pieces of concrete are literally spalding right off the rebar inside the mini-columns that hold up the banisters.

spyguy

October 31st, 2005, 04:58 PM

http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/chi-0510300179oct30,1,3947939.story?coll=chi-leisure-utl

Invention can be a double-edged sword
New approaches to tanks, towers

By Blair Kamin
Tribune architecture critic
Published October 30, 2005

Last week did more than crown the White Sox as the champions of baseball. It proved the continuing validity of Mark Twain's observation about Chicago: "a city where they are always rubbing a lamp, and fetching up the genii, and contriving and achieving new impossibilities."

That spirit of invention was evident in two seemingly unrelated happenings: The City of Chicago's design competition for reusing historic water tanks and the disclosure that developers are proposing a 2,000-foot-tall broadcast tower for the lakefront. The competition produced some fresh and appealing ideas. The developers' plan is innovative, but far less persuasive. Invention, it shows, can be a double-edged sword.

Jointly organized by the city and the Chicago Architectural Club, the water tank competition sought new forms and uses for the rapidly vanishing industrial-age icons. It drew 182 entries from 19 countries and was judged by a 12-member jury headed by Santa Monica, Calif., architect Thom Mayne, this year's winner of the Pritzker Architecture Prize.

The jury wisely bypassed designs that went beyond a simplistic recycling strategy: retaining the historic water tanks, which originally held water for fire protection and manufacturing, and installing new uses inside them -- living quarters for yuppies and the like. It also wasn't seduced by eye candy, like the design that turned water tanks into likenesses of such celebrities as Michael Jordan.

Instead, the jury singled out plans that went down a more sophisticated path: echoing the historic silhouette of the tanks, but transforming them into something new, something that could be reproduced throughout Chicago. This was, as Twain put it, fetching up the genii.

The winner, by little-known Chicago architect Rahman Polk, who works for the firm of Hammond Beeby Rupert Ainge, actually offers a pair of plans.

One, meant to be placed atop the towers where the water tank has been removed, would install a wind turbine in an aluminum drum that echoes the tank's silhouette. Electricity generated by the turbine would power a citywide wi-fi network available to the public. Surplus energy would be routed into the city's electrical grid and credited to the building's owner.

Using a wind turbine

Polk's other design, meant for towers where the water tank remains in place, would use a wind turbine that revolves around the outside of the tank. The turbine would power LED screens attached to the outer surface of the tank's drum. The screens would display moving graphics day and night, an in-the-round version of the Crown Fountain. They might show emergency broadcasts, cultural exhibits, Amber Alerts.

This plan is a three-fer: Retaining the iconic image of the water tanks, conserving energy and providing a dazzling new beacon. Polk asserts that the turbines would be quiet, which would be a key factor in dealing with NIMBYs if the city ever decides to build the design.

There's no guarantee that that will happen, of course. The purpose of the competition was simply to solicit ideas. Still, it's a boon for Chicago when fresh ideas course through the city's architectural bloodstream. It keeps the old town young.

The same vitality is evident in the thoughtful second-prize design by Eric Hoffman of St. Louis, which suggests turning water tanks into bird refuges, and the third-place winner, by Francine LeClercq of New York, who proposes placing outmoded water tanks in a reflecting pool. The plan has a haunting beauty.

While it may seem far-fetched to draw comparisons between the small skyline statement made by the water tanks and the enormous skyline presence of the proposed broadcast tower, something unites them: Like the tanks, the tower represents a new take on an old problem -- how to raise broadcast antennas into the sky.

Olive atop a toothpick

A conventional broadcast tower, like the CN Tower in Toronto, resembles an olive stuck on a toothpick, a giant post with the bulge on the top that houses restaurants and an observation deck. But New Haven, Conn., architect Cesar Pelli and New York structural engineer Charles Thornton are suggesting something more like a tripod, with three pairs of tapering concrete legs and a big empty space between them.

In their plan, prepared for developers J. Paul Beitler and LR Development Co., the legs would form a platform for a so-called "candelabra" of three broadcast antennas. The tower would enable local television broadcasters to upgrade their transmitting systems. It would be located near Navy Pier, between Grand Avenue and Illinois Street on the west side of Lake Shore Drive, just a few blocks north of the proposed 2,000-foot hotel-condo tower by architect Santiago Calatrava. There would be restaurants and an observation deck near the top, parking at the bottom.

If you read Tuesday's paper, you know that I'm no fan of this plan. It's a cartoonish vision of the future. Its massive concrete legs utterly lack the grace of the Eiffel Tower's steel lat-icework.

So why not use the water tank competition as a model for articulating the future of broadcast towers in Chicago? Summon architects and let them have at it.

Is there a better site for a freestanding tower? Why even build a freestanding tower? Why not simply renovate the existing antennas at Sears Tower and the John Hancock Center? Could different materials (steel rather than concrete) produce a better result?

Fortunately, Chicago's officialdom isn't giving this plan the same embrace it accorded Calatrava's twisting tower. Asked about the broadcast tower by the Tribune's Gary Washburn, Mayor Richard M. Daley had this to say: "I am not in favor of it or against it." Other proposals are expected, Daley said.

Good. That means there's time to mull alternatives -- and time to solicit the best possible designs.

How about if the city follows its own example and re-does its exemplary ideas competition for water tanks, this time as an ideas competition for the broadcast tower? Let the best minds win rather than simply doing what's expedient. When we rub the lamp, we want the genii to be breathtaking.

chiphile

October 31st, 2005, 05:52 PM

^ My fiance REALLY wants to have kids and I want to put it off.

Eventually I'll cave in and have them, but I'll be damned if they grow up like the sheltered suburban dipshits that have populated this country of late.

:hahaha: :lol: :applause:

BVictor1

November 6th, 2005, 04:16 PM

ARCHITECTURE

Wabash Plaza could be start of great space

By Blair Kamin
Tribune architecture critic
Published November 6, 2005

For nearly two decades, Chicago's Vietnam Veterans Memorial was marooned in a glorified traffic island on Wacker Drive. Cars swirled like sharks around the memorial and a statue of George Washington and two Revolutionary War financiers. The setting, which had all the serenity of a drag strip, unintentionally symbolized the shabby treatment Vietnam veterans received when they returned home.

But all that will change Friday with the opening of the city's new Wabash Plaza, which includes one of the nation's largest Vietnam Veterans memorials outside Washington and occupies a showcase site between Wabash Avenue and State Street along the Chicago River. The memorial portion of the plaza, which consists of terraced lawns and a black granite wall that recognizes dead or missing Illinois soldiers, is not only more visible than its predecessor. It is more stirring, infusing what might have been a mindlessly cheery waterfront park with the potent themes of tragedy and reconciliation.

The plaza forms the first link in a chain of waterfront parks and public spaces that may someday stretch along the south bank of the Chicago River. Mayor Richard M. Daley's big idea is to turn the riverfront, now a concrete no-man's-land, into a kind of second lakefront. He envisions an entire riverwalk from Michigan Avenue to Lake Street, provided the necessary millions can be found in Springfield and Washington. While hardly faultless, Wabash Plaza makes the right strides toward reaching that heroic end.

The plaza, which cost $4.3 million in state and federal funds, is the latest flower to blossom from the city's splendid $200 million rebuilding of the east-west leg of Wacker Drive, which reopened to traffic nearly three years ago.

The rebuilding also was a reconfiguration. It dramatically shrank the Heald Square plaza, where the old Vietnam Veterans memorial was located upon its dedication in 1982. It joined the lanes of traffic that used to swing around either side of the memorial and moved them about 50 feet southward between Wabash and State. That carved out space for a new plaza along the riverfront. Think of it as a smaller-scale version of the Museum Campus, where the city made room for new lakefront parkland by shifting the northbound lanes of Lake Shore Drive off the shoreline.

Based on a concept plan by DLK Civic Design, one of the firms that shaped the Wacker Drive rebuilding, Wabash Plaza was designed by Chicago architect Carol Ross Barney, whose credits include the new Oklahoma City federal building. John Fried of her office, Ross Barney + Jankowski, also worked on the project.

Barney is nothing if not thoughtful, and she acknowledges how difficult it is to design a Vietnam Veterans Memorial in the wake of Maya Lin's V-shaped wedge of black granite, which was completed in 1982 and remains the standard by which all other Vietnam memorials are judged.

"That is the Vietnam Memorial," Barney says. "So what does anyone else do?"

The answer consists of a wedge-shaped, multilevel plaza that follows Wacker's bend and reaches its apex at State Street. At the eastern end is a street-level plaza, with a formal bosque of trees and a statue of Washington and two patriotic Revolutionary War financiers, Robert Morris and Haym Salomon. The statue also used to be in Heald Square. Steeply sloped stairs and terraced lawns lead down to river level. On the plaza's western end, gently-sloping switchback ramps offer a way for people in wheelchairs and others to get to the river.

In the middle of these bookends is the memorial, which at once respects the classical architecture of Wacker Drive and departs from it. In keeping with the classical style, a low-slung fountain is symmetrically placed in front of a semicircular niche cut into Wacker Drive's limestone retaining wall. Yet Barney also inserted strongly modernist elements, like a beam that extends horizontally across the niche and is covered in black granite, a clear reference to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. On its surface are the names of approximately 2,930 Illinois soldiers who were killed between 1962 and 1973, are missing in action or who died later as a result of the war.

The names are arranged chronologically, the blocks of names growing ever larger. At the foot of the wall is a timeline, etched in granite pavement, that cites key battles and historical events, like the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the resignation of Richard M. Nixon.

The reason for the timeline, Barney says, is that many young people know next to nothing about the war. It is no longer enough, in her view, to simply design a wall of names. The history must be put in context. Here, the context includes literal references that are conspicuously absent in Lin's minimalist memorial. Among them are a circular medallion in the niche that portrays an Asian dragon and bamboo trees. The artist for this appropriately exotic flourish (an interpretation of the Vietnam service medal) was Vietnam veteran Gary Tillery.

Even if it lacks the formal inventiveness and the emotional power of the Vietnam Veterans memorial in Washington, Barney succeeds on many levels.

Her plaza is, first and foremost, a delightful addition of soft greenery to the bleak concrete tableau of the riverfront. As much as the plaza is a platform from which to view the river, it is equally attractive when it is the object of attention. Its green tiers resemble earth sculptures.

The plaza also works as a public space, offering people lots of choices: They can sit in the open or in private reverie. They can watch a concert on the river-level plaza near the fountain or they can stare out at the river from a bench incorporated into one of the walls along the ramps. Given that the plaza stands next to lower Wacker Drive and other underground streets still occupied by the homeless, its abundance of sittable space is remarkable. Let's just hope it lasts.

To be sure, there are weaknesses, like a fountain in the street-level plaza that seems hidden behind the statue of Washington and the Revolutionary War financiers, and some unfinished business. As DLK's Diane Legge Kemp points out, her firm's concept drawings called for extending the plaza's greenery another 30 feet into the river with a permanent riverwalk. But the riverwalk cannot be built until it is funded.

Even in its current state, however, the plaza does not feel cramped. It is a joy to make the journey down to the river, to have the sounds of the city fade away and to escape the concrete jungle. And the plaza's beauty is only intensified by the presence of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial -- and the way it breaks the rules for urban riverfronts.

Following the example of the famous San Antonio Riverwalk, most riverfronts are cute and tourist-friendly, lined by restaurants and tables topped by colorful umbrellas. While Wabash Plaza does have room for a restaurant on its lower east end, it wisely does not follow the typical consumer-driven model, instead giving pride of place to the memorial. The simple, dignified words "Chicago Remembers" are chiseled into Wacker Drive's retaining walls.

Barney's mix of modernism and classicism creates an appropriate visual tension for a war that was one of the most controversial in the nation's history. The design is too literary, perhaps -- more a reading memorial where the stone walls resemble the two-dimensional pages of a book rather than the three-dimensional spaces of a building.

But she employs water to great advantage, not simply using it to tie the plaza to the river but to shape a space and form a mood. Standing on a granite bridge between the niche and the fountain, you are surrounded by waters flowing down the niche and the fountain's waters. Here, where the number of the dead seems overwhelming, the spatial tension created by the water also is at its highest. To escape this confined space is to feel a sense of release. The waters of the river seem peaceful by comparison.

As we know from the healing experience of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, no public space is complete until people occupy it. Nevertheless, it appears that Wabash Plaza is destined to be a considerable success, in large part because it is much more than a simple riverfront park. It is about tragedy as well as pleasure, confronting history as well as escaping from the everyday, intensity as well as relaxation. This is a very good beginning for the chain of riverfront parks and plazas that could well become Chicago's next great public space.

----------

bkamin@tribune.com

spyguy

November 6th, 2005, 05:42 PM

Nicely written. I'm hopeful that it will be a great success as well, and will be a gathering point for many years to come.

Chi_Coruscant

November 6th, 2005, 05:52 PM

Chicago couldn't find a better location for its own Vietnam Veterans Memorial than the corner of Mich Ave/Wacker Dr. Last Fri evening which was warm, there is a huge throng of people congregating on all corners on that intersection, walking and mingling with others. Wabash Plaza would be benefited even more when TTC is completed.

spyguy

November 10th, 2005, 11:55 PM

http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/chi-0511090385nov10,1,3353531.story?coll=chi-leisure-utl

Chicago garages: Aesthetic afterthought?

By Blair Kamin
Tribune architecture critic
Published November 10, 2005

The garage was, is, and always will be the backside of Chicago architecture, the poor stepsister of the house, an aesthetic afterthought. Every once in a while, though, you stumble upon one that sings.

Take Doug Utigard's garage in Edgewater. It's got a white and robin's egg blue paint job, a nicely detailed barnlike roof and diagonal woodwork that enlivens its old-fashioned swing doors. All that makes it a perfect match for Utigard's 98-year-old house. But Utigard long ago tired of squeezing his station wagon into the garage. It's now a storage shed for his 14-foot aluminum fishing boat -- and it may not be there forever.

"I hope I don't have to deal with historical landmark status in case I want a bigger boat," Utigard said.

While the Great Fire of 1871 typically forms the great divide in Chicago's history, there is another way to cleave the city's past: B.C. and A.C. (Before Cars and After Cars), which also means B.G. and A.G. (Before Garages and After Garages). Once the car appeared in the early years of the 20th Century, it forever changed the character of Chicago's alleys by forcing the construction of thousands of garages, just as it would later alter the landscape of suburbia with shopping malls and highways.

In the pre-car era, according to Chicago's cultural historian Tim Samuelson, chest-high solid-board fences screened Chicago backyards from alleys. The iceman came through the alley, along with the peddler and the coal deliveryman. If people had horses, they kept them in stables elsewhere. Then the car appeared, a fragile piece of machinery with a cloth roof. It needed protection from the rain and snow. By the 1920s, the city's alleys were lined with walls of garages.

"If somebody was living in Chicago in the 1890s or 1900s and then came back 20 years later, they would be really surprised at the character of the alleys," Samuelson said. "The old alley was a service entrance to the back of the house. Suddenly, it became a thoroughfare with traffic driving down it."

The first garages, built at the turn of the century, were modeled on horse barns. They were large, boxy and made of wood. You can still find that equestrian look in Edgewater, where the swing doors of some garages are decorated with X-shapes inside a square. "We call that the `Mr. Ed' effect," Samuelson said, referring to the 1960s TV sitcom that featured a talking horse, Mr. Ed, and his owner, an architect named Wilbur Post.

Early garages were for the well-to-do; cars weren't cheap. Some had their own gas pumps, a real convenience because gas was bought by the bucket in repair shops and general stores. Standardized gas stations didn't appear until a decade later.

As cars became affordable in the 1910s, garages multiplied in a variety of looks, giving the city's alleys their lively, slightly discombobulated character. They were built of wood with pitched roofs or of brick with flat roofs. Some had sliding doors, like those on barn doors. Others had swinging doors on hinges. Whenever it snowed, the car owner had to shovel a vast swath of ground to open the swinging doors. Overhead doors appeared in the 1930s.

By the 1920s, the market for garages was so strong that a slew of companies advertised model plans in the phone book. One ad, from a company specializing in cold storage plants, promised an insulated garage "built like a Refrigerator." Water in a car's engine, the ad claimed, would not freeze when the outside temperature was 15 degrees below zero.

In the 1950s and 1960s, companies such as Danley's Garage World took up where the garage specialists of the 1920s had left off, offering not just prototype garages, but showrooms where customers could view the models. The company claims to have erected more than 150,000 garages in the Chicago area since 1959. Its Web site even offers garages that hark back to the barn look -- quite a shift from its typical, stamped-out garages.

Unfortunately, many new Chicago garages are far less alluring. Some are made of the same ugly concrete block that forms the side walls of the detested three-flat condominium buildings. Developers of six-unit condominiums are further blighting alleys with metal gates that control access to rear parking lots and devour space. Forget about neighbors socializing over the fence. The gates, which fail to hide cars as garages do, look like something out of "Blade Runner."

BVictor1

November 13th, 2005, 04:07 PM

HIGH ANXIETY
Tall and thin may be the future, but city's mission must be to see the light -- and patches of blue -- as its new, dazzling towers reach for the sky

By Blair Kamin
Tribune architecture critic
Published November 13, 2005

http://www.chicagotribune.com/media/graphic/2005-11/20457292.jpg

Chicago has long been a city of cloud busting skyscrapers, but its latest push toward the sky is enough to make jaws drop, eyes pop and start alarm bells ringing.

Every week, it seems, a rendering of a new tower is splashed across the front page or the business page in the hopes of generating positive "buzz" and attracting potential buyers and investors.

Some of this may be pure hucksterism. Nothing like a sexy architect's rendering to drum up a prospective tenant or two. Still, every proposal bears watching. It's the ugly one we ignore that -- surprise! -- will get built.

The trend goes beyond the biggest headline grabbers, the 2,000-footers that have spawned nicknames such as "the Drill Bit" and "the Tweezer Tower." Not since the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the Sears Tower, the Standard Oil Building (now the Aon Center) and the John Hancock Center redefined the Chicago skyline, have there been such spectacular possibilities for aesthetic payoffs and pratfalls. At stake in this profusion of residential towers and one proposed broadcast tower is the character of North Michigan Avenue, the lakefront, the riverfront and the walls of buildings flanking Grant Park. The skyline is sure to assume a new center of gravity along a new Gold Coast -- the once-foul Chicago River, where Donald Trump's much-hyped, 1,361-foot hotel and condo tower soon will rise out of a construction pit, and more giants may follow.

None of this is accidental. With little public discussion, Mayor Daley's administration has made a dramatic policy reversal, encouraging great height rather than forcing developers to make their towers shorter. At the House of Daley, where the city's architectural cloth gets cut, tall and thin is in. Short and squat is out. It is, on the whole, a change for the better.

City planners envision a skyline comprising pencil thin "point" towers that leave space around them for light and air. When it works, it should be dazzling, offering the best of both worlds -- great height without overwhelming congestion.

Yet all architecture, like all politics, is local. Tall towers do not belong everywhere. Some stand to do as much harm as good, canyonizing streets, dwarfing waterfronts or marring the skyline with bizarre Buck Rogers silhouettes. The emphasis on bigness still has to come to terms with smallness -- the shops, restaurants and other human-scaled features that give cities their accidental, quirky appeal.

Almost no one suggests that Chicago adopt a highly prescriptive set of design rules that would mandate the shape of towers. That could well kill off a building boom that is the envy of other cities and staunch the city's celebrated tradition of innovation.

But there is a need for the city to develop a planning framework that offers specific guidelines about where tall towers should go, how they can be placed so they block as few views as possible, and how they should behave at ground level to avoid the sort of city-deadening blank walls that now blight River North.

Such guidelines offer the prospect of carefully managed growth instead of unchecked, Dodge City growth, a specter that became very real last month when developers J. Paul Beitler and LR Development Co. unveiled plans for a 2,000-foot broadcast tower along the lakefront.

The plan, it turns out, was a slick switcheroo.

For months, the Streeterville Organization of Active Residents (SOAR), a respected neighborhood group, negotiated with LR over a condominium tower of about 60 stories that was to rise on the west side of Lake Shore Drive just across from Lake Point Tower. Chicago architect Ralph Johnson of Perkins & Will, who has produced some of the city's finest residential towers, designed the structure, whose details haven't been made public. SOAR members were happy with the broad strokes of Johnson's design and with details such as a dog run.

Then they woke up on Oct. 25 and read the front-page story about the broadcast tower, designed by New Haven, Conn., architect Cesar Pelli.

"Basically, it's a giant utility pole," said Brian Hopkins, a SOAR board member.

Following the route usually taken by developers, Beitler and LR only pictured their plan when they announced the tweezer-shaped tower, conveniently ignoring another planned 2,000-foot skyscraper just a few blocks to the south, Santiago Calatrava's Fordham Spire, which would be shaped like a giant drill bit.

Calatrava's design, which still must be financed and receive city approval, appears astonishingly graceful when it stands alone, an extraordinary piece of architectural sculpture that marks a special place in the city, the meeting of the lakefront and the river.

But with the broadcast tower alongside it, as pictured in a composite photo prepared for this story, it looks like one-half of the world's largest set of football goal posts.

This is but one example of the costs of unchecked growth.

Chicago's explosion of tall towers is at once a real estate phenomenon and an urban planning phenomenon, illustrating how quickly ideas from one city can migrate to another in the global age.

One reason for the tall towers, real estate experts say, is that developers have moved from secondary sites, such as the West Loop and the western flanks of River North, to marquee locations, such as North Michigan Avenue. There, land is more expensive and the developers need to build taller so they can make a profit.

Then there is the Trump factor. The developer and reality TV star has pushed Chicago's luxury condominium market to new physical and financial heights, blazing a trail that competitors lust to follow. Trump reportedly is getting stratospheric prices at his Trump International Hotel & Tower -- about $1,000 a square foot, up from roughly $675 a foot when he started selling condos there a few years ago.

"Other developers are looking at his numbers and drooling," says Gail Lissner, vice president of Chicago-based Appraisal Research Counselors.

Last but hardly least is City Hall's changing attitude toward tall buildings, a shift that reflects the growing influence of Vancouver in urban planning circles.

Why Vancouver? Because it offers an eminently livable model of tall, thin high-rise towers set on townhouse podiums.

That prototype clearly is familiar to key city planners, including Lori Healey, the city's new commissioner of Planning and Development, and Sam Assefa a former San Francisco planner who is Daley's deputy chief of staff for economic and physical development.

Assefa helped encourage Chicago architects David Haymes and George Pappageorge to stretch their planned One Museum Park condo tower at the southern end of Grant Park to 720 feet from an initial proposed height of 450 feet. That move shocked the architects, who recognized that the site demanded a commanding presence, but were used to the city's old ways of knocking down height to make towers palatable to neighbors.

"They said: `Can't you make it taller?' We were taken aback by that," Haymes said.

Healey said: "There has been a growing movement in the design community to educate the development world that tall, slender buildings are not bad things . . . [They allow] developers and their architects to be innovative."

Of that, there is little doubt. Look at the contrast between the tall and thin Park Tower, which soars 844 feet above the sidewalk at 800 N. Michigan, and the short and squat Peninsula Hotel building, which sits just to its south at 730-750 N. Michigan, and you see the basic wisdom in the city's shift.

Yes, the mansard-roofed Park Tower, which was designed by Lucien Lagrange Architects, looks like a big yellow rocket ship and could have been more architecturally daring. But it's still a good piece of urban design, with elegant proportions and a silhouette that doesn't overwhelm the neighboring park around the old Chicago Water Tower.

By contrast, the 20-story Peninsula building is a stump, a five-star hotel with a one-star public face.

More skinny towers are on the way, and with Daley warming to adventurous design in the wake of Millennium Park's success, they promise to be fresh and modern rather than tried-and-true traditional.

One intriguing example, now under construction at 340 E. Randolph Drive and designed by Solomon Cordwell Buenz, will soar 672 feet and will include a 25th-floor winter garden with exterior glass walls that open in warm weather, allowing residents to proceed onto a terrace and gaze over Millennium Park.

But top-of-the-line amenities for affluent buyers by no means guarantee the quality of the public realm we all inhabit.

As towers rise, so do concerns about snarled traffic, blocked views and pedestrians being blown off their feet by downdrafts that woosh off the sides of skyscrapers. Density is good because it means people can walk or take public transit to their jobs instead of driving. But when it takes 10 minutes to drive a few blocks in Streeterville at rush hour, are we starting to reach the limits of density?

Streeterville is especially vulnerable to congestion at street level, for unlike the Illinois Center mega-development south of the Chicago River, it has no three-tiered subterranean circulation system. Thank goodness for that. But this means Streeterville's narrow, at-grade street grid must carry the load -- delivery vans, garbage trucks, taxis, even the pizza guy.

Such quality-of-life concerns transcend architecture, suggesting that there is far more to the debate over the city's growth than the graceful presence of towers on the skyline. Indeed, while the design standards of the new towers are head and shoulders above the concrete hulks of River North, good architecture in some cases may not be enough.

A fresh example is the newly announced proposal that would replace the banal north tower of the InterContinental Chicago hotel on North Michigan Avenue with an 850-foot hotel and condominium skyscraper while leaving intact the hotel's 42-story Art Deco south tower. The plan, designed by Lucien Lagrange Architects, calls for a glass-sheathed tower that would rise straight up from the North Michigan Avenue sidewalk.

And that has the potential to cause great trouble.

Even though the architectural quality of buildings along North Michigan Avenue has declined precipitously in recent years, it remains a delightful place to walk -- not a darkened canyon, like LaSalle Street, but a boulevard with abundant sunlight and patches of blue sky. The chief reason for this blessing is that nearly all the very tall buildings along North Michigan, from the John Hancock Center to Lagrange's own Park Tower, have towers that are set back from the street, either behind plazas, parks or retail podiums.

The InterContinental proposal offers something very different. While it would have notches in its upper reaches, there would be no setbacks. The architecture is appealing enough, at first glance, and could, with considerable tweaking, form an elegant backdrop for the Art Deco tower to its south.

But if the building rises without a significant setback, it might open the door to other, very tall towers along North Michigan. And that would risk turning the street into a darkened canyon.

Trump's tower offers a taller, bulkier variation on this theme.

No one doubts the ability of its architects, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill of Chicago, to superbly detail the giant. What remains very much in question, however, is whether Trump's mega-tower will overwhelm the riverfront with the substantial girth of its clifflike southern wall. The squat Chicago Sun-Times building that used to occupy the site looked, at best, like a marooned river barge. But at least its seven stories didn't hog the sky.

All this demands a question: Can the city do a better job guiding where tall towers go?

Healey, the planning commissioner, expressed satisfaction with the way things work. When it comes to the placement of skyscrapers, "we respond to the private sector," she said.

Asked if that means the Department of Planning and Development is essentially passive, more like the Department of Reacting and Development, she responded that Chicago does guide growth by regulating density. Many of the new tall buildings, she added, are actually less dense than zoning laws allow.

It's true that Chicago's Planning Unit Development zoning category has been an effective, if secretive, arm-twisting device for winning public amenities. But typically, as the pitiful public art and other decorations tacked onto the bases of the monstrous high-rises of River North reveal, these efforts amount to little more than damage control -- the regulatory equivalent of perfuming the pig.

Why not develop flexible planning guidelines that direct growth in advance rather than forcing planners to engage in futile rear-guard actions?

Architect Johnson, whose credits include the acclaimed Skybridge and Contemporaine high-rises, offers some answers: He suggests that the city spell out where conventional wall-like buildings should go (along Grant Park and the lakefront) and where tall "point" towers would be appropriate (behind the clifflike lakefront wall). City planners, he adds, also could encourage developers to provide lively streetscapes instead of brute walls, lining parking podiums with townhouses, plus the shops and restaurants that provide essential neighborhood gathering places.

"A framework like this might make sense out of what we are doing," Johnson wrote in a series of sketches laying out his ideas. "It's at least better than nothing."

He's right. Without more fine-grained tools to guide growth, Chicago risks becoming a city of mega-projects where the small gets lost in the big and the big is placed indiscriminately amid the cityscape with devastating consequences.

There is a difference between a vital city and a healthy city. In a healthy city, traffic is not perpetually snarled, tall towers inspire awe rather than fear, and there is not a Darwinian struggle for access to light and views. Chicago's reach for the sky is heading in the right direction, but it must be refined if the cityscape is to reach its highest, humanistic potential -- truly healthy rather than merely vital.

----------

bkamin@tribune.com

http://www.chicagotribune.com/media/graphic/2005-11/20457346.jpg

Frumie

November 13th, 2005, 06:14 PM

Blair knocked one out of the park! His article has a half-dozen or so architectural gtuidelines for healthy city growth that we forumers should bring to bear whenever we are looking at a new skyscraper in the offing. There's a lot more to rave about than mere height and density. It is a remarkable change to tall and thin. Townhouse and retail pedestals would be a welcomed change from the "plop architecture" of highrise on a garage. State Place is a good example, at least I hope so.

ThirdCoast312

November 13th, 2005, 08:51 PM

I REALLY WANT TO SEE THE DESIGN BY PERKINS & WILL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! why can't they just build it like they were going to?? Everyone seems to wants it, including even SOAR. For every piece of shit lowenberg building in the city there needs to be a Perkins & Will ralph johnson designed building to counter-act!!!!!!

UrbanSophist

November 13th, 2005, 09:43 PM

The Vancouverization of Chicago.... ;)

I initially really hated that Pelli design, but its started to grow on me ever so slightly.

I think it would be even cooler if they would propose a second FS on the other side of the Chicago river, and then they could light up at night like torches. ;) Ah well.

Chi_Coruscant

November 13th, 2005, 10:15 PM

For months, the Streeterville Organization of Active Residents (SOAR), a respected neighborhood group, negotiated with LR over a condominium tower of about 60 stories that was to rise on the west side of Lake Shore Drive just across from Lake Point Tower. Chicago architect Ralph Johnson of Perkins & Will, who has produced some of the city's finest residential towers, designed the structure, whose details haven't been made public. SOAR members were happy with the broad strokes of Johnson's design and with details such as a dog run.

Then they woke up on Oct. 25 and read the front-page story about the broadcast tower, designed by New Haven, Conn., architect Cesar Pelli.

SOAR must've felt betrayed by LR. They thought they struck a deal with LR over design of 60-story tower. So, instead, they got a gigantic utility pole. Will SOAR find a way to kill the proposal? Lately, we haven't heard SOAR's fierece opposition against TV Tower.

BVictor1

November 13th, 2005, 10:31 PM

SOAR must've felt betrayed by LR. They thought they struck a deal with LR over design of 60-story tower. So, instead, they got a gigantic utility pole. Will SOAR find a way to kill the proposal? Lately, we haven't heard SOAR's fierece opposition against TV Tower.

You never know, maybe that is just a ploy to negotiate an additional 20 floors onto the P&W design:)

geoff_diamond

November 14th, 2005, 08:01 AM

Great article. I find one flaw with it though... the discussion regarding the canyonization of Michigan Avenue. Were Michigan a street with pleanty of available real-estate, I could see Kamin's concern; but, the reality is that 90% of the buildings on the Mile aren't going anywhere because they're too new or too vital to the infrastructure. So, if a few clunkers (like the north tower of the InterContinental or the little guy that houses House of Brides) bite the dust and are replaced with street-fronting towers that would never turn Michigan into LaSalle.

spyguy

December 17th, 2005, 12:07 AM

http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/chi-0512150210dec15,1,3231612.story?ctrack=1&cset=true

Rather than more icons, city needs truly coherent vision

By Blair Kamin
Tribune architecture critic
Published December 15, 2005

Stanley Tigerman deserves our thanks for continually stirring Chicago's architectural pot, but he needs a better spoon than the one he wields in "Visionary Chicago Architecture: Fourteen Inspired Concepts for the Third Millennia." It's hard to do cartwheels over this exhibition at the Graham Foundation and an eponymous book, even though they float at least one startlingly creative idea, Helmut Jahn's plan for a "sailtower" (half kinetic sculpture, half viewing platform) on Northerly Island.

Sponsored by the Chicago Central Area Committee, an influential business group, and co-organized by Tigerman and the committee's urban planner, William Martin, "Visionary Chicago Architecture" offers a stale taste to anyone familiar with Tigerman's tiresome habit of deliberately pairing opposites to generate a provocative bang.

Two teams of architects (one younger, the other more established) were challenged to design competing pairs of plans for seven sites in the downtown area, from Chinatown on the south to the Ohio/Ontario Street feeder ramp on the north. Their discussions were recorded as they showed each other their designs. Excerpts reveal sharp insights as well as blinding flashes of arrogance, as when Brad Lynch introduces his idea for a massive Chinatown transportation hub.

"I've ignored all of the development and planning north of Wentworth Avenue for the last 10 years," he says.

"Did you tear my building down?" interjects Jeanne Gang, the designer of a new Chinatown community center.

"Yes, I did," Lynch replies.

"It just opened up," Gang fires back.

Lynch's plan turns out to be less mean-spirited than his tone, but you wonder how the people of Chinatown are going to feel when they read about it.

The exhibition at the Graham Foundation is equally undemocratic, despite the openness suggested by having the architects pin up drawings on the walls, as if they had stopped midway through the design process for a jury to review the work.

Only the architects' names appear above their sketches, as if promoting their work is more important than the projects themselves. A single text panel explaining the designs is relegated to an out-of-the-way spot, making it extremely difficult for non-architects to decipher what's on the wall. The exhibition wins this year's Pritzker Prize for lack of clarity.

This is an astonishing lapse, given that many of the architects are proposing icons we'll have to live with, not icons that we visit, such as Cloud Gate and the Crown Fountain in Millennium Park.

Should we just trust them and leave it at that? Are these projects part of a larger framework for growth or are they virtuoso star turns intent upon demonstrating something we already know -- that Chicago has regained its architectural edge?

Besides, why does everything these days need to be an icon? Is there no room in the cityscape for humble everyday buildings, which a distinct minority of the architects, such as Tom Beeby, are content to offer?

These are real questions because Chicago completed a fine central area plan just three years ago and this plan pretty much ignores it.

Bold initiatives

The earlier effort, led by Phil Enquist of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, laid out some bold initiatives, including a West Loop Transportation Center along Clinton Street west of the Chicago River, where buses, trains and high-speed rail would converge. It's not sexy, with drawings that make you say "Wow," but at least it's comprehensive. "Visionary Chicago Architecture," on the other hand, is desperate to be sexy, but it's not at all comprehensive. We seem to be going backward from the days when grand urban visions, such as Daniel Burnham and Edward Bennett's 1909 Plan of Chicago, gave us both.

Without a framework, we're left with episodic proposals. Some flop. Others fly. As at last year's Tigerman-directed exhibition at the Art Institute, "Chicago Architecture: Ten Visions," the problem is not a lack of energy, but a lack of focus and sharply defined positions. Despite a smattering of green-design initiatives and a tendency toward modernism, there's nothing approximating a "school" from which others can learn -- not even a coherent set of clashing design philosophies

Some of the proposals are so dreamy that they invite instant dismissal. Take John Ronan's idea of turning the old Post Office into a municipal mausoleum and putting funeral barges on the Chicago River. Just what every business leader wants--a symbol of death at the doorway to downtown. Despite a beautifully designed open-air exterior that would bring light and air into crypt areas, this proposal, pardon the expression, is DOA.

Practical to visionary

The Burnham Plan had power and persuasiveness because it went from the practical (getting traffic moving on Chicago's clogged streets) to the visionary (turning the Hog Butcher to the World into Paris on the Prairie). Yet even the better of these plans strain to get from the visionary to the practical.

I love Doug Garofalo's idea of placing the headquarters of the Chicago Architecture Foundation in a shimmering bulge high above the superstructure of the "El." But I can't bring myself to believe that there will ever be sheep and cows grazing on a new deck above the elevated tracks, as he suggests.

In a similar limbo between reality and fantasy is Gang's plan to turn the Ohio/Ontario feeder ramp into a ramp that feeds (now there's a Burnhamesque epigram). Her smart idea: Put highly productive hothouses, where you could grow food, on bridges over the ramp. The pyramid-shaped hothouses would communicate Daley's program to "green" Chicago and connect neighborhoods. The rub is whether pollution from cars and trucks would render the whole thing moot.

Then there's Dirk Lohan's intriguing, if overscaled, plan to break down Chinatown's physical isolation and give it a recognizable icon (there's the I-word again). He suggests a very tall, round, X-braced parking garage tower with a pagoda-like top.

"How tall is it," Beeby asks.

"1,054 feet with an observation deck on top," Lohan answers.

"Who would like his car a thousand feet in the air?" Jahn inquires.

It is telling that the most appealing of all the plans, Jahn's sailtower, is, like the Millennium Park sculptures, a giant folly set apart from the everyday city and, thus, its nagging realities. Proposed to rise 550 feet, it, too, strives for instant icon status -- and would almost certainly achieve it.

Wind would turn the sailtower, which would double as a giant LED screen. Park visitors could take stairs and elevators to sample the drop-dead views. Alongside the tower would be a new amphitheater and a covered walkway along the former Meigs Field runway. The walkway would shelter a variety of exhibits. Lagoons and lawns would spread out from the former taxiways.

This tour de force promises to extend the magic of Millennium Park to Northerly Island, creating an extraordinary vertical marker for a horizontal expanse of parkland. Jahn may be an architect of no small ego, but it's still a pleasure to read his self-deprecating prose, which acknowledges that he is not silver-tongued. "Only with a fountain pen," he writes, "can I put my thoughts and ideas to paper and start realizing them."

If this design gets built someday, it would almost single-handedly justify the adventurous, but unpersuasive "Visionary Chicago Architecture." Tigerman and Martin have done good by raising the bar for design downtown and putting some memorable images in Chicago's collective visual memory bank. Yet if the city is to continue its architectural ascent, a truly coherent vision is needed, one that more effectively joins planning and architecture, poetics and pragmatics. That's the best way to stir the pot.

The exhibition, "Visionary Chicago Architecture," appears at the Graham Foundation, 4 W. Burton Place, through Jan. 5. It can be seen from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Thursday.

spyguy

January 8th, 2006, 06:05 PM

http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/chi-0601070082jan07,1,1129880.story?coll=chi-leisure-utl

Another jewel of Sullivan's legacy lost

By Blair Kamin
Tribune architecture critic
Published January 7, 2006

This was to be a happy year in the often-tragic annals of Louis Sullivan--the 150th anniversary of the great Chicago architect's birth will be celebrated Sept. 3--but it is beginning instead with more tragedy: the destruction of his Pilgrim Baptist Church, originally a synagogue where his partner, Dankmar Adler, was a member.

The church died by fire, only a few months after Sullivan's gray-shingled cottage in Ocean Springs, Miss., was destroyed by water--the storm surge pushed ashore by Hurricane Katrina. Sullivan's masterpieces also have perished in more conventional ways. Wreckers brought down his Schiller Building and Chicago Stock Exchange Building in the 1960s and 1970s, leading to the birth of the historic preservation movement in Chicago.

Sullivan got the synagogue job the old-fashioned way--through connections. Adler, the other half of Adler & Sullivan, was a faithful member of the religious institution, called Kehilath Anshe Ma'ariv, .

Located at 3301 S. Indiana Ave., the 115-year-old building was a muscular block of masonry, with rounded arches that reflected the influence of architect Henry Hobson Richardson. A smaller block with a steeply-pitched roof rose abruptly from this base.

Despite the presence of Sullivan's intricate, foliage-inspired ornament, the exterior's effect was "hard and cold," his biographer, Hugh Morrison, wrote in "Louis Sullivan: Prophet of Modern Architecture."

But the building's interior exhibited the same dazzling synthesis of architecture and engineering, spatial drama and superior acoustics that Adler and Sullivan realized in their more-famous Auditorium Building. In its soaring congregation hall, the walls were a showcase for decorative bands of terra cotta--"among the richest examples of Sullivan's work," Morrison called them.

Now, like so much of Sullivan's work, the synagogue, which was declared an official Chicago landmark in 1981, is a shell. Even as there is reason to tingle with anticipation over the soon-to-be-completed restoration of Sullivan's masterful Carson Pirie Scott store in the Loop, there is occasion to mourn: Every time a Sullivan building dies, Chicago is that much more cut off from the wellspring of its architectural greatness.

spyguy

January 8th, 2006, 06:07 PM

http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/chi-0601070283jan08,1,2637212.story?coll=chi-leisure-utl

One South Dearborn reflects beauty of thinking inside the box

By Blair Kamin
Tribune architecture critic
Published January 8, 2006

Boxes are so out of fashion in these days of twisting, torquing, computer-generated architecture that the new and unapologetically boxy One South Dearborn office building comes as a sweet surprise. The 40-story tower makes a handsome skyline statement, carves out a civilized little plaza along Dearborn Street and reveals dazzling views of the Inland Steel Building, the shimmery, midcentury modernist masterpiece next door. Maybe this story should be headlined "Beauty and the Box."

Of course, there's a difference between any old box and a beautifully finessed box, and architects Richard Keating and James DeStefano have achieved the latter in this cool but hardly standoffish tower. Working against classic Chicago constraints -- a tight time frame and budget -- they have created architecture worthy of Dearborn Street, which is lined with history-book buildings that tell the story of the sky-scraper.

True, the tower has some less-than-perfect details and it exhibits no conceptual breakthroughs that will lead to the sort of hysteria that typically accompanies the opening of a geometrically outlandish building by the likes of Frank Gehry or Zaha Hadid. But so what? Good is good. This is the kind of tough but refined beauty that makes Chicago Chicago.

One South holds down the southeast corner of Dearborn and Madison Streets, a site that attracted widespread attention in 1999 because it was the proposed site for a world's tallest building. That superskinny tower, the 112-story 7 South Dearborn, proved to be a developer's pipedream. So nothing much happened on this high-profile Loop corner until early 2003 when the law firm Sidley Austin Brown & Wood (now just plain Sidley Austin) signed on as the anchor tenant for an office building being developed by Hines, the big international real estate outfit.

Enter Keating and DeStefano, both alumni of the Chicago office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, who formed a partnership in early 2003. The Los Angeles-based Keating, the project's chief designer, has done a distinguished series of corporate towers, including Texas' Chase Tower, a 55-story Dallas high-rise with a 75-foot-high, 27-foot-wide opening, or "sky window," near its summit. The Chicago-based DeStefano also has considerable high-rise experience, having served as the supervising architect for projects such as the R.R. Donnelley Building at 77 W. Wacker Drive. Unfortunately, their partnership did not survive this building -- too bad, in light of their superior performance.

One South, which consists of an eight-story base housing a lobby, tenant parking and mechanical floors with the standard stack of office floors above, may be a box, but it's easily more playful than those banal cereal boxes that gave International Style modernism a bad name in the 1960s and 1970s. Let's call its disciplined, but freed-up, aesthetic "relaxed rationalism."

The most visible example of this loosening-up comes at the tower's top where Keating and DeStefano extend the building's east and west walls beyond the roofline with a slab of textured, translucent glass. Purists may sneer that this device resembles an Old West false front. Yet the glass screens simultaneously hide rooftop mechanical equipment and give the building's top a pleasing see-through character.

The architects further enriched the screen with an off-center cutout, or aperture, roughly 90 feet square. It consists of a wall of frosted glass that tilts inward. Beneath it is a balcony for Sidley's two-floor conference center. Keating has done this sort of thing before -- in effect slicing into a building and scooping out a void -- but rarely with such felicitous impact.

A giant light box

When the cutout is lit from behind at night, it becomes a striking beacon, making the aperture a superscale light box rather than a dark window. Even during the day, the cutout gives this relatively short tower a distinct skyline identity as it peers over the old masonry buildings facing Millennium Park.

To the architects' credit, the cutout's diagonal geometry introduces an effective visual leitmotif rather than being a one-liner.

It reappears, for example, in the saw-toothed translucent glass towers that protrude from One South's black granite base along Madison Street. Their sole function is to enliven that otherwise monolithic facade and to echo the visual rhythms of bay windows on the nearby Chicago Building. The architects clearly have thought through how this building will appear from different vantage points in the cityscape. Indeed, though its massing is modern and asymmetrical, One South has an appealing, three-part arrangement of bottom, middle and top that subtly recalls the composition of historic, human-scaled Loop skyscrapers like the Marquette Building.

Perhaps the most inspired aspect of One South is not the building itself, however, but how it sits in the cityscape. Keating and DeStefano both worked at Inland Steel during their Skidmore years and their love for the Skidmore-designed building, still much admired for its graceful proportions, refined detailing and innovative layout, is palpable.

Rewards pedestrians

To showcase Inland, now called 30 W. Monroe St., they shifted One South back from Dearborn and toward State Street. That not only creates the plaza's roomlike space but also rewards pedestrians at the Madison-Dearborn corner with a new view of Inland's north facade, which used to be blocked by the turn-of-the-century office building that previously occupied the site. "It's the most beautiful wallpaper you've ever seen," DeStefano says.

The smartly furnished plaza, with its formal bosque of big red sugar maples and sensuous red-granite pavement, compensates for the tower's coolness and makes a modestly scaled addition to the string of grand public spaces along Dearborn (Daley Plaza, Chase Plaza and Federal Plaza). In the process it opens views of other surrounding towers, like the massive, slope-sided Chase Tower (the old First National Bank of Chicago tower), which soars over the plaza like a giant clothespin.

There is more visual richness as you approach the lobby. Above the main entrance, a backlit wall of thinly sliced, glass-encased marble shields the parking garage and provides a rich contrast with Inland's steel and glass exterior. Highly transparent glass walls ensure that the lobby's chief art feature, a pair of richly textured, cast-glass walls, is in effect, a work of public art, easily visible to passersby.

The lobby itself manages to be grandly scaled but not grandiose. It's sheathed in handsome slabs of white and gray marble without recalling a mausoleum. One gemlike touch: Hunks of recycled glass -- "glass fists," Keating calls them -- which are laid in the floor like rocks in a Japanese garden. Lit from below, they give the floor a dazzling sheen, striking up a conversation with the reflective ceiling in Inland's lobby.

One South's office floors are nice enough, with their floor-to-ceiling glass windows, but otherwise unremarkable. The lone exception occurs in the building's northwest and southeast corners, which continue the building's diagonal motif with small, saw-toothed window bays. That adds a little zip to the exterior and gives big shots in their corner offices the thrill of standing on a glass-encased ledge.

Now the faults: One South's exterior was supposed to be more vigorously sculptural, but the architects lost a battle with the developers in their effort to create deeply recessed covers for the building's steel columns. Keating and DeStefano also over-finessed things a bit when they gave a portion of the plaza-facing wall a more glassy look in an attempt to echo Inland Steel's 19-story height. The combined impact of these shortcomings brings One South's exterior perilously close to flatness, leaving it short of the high architectural standard set by its muscular, midcentury neighbor.

Still, this is one of the most civilized office buildings to rise of late in the Loop, ranking with the new, football-shaped Hyatt Center as a bright spot in the cityscape. It manages to enhance its surroundings even as it makes a statement of its own. And that statement is all about the grace the architects have squeezed out of (and carved into) the box, enlivening the shape that remains the basic building block of cities.

spyguy

February 19th, 2006, 05:26 PM

Carsons restoration would make Sullivan smile

By Blair Kamin
Tribune architecture critic
Published February 19, 2006

The great Chicago architect Louis Sullivan lived a roller-coaster of a life, ascending to the heights of his profession with soaring skyscrapers and ideas, then plummeting to a hellish existence that found him penniless and without work when he died. This year, which marks the 150th anniversary of Sullivan's birth, is proving no different -- a whiplash-inducing mix of triumph and tragedy.

Less than two months after fire severely damaged the Pilgrim Baptist Church, originally a Chicago synagogue designed by Sullivan and his partner Dankmar Adler, the restoration of one of his masterpieces, the Carson Pirie Scott & Co. store at 1 S. State St., is nearly complete. Around 1948, the store's lidlike top, or cornice, was sheared off, disfiguring one of the city's and the nation's finest works of architecture. Now, as part of a more than $60 million redevelopment that has turned the store's top five floors into rental offices, the cornice is back, along with recessed windows and columns that culminate in a burst of Sullivan's intricate, nature-inspired ornament.

Continued Here (http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/chi-0602180227feb19,1,1195411.story?coll=chi-leisure-utl)

spyguy

March 5th, 2006, 06:49 PM

Urban renewal and the soul index
Make downtown vital, not sterile

By Blair Kamin
Tribune architecture critic
Published March 5, 2006

If you love cities and their endless array of flavors, both culinary and architectural, then last week was a lousy week.

The Cambridge House, the no-nonsense Greek-owned diner off North Michigan Avenue, closed Monday. The Berghoff, the elegant old German restaurant in the Loop, shut down Tuesday. Two hits against old Chicago. The end for two locally owned and operated restaurants that ran against the tide of look-alike franchise eateries and coffee bars.

With them go decades of history and memories, as well as treasured gathering places for their neighborhood and their city. Hello progress. Goodbye soul. Their loss hurts, even to the architect who designed the sleek, 26-story condo tower that will rise where the Cambridge House once stood.

"We've had these old friends," said David Brininstool of the Chicago firm Brininstool & Lynch. "We're losing them and there's always that sense of loss. Until you find something else to fill your life, like that grandfather that just left your life, you have this sense of, `What's going on?' You don't know what's going to make your life pleasurable and comfortable."

Continued:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/chi-0603040223mar05,1,1064345.story?coll=chi-leisure-utl

The Urban Politician

March 5th, 2006, 08:15 PM

^ I"m glad you posted that, because I completely overlooked it while skimming the Tribune today

forumly_chgoman

March 5th, 2006, 09:26 PM

^^^^^another little joint we are going to lose to condos is the 'sea of happiness' a little dive bar about 25 by 15 at 640 wabash

I am all for development downtown.....but we need to incorporate 'joints' as well......otherwise we are left w/ boring homogenous sterility

wickedestcity

March 5th, 2006, 11:24 PM

http://www.suntimes.com/output/nance/sho-sunday-arch05-colum.html

and

http://www.suntimes.com/output/entertainment/sho-sunday-arch05-intro.html

^^ a few cool architecture articals on the paper today

i_am_hydrogen

February 12th, 2007, 05:47 PM

CHICAGO'S TWO-TRACK BUILDING BOOM
While there are hopeful signs of new modernism around the city, there also are some flops

By Blair Kamin
Tribune architecture critic
Published February 11, 2007

If you had asked most architects 25 years ago whether modern architecture could make a good city, the answer would have been a rousing "no." Wounded by spiritless steel-and-glass boxes and the social tumult at notorious public housing projects such as Cabrini-Green, the dominant style of the 20th Century was in full retreat, even in Chicago, the nation's pre-eminent stronghold of steel and glass.

Today, however, modernism is back, powered not only by the shifting winds of architectural fashion but also by things that have precious little to do with high design, including the drop-dead views -- and higher prices -- that floor-to-ceiling glass makes possible. Yet this revival, it turns out, is far from triumphal.

While the new modernism is producing hidden gems, such as 156 W. Superior St., a small-scale condominium building tucked away in River North, it is also turning out high-profile clunkers such as the apartment building called Left Bank at K Station, a 37-story hunk of concrete across the Chicago River from the elegant green-glass 333 W. Wacker Drive office building. Across South Lake Shore Drive from Soldier Field is a cacophony of new towers -- some modern, others postmodern -- that lacks the order and distinction of the great range of high-rises to the north.

All this speaks to a little-noticed trend: Chicago is in the middle of a two-track building boom. On one track are spectacular, high-profile designs such as Santiago Calatrava's proposal for the twisting, 2,000-foot Chicago Spire. The other track, far more pervasive, consists of smaller, less expensive projects that do far more to shape a city's quality of life.

And there are lots of them.

From 2000 to 2006, according to Daley administration officials, 29,000 residential units were constructed downtown. That's roughly 4,000 units a year, the equivalent of building a small town every 12 months.

A tour of the results suggests that creating good cities from the building blocks of modernism remains a significant challenge, even though architects and urban planners today are far more attuned to the need for good urban design than they were a quarter-century ago.

One of the hopeful signs can be found at 156 W. Superior St., a new condominium project that has received little attention, almost surely because it is just nine stories tall and sits at midblock on a low-profile street. Next door is a worn-down brick building whose outside wall is plastered with a sign for Ricci & Co., one of the Midwest's oldest nut wholesalers.

Designed by the Miller/Hull Partnership of Seattle and backed by Ranquist Development, the 11-unit building flaunts an eye-catching, structurally expressive exterior, whose exposed structural steel and X-shaped tension rods evoke in miniature the X-braced, 100-story John Hancock Center. The resemblance, it turns out, is no coincidence.

Depth and texture

Designer David Miller worked in the studio of Bruce Graham, the Hancock's architect, during a stint at the Chicago office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in 1974. In this case, the expressed structure lends the composition welcome depth and texture and gives it a presence that allows it to stand up to the much larger residential towers around it.

Another aesthetic flourish comes in the balconies, which measure a generous 12 by 7 feet, that run up the building's front and back. Miller wanted them to be real outdoor rooms, capable of accommodating a big table, not just tiny decks suitable for stashing a barbecue grill. The balconies give the 156 W. Superior a pleasing sculptural quality, with their rhythms of voids and solids. As a bonus, they're close enough to the sidewalk to encourage interaction with passersby -- a very different situation from high-rise balconies that are the equivalent of viewing the cityscape from a low-flying plane.

While the space gobbled up by street-level garages prevented Miller from sliding any stores into the building's ground floor, the project is nonetheless a model for in-fill housing. Here, in contrast to the slash-and-burn urban renewal programs of the 1960s, modernism wields a light touch, filling a vacant lot without brutally disrupting everything around it.

Chicago architect Laurence Booth used a comparable approach in his under-construction 30 W. Oak, a 24-story, 45-unit project that has a gently curving south face of floor-to-ceiling glass for open living spaces and a boxy north side of poured-in-place concrete for private sleeping spaces.

Building on the cheap

Scheduled to be completed in June, the building already is in elegant presence, floating like a dove above such heavy masonry neighbors as the muscular Newberry Library. To Booth, one of the "Chicago Seven" architects who revolted against modernist orthodoxy, the project demonstrates that the urban design tool of choice is the scalpel, not the meat cleaver.

"Building cities today is like rehabbing," he says. "You've got to deal with what's there. There's more pragmatism than a preconceived vision. I think that's good."

To be fair, the late, great master of steel and glass, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, also believed in the scalpel, as he demonstrated in the Chicago Federal Center and other developments that deftly created openings amid the chock-a-block density of the old city. Actually, it was another great modernist, the Swiss-born Le Corbusier, who proposed leveling great swaths of Paris in the 1920s. Mies did clearings in the forest; Le Corbusier was all about clear-cutting.

The enemy of both their visions was the developer who saw in modernism a chance for building on the cheap. The result produced such lifeless thickets as Illinois Center, the massive assemblage of office buildings and hotels that began rising south of the Chicago River in the 1970s.

Yet such exercises in form-follows-finance modernism are still with us, as the aforementioned Left Bank at K Station lamentably shows. While its name evokes the old bohemian quarter of Paris famous for its sidewalk cafes and gatherings of writers and artists, the tower actually is a squat chunk with serrated facades of glass and precast concrete.

Designed by Chicago architects DeStefano + Partners and located at 300 N. Canal St., Left Bank at K Station has principally been shaped by the dictates of the dollar -- large floor plates that are more profitable (or "efficient" in developer-speak) than small ones, plus a diagonally sliced facade that ensures tenants will enjoy views down the Chicago River even if new towers rise nearby.

The result is a bland vanilla box.

At less prominent sites, this lack of architectural ambition might be forgivable. At this showcase site -- along the bend in the Chicago River, with such extraordinary buildings as 333 Wacker and the Merchandise Mart in plain sight -- it represents the equivalent of wearing blue-jeans to an affair where the dress code is black-tie.

This is a classic case of a developer's private agenda trumping the public realm -- and a reminder that the brute forces of economics are still able to reduce modernism to a spiritless formula.

But it would be wrong to conclude, on the basis of that single project, that the new modernism is incapable of making good buildings -- or good cityscapes -- on a budget.

Aesthetic essentials

The plans that K Station's backer, Steven Fifield, unveiled Feb. 1 for the rest of the development -- a $750 million project of six apartment towers that will stretch westward from the river to Halsted Street -- promise a vibrant cluster of high-rises, a public park, a grocery store and lots of street-level commercial space.

Conceptually, this plan represents a significant step forward from 25 years ago: a recognition, as the late urbanologist Jane Jacobs argued, that neighborhoods hum when they have a mix of activities rather than a single use.

Even if the first of the new towers, now under construction at the southeast corner of Kinzie and Des Plaines Streets and designed by Chicago firm Pappageorge/Haymes, is not breathtakingly innovative, it deals cleverly with the constraints of a tight budget, turning the building's essentials into its aesthetic.

By slicing open the tower's corners with glass and making strongly vertical piers out of its exposed concrete structure, the architects simultaneously open views for large corner apartments and make this high-rise more like the thinner, graceful moderne skyscrapers of the 1920s than fat, brute slabs.

Assefa's stance critical

Significantly, Pappageorge/Haymes had help on K Station from city planners, particularly Sam Assefa, Daley's deputy commissioner for urban design, who has been the quiet prime mover behind the city's push for tall, thin towers rather than short, squat ones.

Assefa has been in his post for about 3 1/2 years. Shortly after arriving here from San Francisco, he quickly recognized that projects approved under his predecessors, such as the mishmash of towers across from Soldier Field, were a major lost opportunity.

Developers, Assefa says, "went out to maximize square footage and to increase efficiency and to maximize views. We started saying, `Well, no. We need to think about the public realm.'"

His stance is critical because it promises to end the disconnect between the Daley administration's generally splendid improvements to Chicago's streetscape and the unchecked, Dodge City growth it had allowed on the skyline. The brute concrete residential towers of River North exemplified the sorry outcome of the city's laissez-faire approach.

The new way already is bearing fruit in such designs as Pappageorge/Haymes' glassy, scallop-shaped 62-story tower now rising along Roosevelt Road across from the Museum Campus. Instead of the monotonous pair of 40-story hulks the firm originally designed, the new tower should join with a neighbor, also by Pappageorge/Haymes, to form a strong urban wall at Grant Park's south end. Appropriately, that will match the wall of skyscrapers on the park's west and north ends.

Will the tower be great architecture? Not necessarily. The renderings look a bit too Buck Rogers. But the quality of one building isn't the issue. The issue is the whole city. An enlightened public sector needs to keep on pushing for the public realm. That way, Chicago's new burst of modernism will come to full flower rather than backsliding to the bad old days of design on the cheap and slash and burn.

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bkamin@tribune.com

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