Oh it started a lot longer ago than 10 or 20 years. Really the advent of horrendous, soul crushing retail architecture began in the immediate post-war era (many of those were helped quite a bit though by the marriage of signage design/typography and architecture), perfected the high art of faux colonial strip mall visual nausea in the 70's and 80's and now the current lifestyle center era built for unchanged 30 year life spans.

^ Thanks for posting that. You gotta love how Loyola Station has drastically improved that little area

^But CVS had nothing to do with the design of that building. They merely took a ground-floor retail space.

When CVS took the ground-floor space at Library Tower (SWC State/Congress) they were so clueless about context that they submitted drawings for a 14-foot-high sign on the third level of the west wall of the building. They reluctantly conceded that might be unnecessary, since the sign would be entirely blocked by the 10-story Petersen Building only 16 feet away.

The cinderblock CVS at Foster & Broadway is a reused grocery store.

Yes - thank you - antefixae.

Sorry if this has been mentioned before, but I don't remember seeing anything about this here. I was at a meeting today at DePaul and it was mentioned that a new building for the Lincoln Park campus is being designed by Cesar Pelli. Does anyone know any more about this? I think they said it was an art building.

^^^ ?!?!?! How could something like that be flying under our radar? I haven't heard about it. If so, great, some of Pelli's stuff is a little "meh", but I'm generally a fan.

Mr Downtown can we expect an interesting book of local anecdotes (indeed, local history) to be published by you in the coming years? Please? You can change some names to protect the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Can anyone divine whether Walgreen's and CVS's choice of this street window philosophy has to do with preserving the modesty of its customers shopping for certain items?

On the subject of supermarkets, quite an impressive pit (shopper parking I assume?) for the new Jewel has emerged near Southport/Addison.

Ahh, I love the smell of raker beams in the evening.

Doesn't Milwaukee have some kind of design/review policy that John Norquist (head of the Congress for New Urbanism) put in place when he was mayor there? I saw part of a PBS (I think) piece on it recently, and I'm probably confusing the details, but I remember being impressed by the premium they place on good design up there -- and it shows when you see it in person.

No; in fact, CVS refitted all the Osco stores with lower fixtures, which their research showed made women shoppers more comfortable.

The stores just want the windowline to have more room for display racks. In most of the stores, the front windows are the back of the front-end cashier area, so they want to have the jewelry, batteries, and cigarettes there. And even department stores no longer see any value in window displays. At State & Madison, the stores once had two levels of displays to lure passers-by. Now, if you're lucky, you get Old Navy to put up a sign saying "time to shop," or get Walgreens to display a sepiatone photo of a 1940s lunch counter.

^Sad but true.

The Walgreens in Milwaukee being mentioned was built by a developer who leases the space to Walgreens. It also has the mandatory parking lot behind that they require in order to lease the space.

also, the "front" of the Walgreens, which faces the street has frosted windows, because on the other side is the corridor to the bathrooms. So, in that case it more for a sense of privacy than anything else.

Doesn't invalidate the concept of a window display. In areas where most customers are arriving via car, the displays should reflect the scale and speed of auto travel (LED signs, large Mexican-grocery-style hand painted signs, etc).

Immediately adjacent to a rapid transit station, right off a college campus, most customers will be arriving by foot, so it makes sense to install low racks on the windowline in those locations.

The behavior of the retailers on State Street, easily one of the top 3 or 4 places in the city for sheer pedestrian volume, is puzzling. If the window displays on State Street aren't having the intended effect of bringing in more customers, then they probably need to be designed better.

That's a stupid rationale for what is, in reality, terrible design. If you can persuade Walgreens to include bathrooms in their design (most locations have none) and forego the windowline shelves, you could just as easily persuade them to drop the bathrooms and use the same space for additional merchandise or display space that is appealing to the street.

On a side note, Walgreens just bought Duane Reade. I wonder if the inevitable renovations in NYC will introduce the unfriendly elements we see in Chicago Walgreens locations, or conversely, if the retained Duane Reade people will introduce a more urban-friendly aesthetic to Walgreens' design department. (Although Duane Reade isn't much better..)

^^^ I don't think the entire row of windows in that Milwaukee Walgreens is a hallway to the bathrooms, I think its only a segment of them, like maybe 1/4 or 1/3 of them. I'm pretty sure the rest do peer into the store or the backs of the sales counters.

You are correct.

The windows looking into the bathroom hallway (admittedly an awkward thing to have on the front street side of any store) only make up a small portion of the front wall...and they've been cropped off the left edge of the photo posted earlier. The big windows with that blue band across them are looking into the blank back side of display shelves (still pretty awkward, considering all the foot traffic of the surrounding university neighborhood and intersecting bus lines).

The design is a step in the right direction (unique aesthetics, varying use of solids and voids on the facade, building pushed up to the sidewalk, the signage, etc.), but still not quite as pedestrian friendly as it could be (though certainly better than the standard Walgreens, and much better than the the old Walgreens building down the street it replaced. ), especially with those blanked out windows.

Since it was asked upthread about Milwaukee's design policy regarding these types of stores, here's another example of a Milwaukee Walgreens where the City worked with the developers and company on creating something other than a standard design from the corporate pattern book. Still not quite enough transparency between the interior and the exterior sidewalk, but the streetside windows are used for advertising posters. And the corner of the parking lot has a small "outlot" retail building pushed right out to the corner sidewalks.

So these are just a couple of precedents for other cities to pick up when these types of businesses are proposed.

That Oak Park Walgreens posted earlier, with the new modern entryway (grafted onto an existing building, I assume) looks pretty nice.

The old one, while soul-crushingly boring, at least has a reasonably-sized parking lot. The new one is just excessive.

Given a mutually-exclusive choice would you take:

(1) soul-crushingly boring design but a satisfying quantity and layout of parking, or
(2) satisfying design but a soul-crushingly suburban quantity and layout of parking?

That is both hilarious and sad at the same time. One would think with all of the money going into each new location, the corporate office would do a wee bit more research, especially for a site different from the standard plop-a-store format.


The sad truth about the plop-a-store is that the building envelopes are seen as a form of advertising. They want you to recognize the building as a Walgreen's from afar. That is why we see standard designs which are copied over and over again. The savings and standardization of construction costs and procedures when using the same design, is another driving factor. We see this with fast food outlets as well, which is perhaps the worst offender at this practice; although I must admit I am fairly happy with the direction that McDonald's has taken.