Why can't the 35th Street Bridge look more like Frank Gehry's BP Bridge?
Bridging the gap between utility and art
By Blair Kamin
Tribune architecture critic
Published January 29, 2007
Those idyllic aerial shots of Chicago's lakefront brought to you by organizers of the city's Olympic bid are dazzling, seductive and, in at least one significant respect, profoundly misleading.
Getting to the lakefront can be terrifying, forcing pedestrians to confront as many as 10 lanes of speeding cars or, worse, all those lanes of roaring traffic plus the equally daunting barrier of the Illinois Central railroad tracks.
So it is tantalizing to view proposals for improving access to (and along) the lakefront that have popped up in recent days. The Olympic village plan, unveiled last Tuesday and designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill of Chicago, calls for two pedestrian bridges across South Lake Shore Drive. Architect Santiago Calatrava's design for the 2,000-foot Chicago Spire, made public in early December, suggests two spans east of Lake Shore Drive to upgrade the chaotic downtown stretch of the lakefront bike path.
And last Thursday, the Chicago Architectural Club announced that three little-known New York designers had won its juried competition for a pedestrian link between Buckingham Fountain and the lakefront. Their provocative plan: Weave a series of rippling, landscaped pathways over a lowered stretch of the lakefront highway. While pedestrians ambled to the lake above, dramatic openings would bring shafts of natural light to cars racing below, "Blade Runner"-style, in a noir vision that seems right out of L.A.
Just one problem with all this: All bridges and underpasses are not created equal.
The difference between the ramrod-straight, rusting, rickety pedestrian bridges across South Lake Shore Drive and Frank Gehry's snaking, stainless steel-clad, sense-enlivening BP Bridge in Millennium Park is the difference between spirit-crushing utility and life-affirming art. That spectrum of possibilities is worth remembering.
The plans to improve lakefront access turn out to be all over the map.
Let's start with Skidmore's bridges, which are part of a brilliant urban design move to build the Olympic village on a deck above the truck parking lots south of McCormick Place. It's brilliant because it extends the Chicago tradition of creatively using the air rights above land in financially profitable and (sometimes) socially productive ways. Millennium Park, with its eye-popping public sculptures built over commuter railroad tracks, is the best example.
While the Olympic village is simply a concept, it is nonetheless deeply troubling. A row of almost-identical curving slabs -- they would house athletes during the Games and become condominiums afterward -- would march along the shoreline for nearly a mile. It looks like Brasilia-by-the-Lake. There's scant variety in the massing and expression of these midrises. The plan's bridges aren't much better.
Renderings show two of them leading across Lake Shore Drive to a shoreline park for athletes. Perhaps these depictions are simply meant to be placeholders. As pictured, though, they lower expectations for this piece of civic infrastructure, resembling expressway overpasses that were ordered out of a catalog . They're simply a way to get from Point A to Point B -- passageways, not places.
One of the bridges would be torn down after the Games, an astonishing act of shortsightedness given that this stretch of the south lakefront doesn't come close to meeting the standards of Chicago's 1973 Lakefront Protection Ordinance. It calls for bridges and underpasses to be placed at intervals of one-quarter mile. Any bridge that would improve lakefront access shouldn't be discarded like a disposable camera.
While Skidmore's bridge concepts are visually underwhelming, one of Calatrava's is grotesquely overwhelmingly -- his scheme for a towering, cable-stayed swing bridge that would rise east of the Lake Shore Drive bridge. His span appears perfectly in scale with the twisting, record-shattering Chicago Spire and dwarfs the Lake Shore Drive bridge's Art Deco towers. (His other proposed bridge, a low-slung span across Ogden Slip east of the drive, is suggested in the drawing.)
Makes perfect sense
Nonetheless, if you slither beneath Lake Shore Drive and venture east to the garbage-strewn, weed-infested outcropping where plans call for DuSable Park to be built in the next few years, you can see that the broad outlines of Calatrava's urban design plan for the Chicago Spire make eminent sense.
The two bridges would let pedestrians and cyclists move easily between the planned park and Navy Pier on the north and Grant Park on the south. Instead of being jammed into the crowded lower deck of the Lake Shore Drive bridge, people would be able to whirl through a new shoreline park, with spectacular waterfront views.
The Spire's developer, Dublin-based Garrett Kelleher, deserves credit for broadening his urban design vision beyond the skyscraper's site west of Lake Shore Drive. Now the question is: To what extent will he help pay for these infrastructure improvements -- which, one hopes, will reappear in less aggressive form.
Between the poles of Calatrava's over-the-top icon and Skidmore's banal bridges is the winning entry in the architecture club's competition, by a team from the New York firm of di Domenico + Partners: team leader Richard Alomar, a landscape architect; and two architects, Kenji Suzuki and Yonghyun Yu.
Like many winners of so-called ideas competitions (the club's contest had no official backing from the City of Chicago), this one is at once mind-opening and wildly impractical. But its underlying concept should help shape public debate over how to improve access to the shoreline public space known as Queen's Landing.
Queen's Landing got its name in 1959 when a red carpet was rolled across Lake Shore Drive, enabling the visiting Queen Elizabeth II to cross decorously from her yacht to Buckingham Fountain. In 2005, though, city traffic managers abruptly shut the dangerous Lake Shore Drive crosswalk between the fountain and Queen's Landing, forcing pedestrians to hike to other street-level crossings.
The winning plan imagines two rocks dropping in the waters of Buckingham Fountain and Lake Michigan. The rocks spawn "ripples" that join in the curving landforms that spring over Lake Shore Drive, which would be depressed by 5 feet. The moundlike landforms, which would rise 7 feet above the fountain's main level, would make for easy pedestrian passage over Lake Shore Drive. The plan also braids a loose weave of diagonal landforms over the highway, allowing for angled pedestrian movement and for sunlight to drop to the cars below.
Obvious shortcomings
The plan's practical shortcomings are obvious: Its designers don't know how these landforms would be supported. Nor have they calculated where the downward slope of the highway would begin or how long it would take to build this project. There is also this sticky issue: The landform mounds would partially block views of the fountain as one looked westward.
Even so, there is much to like here: The design respects the Beaux-Arts symmetry of Grant Park but is bracingly contemporary. It elevates the experience of pedestrians but doesn't consign drivers to tunnel hell. It's strongly urban but appropriately takes its cues from nature.
Most important, the plan shows a third way for civic infrastructure -- between preening, overwrought icons and visually undernourished bridges and underpasses. It sends its message with simple but strong landscape architecture.
Given the glacial pace at which Chicago's existing plans for lakefront bridges are moving forward, no one should expect this design to be built anytime soon. But it does advance the debate, and one day, perhaps, its ideas could bear fruit.
----------
bkamin@tribune.com
http://www.chicagotribune.com/featu...90098jan29,1,298948.story?coll=chi-living-hed