This was in the Sunday Trib. There was a night rendering of TT to go with it.
ARCHITECTURE
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.
----------
bkamin@tribune.com
Prev
I think most would like the needle better, though.
Linear Mode
