Somebody’s been monkeying with our skyline. Everywhere you look, new buildings are sprouting like sunflowers, overnight, without warning, without even a simple courtesy note to you or me. There’s the much-touted Helmut Jahn, he’s got his hand in it, and two New Yorkers, Philip Johnson and John Burgee, and Connecticut’s Kevin Roche and another New Yorker, William Pedersen, but that explanation gives you so little to go on you feel like Butch Cassidy gasping at the dust cloud raised by his relentless pursuers and moaning, “Who ARE those guys?”
Jahn et all are the architects who are carrying us into the future on the strength of their vision of what buildings ought to look like. Their handiwork is everywhere. A total of 148 new downtown building and renovation projects worth $2.2 billion were completed in Chicago in 1985 and 1986, according to a recently released report on downtown development by Louis Masotti, professor of urban affairs at Northwestern University, and Mary Ludgin, development specialist with The Chicago Department of Planning. Ground was broken on another $1.5 billion worth by year’s end. This activity comes on the heels of $4.5 billion in projects undertaken from 1979 through 1984. In all, almost eight years have given Chicago’s economy an $8 billion shot in the arm. And there’s more. A mind-boggling $7.5 billion in projects, including 51 entirely new downtown buildings, are on the drawing boards for the future, though certainly not all of them will see the light of day.
“It is the biggest continuous building boom in Chicago history,” says Masotti.
Many of the new buildings are extremely dramatic and exciting. Others are less than pleasing. A few border on the outlandish. But what is shared by much of the new construction is that, to a degree unheard of before in Chicago, it is the work of fashionable “name” architects, many of them out-of-towners, hired largely to inject pizzazz. Like people shopping for designer labels, the developers fueling the boom have immersed themselves in a feverish pursuit of glamour designers for their buildings, celebrity-style architects–architects–whose hands at the drawing board virtually guarantee a distinctive, eye-catching, even whimsical creation that will enhance the building’s marketability.
A marketing mentality that borders on mania has gripped developers, who are trying a variety of ploys to interest prospective tenants. New office buildings boast about their health clubs, shopping arcades, gourmet restaurants and subterranean access to commuter stations, as well as “talking” elevators, lavish penthouses, commodious corner offices, panoramic views and tight security. Some developers have even hit upon calling attention to their new buildings with fancy, billboard-style construction barricades that emulate the building’s facade-to-be.
But hiring name-brand architects is among the favorite stratagems. For a city such as Chicago, which has never had to stray far outside its own borders of architecture of genius. given names like Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe to choose from, it is a radical departure to be reaching out so freely to other venues for talent, But the temptation to climb on the bandwagon is strong.
We’re in the era of the big name,” observes architect Burgee. “You wear a designer’s name on your shirt, and the same thing is happening to an extent with buildings.”
Chicago’s Harry Weese, himself a starchitect, disapproves of the trend. “It’s becoming a personality cult,” he sneers. “People are trying to slap `Calvin Klein’ on a building’s rump.”
But Robert Belcaster, a managing director of Tishman Speyer Properties, a major Midwest developer, defends the practice on grounds of quality.
“If an unknown could create a great building, that’s fine,” he says, “But great buildings tend to be associated with great architects. If General Motors brings in Ferrari to make a new Cadillac, it’s not only because they want the name Ferrari but because they want to build an outstanding car.”
Starchitecture is not a new phenomenon, of course. The field of building design has always tended to generate large, even outsized reputations, and egos to match. But if the name game isn’t new, its stepped-up pace is. It would be difficult to find a time when there was such an overt emphasis on hiring voguish stylists and encouraging them to let their imaginations soar in achieving unique effects.
This, in turn, has had a marked impact on the quality and diversity of architecture. Sensing a sort of “Can you top this?” atmosphere, architects have responded with some of the most original and lively design of the last 50 years.
Okay. Okay. But who are these guys monkeying with skyline?
This Helmut Jahn, for instance.
Jahn is not the most influential architect of his age. That honor doubtless belongs to Philip Johnson, 80, widely acknowledged to be the dean of American architects. Johnson is something of an apostate. Though he was the man who did more than anyone else in the U.S. to popularize Mies van der Rohe’s glass-box, Modernist style, a design philosophy that reigned of nearly 40 years as a kin of architectural totalitarianism, Johnson broke with orthodoxy in the 1970s and with partner John Burgee took the lead in experimenting with new forms. Today he and Burgee are princes of Postmodernism, the movement towards a more romantic, historic, and fanciful style of building design.
Jahn may not even be the hottest architect around. That could be William Pedersen, of Manhattan’s Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates, Pedersen, 47, is the design engine of a firm that is winning accolades throughout the country of buildings that combine monumentality with elegance. Though Kohn Pedersen Fox is only 10 years old, it has already carved out a major niche in New York and is on its way to a significant presence in Chicago.
But if you are talking starchitecture, if you are wondering who more than anyone else in the U.S. or the world, for what matter, best epitomizes the architect of the mid-1980s, there is only answer: Helmut Jahn.
So who is this Jahn? Even his fellow architects would like to know. Do not take this question lightly, for Jahn, 47, is a study in extreme contrasts. Coexisting within the same lithe body is a man who is either shy or flamboyant, charming or cold, tall, short (interviewers have come away with differing impressions), deep, shallow, idealistic, shoddy, authentic or phony. Depending on whom you talk to, he is either a brilliant designer of buildings or the emperor revealed to be a rather nude fellow with vulgar tastes.
The hazy outlines of Jahn’s persona remind you of those schoolboy novelties that, depending on how you tilt them, show a picture that changes back and forth. But to be polymorphous is a plus in the plastic world of images and merchandising, and in that sense Jahn is a man perfectly suited to his times. He is the paradigm of the contemporary architect: slick, facile, market-conscious and media-wise, possessor of bold, sometimes outrageous architectural vision wedded to a canny gift for showmanship and the irresistible sales pitch. He is the man who Northwestern University architectural historian David Van Zantern calls “the most gratifying actor on the current stage.”
Jahn’s buildings are reshaping the financial and civic areas of the loop. His art Deco-ish Northwestern Atrium Center is currently straining towards completion above the old Chicago & North Western railroad station, within moderate exercise of his other works, the much-criticized state of Illinois Center, the new One South Wacker Building, the Chicago Board of Trade Annex and Xerox Centre.
Jahn also has designed the new United Airlines terminal under construction at O’Hare International Airport, Two Energy Center in Naperville, the shimmering Shand Morahan corporate headquarters in Evanston, the peak-roofed, octagonal Oakbrook Terrace Tower and the luminescent, glass-block station at the terminus of the O’Hare rapid transit line.
But they city is alive with the work of other starchitects. Pedersen and his colleagues, for example. Their first Chicago entry was the curvilinear, green-tinted, river-dominating 333 W. Wacker Drive Building, which always elicits gasps of admiration from passersby and which won an American Institute of Architects’ award several years ago. Now their newest Chicago creations are 2 Franklin Place, a 62-story stower at Jackson Boulevard and Wacker Drive, across from Sears Tower, that may eventually become a triad of interconnected skyscrapers; and 900 N. Michigan Avenue, a $450 million, 66-story, mixed-use behemoth, whose most notable client will be Bloomingdale’s. The latter building, which features a setback tower of white and buff limestone crowned by four illuminated cupolas and a pyramid roofline, is taking shape on a massive lot across from the rose-granite sophistication of One Magnificent Mile, itself designed by the redoubtable Bruce Graham of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Though Graham has intentionally cut his workload in recent years, his design talents are still much in demand, and it is his intelligence that informs the elegant Madison Plaza, at Madison and Wells.
Johnson and Burgee have designed 190 S. LaSalle Street, now nearing completion. It is a glowering, gabled, Daily Planet of a building, with a five-story base of imperial red granite and mysterious speaker-like grilles climbing up its face. Nostalgia is part of the Postmodernist credo, and here Burgee and Johnson have created something that reminds you of an old Philco radio.
Rising along Columbus Drive, in Illinois Center, is the Fairmont Hotel, latest offspring of the San Francisco-based chain. Fairmont has snared architect Gyo Obata, of the prominent St. Louis firm of Hellmuth Obata Kassabaum, to create a 37-story tower of lightly tinted glass and rose-colored granite. Obata also is doing the Hotel Nikko, the first major Chicago project by a Japanese company, which will grace Riverfront Park on the north bank of the Chicago River between Dearborn and Clark Streets. Not to be outdone, A Swiss-American development consortium has engaged Harry Weese to design a Swiss Grand Hotel on Wacker Drive in Illinois Center. Weese has come up with a triangular reinforced concrete tower clad in a mantle of silver-tinted glass.
Postmodernist Stanley Tigerman, he of the antic sense of humor, is the designer of the Tuscan-style Hard Rock Cafe in the burgeoning Suhu District north of the Chicago River. Tigerman also is the wit behind a parking garage at 60 E. Lake St., that parodies the front end of a Rolls-Royce. Meanwhile, the ultrachic Kevin Roche, whose mentor was Eero Saarinen and whose Ford Foundation headquarters in New York was the first postwar skyscraper to have an atrium, is making his Chicago debut with a silver-and-glass tower at State Street and Wacker Drive that looks for all the world like a hounds tooth suit. It will house the Leo Burnett advertising agency and be an anchor of the new North Loop project.
The trend toward starchitects is not peculiar to Chicago, of course. The same cachet-laden firms are being signed up by developers in cities all over the world. Jahn currently has more projects underway in New York City than he has in Chicago and is extending his reach as far as Johannesburg and Frankfurt. New Jersey’s Michael Graves, an iconoclast whose startling Portland Public Service Building in Portland, Ore., is considered a landmark of Postmodern design, just finished health-care giant Humana Inc.’s Corporate headquarters in staid old Louisville, Ky., with audacious results. He has also been commissioned to devise an addition into New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art. Gyo Obata worked with architects from London, Houston and New York to design the $2 billion campus of King Saud University, near Riyadh in Saudi Arabia. Bruce Graham and Skidmore have two major projects underway in London, including Canary Wharf, a 71-acre dockside development that will provide the crowded London financial district with 10 million square feet of new office space and trading floors. And Arata Isozaki, one of a new breed of world-class architects coming out of Japan, has been taken to America’s bosom. His avant-garde, geometrically shaped Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles opened in December, and he recently won a competition to collaborate on a $200 million renovation and expansion of a the famed Brooklyn Museum in New York. Isozaki is also designing a museum of Egyptian culture in Cairo and a stadium for the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona, Spain.
There are only a few of the glamour boys whose names cause developers to quiver in their calfskin shoes. If you are thinking of erecting something, say a 60-story, 800,000-square-foot skyscraper or a major public edifice, you might also consider New Haven’s Cesar Pelli, author of the air-rights project over the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the new Carnegie Hall tower in the same city, or Fumihiko Maki, whose much-photographed Fujisawa Municipal Gymnasium near Tokyo features a stainless-steel roof that looks like a samurai helmet, or London’s Norman Foster or Philadelphia’s Robert Venturi or Austria’s Hans Hollein or Los Angeles’ Frank Gehry. A developer seeking a personality architect has as much to choose from today as a movie producer sorting through the bumper crop of “in” film directors. The analogy is more than superficial: a palpable aroma of Hollywood has entered the business of putting up buildings.
The reasons for the new fashion consciousness in architecture are complex. But part of the explanation lies the changing nature of the real estate business. Until a very few years ago, office-building construction was mostly the province of large companies taking the lead in developing structures for their own use. Before the first spadeful of dirt was dug, everyone knew who the primary tenant was going to be for decades to come. Moreover, since big corporations are run by layers so pinchy-eyed, dry-ventricled management and boards of directors, the architectural plans they tended to favor (with a number of notable exceptions) were conservative and straightforward; the familiar, time-tested, meat-and-potatoes stuff. Oh, gigantic, to be sure, pleasing, without question; sleek, by all means; but nothing that would make waves or risk public disdain.
This attitude fit in quite neatly with the suffocating prevalence of the Modernist style, a design philosophy immediately following World War I. Dedicated to establishing a new order based on the nobility of the workingman, the Modernists stressed lean, squared-off, functional form without ornamentation (“Less is more”) and the use of economical materials that celebrated the new technology, such as steel, glass and reinforced concrete.
Though it quickly gained adherents in Europe, Modernism made few inroads in the U.S. until 1932, when Phil Johnson, then a brash, 26-year-old, Harvard-educated dilettante with a ton of family money and a knack for propaganda, became enamored of the new style and embarked on a campaign to promote it. Together with historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock, he mounted an exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art extolling the new architectural vision and simultaneously published a book that gave the movement a name that stuck: the International Style. The American architectural community, displaying the usual Yankee infatuation with things European and reacting against the slavish classicism and opulent ornamentation that had characterized the architecture of previous eras, quickly embraced the International Style. When, several years later, the principal exponents of the new architecture, Walter Gropius and Mies, fled to the U.S.. to escape the Nazis, they were extravagantly welcomed as gurus. In short order, Mies was installed as director of architecture at the Armour (later Illinois) Institute of Technology, while Gropius was accorded a like position at Harvard, giving the pair impressive sounding boards for their views.
Stanley Tigerman has written that there was a religions theme to Mies’ design philosophy, particularly in the master’s emphasis on the mathematics of proportion, which asserts Tigerman, echoes the biblical method of “describing visual phenomena…primarily through measurement alone. The cubit, for example, is the only element consistently employed in describing the temple of Solomon.” Whether Mies had theological inclinations or not, his disciples certainly embraced his ideas with religious fervor, elevating them to the level of a gospel. By the 1940s nearly every American architect worth his salt was designing in the International Style, and students were being carefully drilled in the Modernist catechism. Idling after building went up in the familiar, undeviating glass-box mold; you could scarcely tell one form another. Long before fast-food chains homogenized the appearance of American suburbia, Miesian architecture was doing the same for our downtowns.
The sameness was just the thing, however, for corporate planners. Good, safe, proven architecture, and for icing on the cake, it was relatively inexpensive. Thus, in one of this century’s more amusing ironies, a brand of architecture conceived as a tribute to the working class became the hallmark of megabuck capitalism. Companies like Lever Bros., Seagrams, IBM and Pan Am flocked to have their headquarters done up in the Modernist style. Governments, universities and other institutions followed suit.
Even when buildings were not strictly crafted to Modernist specifications, they did not deviate too far from the boring conventionality of the time. Thus, in 1960, when Arthur Wood commissioned Bruce Graham to do Sears Tower, the resulting “bundled-tube” colossus proved to be nine glass boxes in one, and while Lake Point Tower violated an essential Modernist principle by being rounded, its architects, Schupporeit Inc. and John Heinrich, were very much disciples of Mies, and the design in fact resembles one Mies himself had tried many years before. Among downtown Chicago commercial structures of the period, only Edward Durrell Stone and the firm of Perkins & Wills’s Standard Oil Building and Bertrand Goldberg’s Marina City showed any spark of real departure.
Beginning with the mid-1960s, however, two trends were discernible that would lead American architecture out of its straitjacket. The first was the sense on the part of a few practitioners, most notably Robert Ventura, that it was time for a change. (“Less is a bore,” Venturi wisecracked in his seminal 1966 book “Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture,” in which he argued that it was all right to be imaginative and draw on historical references in designing buildings.) The second was the emergence as a primary player on the real estate scene of a classic American business type, the freewheeling private develop.
Developers have been around as long as there has been architecture, but as a numerically dominant force they have come into their own only in this century. The prototype was the flamboyant New Yorker William Zeckendorf, a compulsive, Warbucksian buyer and seller of properties, who acquired the land where United Nations Plaza stands, who built Denver’s Mile High Center and Montreal’s Place Ville-Marie, who single-handedly saved Wall Street as the site of New York’s financial district by engineering $250 million in real estate deals, who turned Long Island’s 370-acre Roosevelt Field into a gigantic shopping center, who built high-rise dwellings in Chicago, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Washington, D.C., and New York, who convinced Alcoa to build Century City in Los Angeles and who ended up bankrupt at age 63, some $78 million in the red.
Entrepreneurs like Chicago’s Pritzker family, Houston’s Gerald Hines, New York’s Donald Trump, Boston’s Mortimer Zuckerman, Toronto’s Reichmann brothers, Dallas’ Trammell Crow and Montreal’s Bronfman family have literally taken charge of the real estate industry, steering it in dramatic directions as they give vent to their often fabulous visions.
There are several things about the developer phenomenon that throw light on the growing emphasis on starchitecture. First of all, by significantly adding to the number of buildings being put up, developers have created a highly competitive rental market. As a result, they have become conscious of a need to merchandise their buildings: they are seeking strong selling points, and at or near the top of the list is architectural design. In addition, developers, by nature, are often less conservative than corporate executives, hence they tend to be more open to dramatic design innovations. Though they would never approve something so daring as to scare away tenants, certain developers have both consciously and unconsciously taken a leadership role in raising the architectural taste level of corporate America.
“Definitely, more buildings are being put up by developers than in the past,” notes Robert Belcaster, of Tishman Speyer. Tishman Speyer, which controls 7 percent of Chicago’s downtown office market, is erecting NBC’s new million-square-foot headquarters, a limestone structure evocative of the 1920s. Designed by Skidmore’s Adrian Smith, it will kick off the huge Cityfront Center project on the spot of land directly across the river from Illinois Center.
Says Belcaster: “What has happened is corporations have begun to understand the extreme cost of building their own headquarters and occupying every inch. Let’s say a corporation needs half a million square feet, so it builds a building with 600,000 to accommodate for some growth. Then all of a sudden you exceed that, and now you have to lease space somewhere else until such time as you are big enough to justify building another 500,000-foot building. So what have you done? In 15 years, you will have built a million square feet or more, and the second 500,000 is going to cost quite a bit more than the first.”
One solution for very large companies like Sears or First National Bank has been to build at the outset a structure much larger than they need, put the unused space out for lease and then grow into the building over time. “But you need a keen sense of marketing today in order to avoid saddling yourself with vacant building space,” cautions Belcaster. “Major corporations are shying away from that risk and have swung around to the idea of bringing in a developer/partner who has the expertise to understand the market to determine what sort of building to build, to handle leasing and so on. That way the risk is jointly shared.”
Many corporations are not even getting to that point. In more and more cases, they are letting the developer go it alone in erecting the building, then simply leasing a portion of it, depending on how much space they need. Sometimes leases are signed before ground is broken, giving the developer a safety net. But often scarcely a tenant signs up until the structure is finished, creating a relatively new phenomenon: the speculative building, in which a developer puts up an office tower before he has a base number of clients committed to leasing the space.
Erecting a “spec” building is a death-defying high-wire act. Imagine it. You build an enormous structure costing perhaps $100 million or more, for which the financing has been difficult to arrange because traditional lending sources have dried up, and for your trouble there is the nightmarish possibility that you won’t sign up enough tenants to make good on the investment.
Unhappily for developers, the nightmare has become reality. Office space is going begging in downtowns throughout the country. The reason can be summed up in a word: glut.
When corporations and institutions put up buildings, they only put up what they need. But when developers build on spec, the relationship between supply and demand becomes diffuse. There are several reasons for this. First, demand is hard to access. One never has more than a general pulse of the market in deciding whether potential tenants exist to make it worthwhile to build. Second, it takes years to finish a tall building during which time market conditions may change dramatically. Corporations can move or merge, economies can contract, rivals can flood the market by announcing 10 new buildings. Finally, even when signs look bad, it tends not to deter developers, who are by nature an adventurous breed. Each developer thinks his building will be the one that will succeed in a down market.
The result is glut. Contributing to the problem was a one-time-only blip in the market created by the breakup of American Telephone & Telegraph. Former AT&T companies were suddenly required to find up to 50 million square feet of office space around the country. This musical-chairs game temporarily drove up the rate at which office space was being absorbed in American cities. When developers and brokerage houses examined these absorption rates, they were lulled into thinking a period of sustained demand was on the way. Alas, no. But by the time people realized this, a lot of superfluous buildings were shooting up.
According to Masotti and Ludgin, currently there is a 17 to 18 percent vacancy rate in downtown Chicago, compared with 12 percent last year and less than 6 percent in 1980. Many new buildings in the Loop stagger along with occupancy rates well below the break-even point of 80 to 90 percent, and not a few are as low as 10 percent. The squeeze is even worse in the heavily built-up suburban business corridor, where occupancy has dropped through the floor. The vacancy rate in some suburban areas is running 40 to 45 percent.
Nationally, there are some 200 million vacant square feet. In Houston alone an unbelievable 43 million square feet of office space sits empty, creating a new urban phenomenon, the “see-through” building. New York and Boston are better off than Chicago at the moment, but there are signs that the New York market is softening, too.
Chicago developer John Buck laments that whereas five years ago you could count on convincing a reasonable number of tenants to lease space prior to construction, “today nobody is signing up before, during or after. We’re in an oversupply situation that seems to be the direct result of overbuilding.”
The problem will right itself in time. Already deal-making is slowing. Banks are leery of financing large buildings, and the new tax laws, by removing certain write-offs, are discouraging investment by alternative funding sources, such as real estate syndicates. Even the current standbys, pension funds and insurance companies are showing greater reluctance to invest, especially in speculative buildings. Since the boom was essentially investment-driven rather than market-driven–that is, it was a product of too much easily available construction capital rather than any genuine demand for more commercial space–when the money is gone, the merry-go-round stops.
But even without the glut, developers are not out of the woods. They will continue to face keen competition in attracting and holding tenants. It’s the nature of the business.
How, then, do you improve a building’s marketability? One of the chief ways developers have found, is to retain the services of a trendy architect.
The first to hit on the strategy was Gerald Hines of Houston, who has become something of a folk hero in real estate circles. Hines has always been a connoisseur of fine architecture. In the early 1970s he commissioned Bruce Graham to design his One Shell Plaza, an office tower in which he convinced Shell Oil to take half the square footage, and Gyo Obata to do his Galleria, a gigantic complex of shops, offices, theaters and hotels that today is a Houston landmark. But it was Hines’ next major project that gave him superstar status.
With the deed to a square block of prime downtown land in his pocket, Hines trolled around for someone to become lead tenant of the majestic skyscraper he had dancing around in his brain. When his angel appeared, it was J. Hugh Liedtke, the head of Pennzoil. Liedtke’s only stipulation was that the design be something striking. He believed a distinctive public presence would help sell Pennzoil to both consumers and potential management recruits.
Hines got on the phone to Bruce Graham. But Graham, a dyed-in-the-wool Miesian, came up with something that Liedtke sneeringly called “an inverted cigar box.” Sensing Liedtke’s growing impatience, Hines turned to Philip Johnson and John Burgee, who were beginning to attract wide critical attention with their incipient departures from Modernism, most notably the octagonal, pleated, reflective-glass skyscraper they did in Minneapolis for Investors Diversified Services (IDS), which opened in 1973. Hines had already worked with Johnson/Burgee on a smaller project–a 25-story Houston building that the pair gave a distinctive and very un-Miesian look by girdling it with alternating bands of silver reflective glass and charcoal anodized aluminum, while simultaneously satisfying the No. 1 prerequisite of develops everywhere: Hold down the cost. Now Hines hoped they would come up with an equally inventive design. They didn’t let him down.
They created twin trapezoidal towers with the tops sliced off on the bias like a cheese. Liedtke loved them and agreed to take half of one building. Another energy firm, Zapata, and the accounting firm of Arthur Andersen & Co. jumped aboard for a hunk of the other tower. But Hines was still left with almost 1 million square feet of office space to sell in a very tight market. His solution rewrote the rules for merchandising office buildings.
Conventional wisdom held that tenants would not pay a premium for unusual architecture, hence there was no advantage in making a building’s design its key selling points. Hines set up an elaborate marketing center, costing well into six figures, that featured sublime scale models, glittering dioramas, hardbound brochures and above all a seductive sound-and-light show suggesting to prospective tenants that the office complex under discussion was not just another dreary spindle of mammon in the oil satrapy of Texas. No, if the truth were known, it was hardly an office complex at all but a masterwork that might have issued from the pen of Michelangelo or Bernini. It whispered Sistine Chapel, Chartres, St. Paul’s and Mont St. Michel.
The prospects were blown away. Well before it opened in 1976, Pennzoil Place was assured 97 percent occupancy. Clients were so eager to sign up, Hines says, that two extra floors were added to the plans after construction began. The most intense demand was for offices directly beneath the slanting roof. They had to be rationed. For each office that tenants leased on a top floor, they were required to take x amount of space elsewhere in the building.
Pennzoil Place was an immediate hit. Critics loved it. Tenants adored it. Best of all, it hardly cost any more to build than your standard, government-issue, garden-variety glass box. Hines told Jim Powell, author of “Risk, Ruin and Riches: Inside the World of Big-Time Real Estate,” that designs by the likes of Johnson and Burgee have added only 2 to 4 percent to his cost of doing a building. Meanwhile, he says, it has enabled him to charge more for a lease–up to 50 cents a square foot more at Pennzoil Place, for example.
Since then, Hines has become the pacesetter in hiring high-quality name architects. He’s used Kevin Roche for the Hutton Building in New York and I. M. Pei for Houston’s Texas Commerce Tower and Washington, D.C.’s Columbia Square. He has commissioned Cesar Pelli to design Norwest Center in Minneapolis and Skidmore’s Adrian Smith to do the dramatic Three First National Plaza in Chicago. But his tightest association is with Johnson/Burgee, who have given him the RepublicBank Center and Transco Tower in Houston, the 101 California Street Building in San Francisco, the New England Life Insurance Building in Boston, now in progress, and the 53d at Third Street Building in New York. Virtually all these buildings are outstanding examples of architectural design, and most of them break with Modernism.
“Good architecture sells,” Hines insists. “So does the unusual. Tenants today are more sophisticated; they recognize and are stimulated by good design,”
As proof, he cites Transco and RepublicBank Center, both speculative projects “which have leased very, very well in tough, tough market. I definitely attribute that to the architecture.”
Hines is frequently likened to the Medicis in his patronage of fine architecture, a comparison he does nothing to deflect.
“I do this, ” he says, “because I really enjoy good architecture and I felt that I could bring it in for abut the same price as mediocre. I was right. There are ways to do great things at a reasonable price, and it’s been very rewarding to me and my firm.”
Pennzoil Place inspired a sea change in American architecture. Developers nationwide were quick to pick up on Hines’ example and start emphasizing quality design. Business executives began to see uniqueness as a corporate signature, a statement that the firm was abreast of the times. When Johnson undertook to design his $200 million AT&T headquarters in New York in 1979, the only thing the firm’s management told him was, “Please don’t give us a glass box,” Instead, Johnson came up with his controversial “Chippendale” design, the broken-pediment top that represented architecture’s final break with its Miesian period.
Now the wraps are off. Postmodernism, with its liberated imagination, fanciful wit and nostalgic curtsy to the past, is in full flower. Suddenly downtowns nationwide are alive with Dutch Gothic buildings, buildings with setbacks, buildings of pastel hues, mirrored buildings with sawtooth surfaces, brooding masonry buildings evocative of the 1920s, buildings with turrets, fat tomblike buildings with Egyptian motifs, buildings of all shapes and kinds.
“What I’m finding is that more and more clients want identity,” says architect John Burgee. “What happened during the Mies years is that buildings became interchangeable. IBM looked like AT&T and everyone else. People finally decided they wanted something special. It’s a reaction to all the boredom and sameness.”
Chicago architect George Danforth agrees. “There is definitely something happening,” he says, “The client wants something unique, something different from everything else. He wants a certain todayness.”
By no means does starchitecture always produce dramatic or strange-looking buildings. When developer John Buck a native Texan who formed his own Chicago firm in 1981, was looking for someone to do the Leo Burnett Building on Wacker Drive, he wanted something “sophisticated and practical, nothing outlandish or fanciful. We wanted a building that would have an aura of importance not only in 1989 but 50 years from now. That was our charge to the architect: timelessness.”
Eight high-profile architectural firms, four of them from outside Chicago, were interviewed by a joint team from Buck’s office and Leo Burnett. Twelve weeks later, Roche’s fir, Kevin Roche Dinkeloo Associates, got the nod. “We were impressed,” says Buck, “by the attitude of the Roche people to do something that was excellent but something that worked well for the user.”
The user. The user. The user is everything to a real estate developer, and Buck’s attitude reflects the ever-present anxiety among developers that hey satisfy the clients’ more mundane concerns, that is, the desire for efficient floor plans, appealing interiors, substantial-looking front offices and, above all, reasonable rents.
Roche’s design, therefore, accommodates traditional office layouts, has an air of sumptuousness and by a conscious, somewhat awkward ballooning of all four corners into exaggerated bays, makes the building a cornucopia of large corner offices with excellent views, a strong selling point to the corporate bosses who will occupy them.
“Looks are very important,” notes Robert Belcaster, “but pretty buildings don’t always lay out well. Finding balance is the trick. As a friend of mine says, “If you want to avoid looking at an ugly building, be in it and look across the street.’ “
Given developers’ scrupulous regard for tenant whims, Hines’ strategy of marketing good design would never have gotten off the ground had it not been for two factors. First the tastes of corporate and institutional clients have been excited by the new trend. If the developer was once the vehicle of change, momentum has long since shifted to the consumer. He demands variety. He demands drama. He demands shtik. “There has been a definite attitude change,” says John Burgee, “but it comes much more from the user than it does the builder or the architect.”
Second, good design has become crucially important to arranging financing. “You don’t raise large amounts of funds these days without a very good product,” says Hines. “Insurance companies, pension fund trustees, and other long-term investors want to know ahead of time who the architects will be and what the building will look like. They want to be sure the building is going to lease.”
They also want to be sure the building will come in at cost. In this regard, the artistry of an architect is less important than his reputation for working within budgets, for being flexible and open to design changes and for being sensitive to the needs of users.
But here, too, according to insiders, commissioning a starchitect is good insurance. “These guys have a track record,” says one knowledgeable source. “They’re more likely to give you a great design. They’re more likely to give it to you the first time. And they’re more likely to be used to working within cost constraints, floor-plan dictates–all the things you’re concerned about. They didn’t get to the top by being flighty rogue elephants.”
Twenty years have passed since Helmut Jahn first came to these shores to study architecture at IIT, having completed studies at Munich’s Technische Hocheschule. He was a young man in a hurry even then. While fellow graduate students toiled at the usual part-time jobs, like grading papers or clerking, Jahn preferred something with a little more visibility. He landed a job designing McCormick Place.
The way this came about illustrates how a happy accident can spell the difference between a life spent doing room additions and a life as the celebrated creator of some of the major edifices of the day. Jahn heard through a friend that Gene Summers, a longtime Mies associate who had just opened his own architectural office, was looking for an assistant to answer phones. “I didn’t want to be one of 250 people at a large firm,” Jahn recalls. “Better to be the only employee of a man of stature.
Now the gods sit down at their console. In January, 1967, two weeks after Jahn joins Summers, McCormick Place burns down. Within days, Mayor Daley taps C.F. Murphy, the large well-connected architectural firm to design a new one. Murphy is in a pickle, having recently lost its chief designer to the University of Michigan. It broadcasts an SOS to Summers, who rather reluctantly accepts the chief-designer job. Summers brings with him the promising Jahn fellow.
Within a short time, Jahn had dropped out of ITT (“I was disenchanted with education,” he says. “I realized that getting a master’s degree wasn’t what I wanted to do”) and was up to his galluses helping Summers design the giant lakeside building. There are those who say privately that it was Jahn’s basic concept that prevailed.
It is heady stuff at age 27 to have been one of two architects behind a world-renowned exhibition hall. But plenty of people have gained the pole position on the fast track only to fade along the back stretch. By 1976 he was pulling down critical waves with his first major building, Xerox Centre. Winsomely beautiful, with lush curves, creamy skin and shimmering glass, it marked Jahn as a major figure in the drive to go beyond Modernism. By 1981 his name had gone on the office door as C.F. Murphy Associates became Murphy/Jahn, and by 1983 Jahn had bought the firm altogether in a leveraged buyout.
Now Murphy/Jahn, with 155 employees and smart offices in the old Jeweler’s Building, a Chicago landmark at Wabash Avenue and Wacker Drive, has embarked on a furious campaign that seems aimed at seizing virtually all the architectural business in the Western world. Besides his Chicago projects, Jahn also has going a dizzying skyscraper in Philadelphia called One Liberty Place that echoes, in its lines, New York’s Chrysler Building; a convention center in Frankfurt, West Germany, whose tower, which strikingly resembles a rocket ship, will be the tallest building in Europe; a high-tech office and recreation complex in Johannesburg, South Africa; and the massive, octagonal Esplanade in Houston, whose 7.5 million square feet will house commercial and living space.
There are in addition to an awesome list of New York City projects, which include two whimsical office buildings on Lexington Avenue, one of them a free-standing column, complete with base and capital, that unintentionally resembles a Gobot, and the other a round, sheathed structure that looks like two fingers holding a fat crayon; a needle-thin tower of stone, glass and copper next to the City Center theater; Park Avenue Tower, an Egyptian-inspired obelisk of red granite and glass; and Television City, a projected urban village that developer Donald Trump would like to erect on 77 acres of midtown Manhattan along the Hudson River. Springing from among seven shorter, Gothic-styled buildings would be a 150-story spire, the tallest building in the world, a sublime steel-tipped carrot with which Trump hopes to entice NBC to abandon Rockefeller Center. Jahn also entered the recent South Ferry Plaza competition held by the developers of property at the foot of Manhattan near Battery Park. Jahn’s entry called for an Eiffel-styled tower that would dominate New York harbor like a lighthouse.
Jahn’s emergence as Chicago’s premier starchitect has paralleled a decline in the fortune of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the nation’s largest architectural firm with offices in nine cites and some 1,500 employees. For years, SOM had a virtual lock on major design work throughout the country. But its passion for the glass box, which led to an obsessive production of Miesian clones, has undermined its market dominance in recent year. Though it is still a formidable presence, it no longer commands the knee-jerk respect it once enjoyed. Now, however, having armed itself with a coterie of younger, hipper architects and a design philosophy more suited to the Postmodern era, SOM appears to be on the move again.
In fairness to Jahn, no architect could possibly acquire so much business were he not producing outstanding buildings. His designs are astonishingly different from one another–testament to an obviously fertile mind–and more often than not, they are graceful, dynamic, balanced and pleasing. They simultaneously reach into the past for antecedents and stretch outward toward the future.
Disobeying his Miesian training, Jahn experiments with colors, materials, shapes and styles, and the remarkable thing is he may only now be entering his prime. “His best buildings are yet to come,” says Lou Masotti.
But beyond all the talent lies a business savvy frequently lacking in architects, a genius for packaging and persuasion. Part of his appeal is his own personal mystique: the Ultimo clothes, the long hair, the profile in Gentleman’s Quarterly, the yacht racing, the daredevil skiing, the Karl Maria Brandauer accent, the visibility in gossip columns, the headlines in the New York Times, the globetrotting travel, the reputation for sketching 100-story buildings while peeling a breakfast orange and the macho, above all, the macho. Once, in conjunction with a Tribune profile, Jahn agreed to be photographed making his grueling daily run in Lincoln Park. He showed up for the picture minus a key article of male athletic attire. The resulting photos, while presenting him in an aspect that was admirably virile, were not, unfortunately, suitable for publication. Did he forget? Who knows? That’s Jahn.
Apart from the personal charisma, there is Jahn’s gift for winning the confidence of developers. An architect is a curious figure. He is at heart an artist, whose canvas is the environment. That’s what a city really is, a vast open-air gallery of public art, each of the works a rather presumptuous attempt by an architect to inflict his fancies on the rest of us in hopes of winning our approval. It calls to mind William Faulkner’s portrayal of novelists as dog breeders who get to show their dalmatians from time to time–except in architecture we are talking about 80-story dogs that are going to be around for 50 years or more.
It is true that architecture, unlike art, must also be functional; but if all that functionality requires is the creation of rooms in which to put beds, tables, offices, drill presses, books, gymnasia and so on, everything could satisfactorily be housed inside a big, basic cube. It’s how gracefully you deviate from that code–the artistry–that counts to the architect (and probably the public as well). The hitch is that painters can express themselves on a scrap of paper and do it for next to nothing. Architects need a piece of land and a tremendous amount of money–someone else’s land and someone else’s money. That’s the key difference between architecture and art. With architecture, somebody has to let you do it.
Many architects have a problem selling themselves and therefore don’t get good commissions. Jahn has elevated to a science the trick of getting someone who basically needs just a cube to spend money to make something fine. Part of Jahn’s secret is a seductive setting. His working offices are on the third floor of the Jeweler’s Building, but he maintains a ceremonial office in the quaint cupola at the top. “He takes clients up to this wonderful cupola,” says Masotti, “and he plies them with drawings and beautiful scale models till their mouths water.”
