http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainm...1,1995989.story?coll=chi-ent_critics-hed
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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I hope Brookwood Towers has had a paint job since I took the photo; anyway I do love the building. I can never remember exactly what it looks like.
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