The big interior space is back, and American architecture is surely the richer for it. In Chicago and across the nation, designers are using atriums, high-ceilinged lobbies and glassed-over plazas to stun the eye, temper the climate and add visual sizzle to merchandising. It is a time of expansive spatial gestures, grandiose imagery and changing notions about what constitutes the good life in cities and suburbs.
Part of this is a rebellion against the old constraints of the International Style, which was rarely celebratory in the usual sense and declared itself by understatement that too often turned out to be boring. Today, as architecture strikes off in new directions, the grandly scaled space is again in vogue after a long period of neglect.
The trend began in 1967, when John Portman designed the Hyatt Regency Hotel in downtown Atlanta. Its almost outrageously overpowering 21-story atrium lobby launched Portman into the big time and within a few years made him America`s most influential living architect.
It is true, of course, that Portman was to a degree simply reinventing
(albeit on a much larger scale) the kind of open lobby space employed in such turn-of-the-century hotels as the Brown Palace in Denver. His use of exposed ”thrill ride” elevator cabs, too, was a throwback to technology of the 19th Century. Portman was disdained by many critics and architects for all this theatricality. But the public loved his work, and as much as anyone he was responsible for the space revolution.
Almost simultaneous with the opening of Portman`s first hotel was the completion of the Ford Foundation building in Midtown Manhattan. Designed by Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo, it was a 12-story office structure wrapped around a heavily landscaped atrium that gave desk-bound workers something pleasant to look at and a sense of outdoorsy openness.
The Ford Foundation building seemed quite spectacular when it opened
(although Frank Lloyd Wright created something roughly similar when he designed Buffalo`s Larkin Building in 1903). Today, such tall atriums are commonplace and help lure tenants to even relatively low-budget office towers. But if thinking about interiors was undergoing a profound urban change in the late 1960s, it had already taken a radically new turn in the suburbs. In 1956, Victor Gruen designed and built Southdale, a multi-store Minneapolis complex now recognized as the nation`s first enclosed shopping mall. The success of that roofed, heated and cooled shopping Shangri-La inspired dozens, then hundreds of similar malls across America.
And while architects next began designing lavishly scaled atriums for everything from schools and hospitals to art museums and libraries, rehabbers started recycling old spaces. Almost every sizeable city in the nation, for example, seemed to have a grandly scaled but comatose downtown railroad terminal waiting to be transformed into a home for fern bars, cookie stores and franchised restaurants.
Minneapolis became the scene of still another major spatial prototype in 1973, when Philip Johnson and John Burgee designed the Crystal Court, an atrium housed not within a single building but connecting several downtown buildings–in effect, a roofed-over plaza.
The Crystal Court became a grand new focus of shopping and pedestrian activity in Minneapolis. It was a place for promenading, meeting friends or people-watching, a contemporary version of the old public square. In a city whose winters are excruciatingly cold, the 20,000 square-foot atrium seemed to make good sense, particularly since it tied together Minneapolis` network of pedestrian bridges crossing streets above traffic.
Still, there were profound and sometimes disturbing differences between the suburban shopping mall and its urban equivalents.
Suburban malls offered some sense of community focus and at least a few of the diversions once found only in traditional downtown settings. Art shows and band concerts were held in them, senior citizens took their winter walking exercise there, and teenagers (a.k.a. ”mall rats”) hung out amidst the fountains, greenery and Muzak.
Urban malls, on the other hand, tended to drain foot traffic off downtown sidewalks and discriminate against small but uniquely urban businesses (used book stores, mom and pop shops) that couldn`t afford the rent. The malls were antiseptically clean, patroled by security men wearing blazers and totally lacking the gritty charm and spontaneity of the streets.
This somewhat wimpy suburbanization of the city was bemoaned by old-fashioned urban types. Moreover, the big urban spaces introduced new elements of ambiguity into the philosophy of municipal government. Could the malls really be counted as ”public” resources when they were privately controlled? Wouldn`t financially troubled cities tend to neglect their true public spaces –parks, plazas and the like–if they thought private enterprise could take up the slack?
Architecture, it seemed, was creating as well as solving problems
–although architects could always claim they were simply meeting client demands.
And where does Chicago stand in this return to the big interior? It got off to a rather slow start because of its innate but now withering
architectural conservatism. Chicago was the last of America`s biggest cities to move away from International Style dogma, and its major design firms long seemed uninterested in mightily scaled spaces unless they served some practical purpose.
Yet Chicago today boasts examples of most kinds of spatial spectaculars that have come into fashion in the last decade or two, and the city is destined to get some exciting new ones. A few prime examples, by category:
The Hotel Atrium. John Portman came up from Atlanta in 1971 to design the Hyatt Regency O`Hare, which would have stood Chicagoans on their ears had it been built in the Loop instead of in the wilds of Rosemont, where few locals ever visit it. The hotel`s 115-foot-tall atrium is such a treat that we can forgive Portman for making the topside restaurant rotate.
The Glass Box. A. Epstein & Sons designed the crystalline cube housing the lobby cum restaurant in front of the two Hyatt Regency Chicago Hotel buildings in Illinois Center. The cube is the only bright spot in a thicket of shadowy and depressing highrises and comes off as a cheery place even during Chicago`s six-month gray season.
The Office Building Atrium. A glassed-over lobby fronts Three First National Plaza, and three interior atriums enliven the 33 W. Monroe St. building. Both structures–among the first of their kind downtown–were designed in the late 1970s by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, and while their open spaces were crisply conceived, they lack the flair that has marked more recent SOM work.
The Vertical Shopping Mall. A suburban-style mall stood on end is largely what makes Water Tower Place such a phenomenal success. The firm now called Loebl, Schlossman & Hackl designed the mall-hotel-condo complex, and even though its designers didn`t make it particularly lovely, they created one of Chicago`s greatest sales amphitheaters.
The Winter Garden. As an architectural type, the winter garden was reinvented a decade ago by architect Cesar Pelli. Taking his cue from Victorian developers who created a park, then sold frontage lots, Pelli designed a Niagara Falls, N.Y., greenhouse calculated to attract commercial buildings that would plug into it later. In Chicago, the principle has been applied by the firm of Kohn Pedersen Fox, which has designed a triad of skyscrapers for a site on Wacker Drive between Jackson Boulevard and Van Buren Street. All three towers will be spliced into the greenhouse, which will serve as a leafy grand lobby.
The Capped Light Well. In the days before air conditioning and fluorescent illumination, architects ran light and air wells down the centers of office buildings for obvious reasons. Rehabbers now put glass tops on the wells and create instant atriums. One of the biggest and best in Chicago is at the 17-story Santa Fe Center (formerly the Railway Exchange Building).
The One-of-a-Kind Extravaganza. It is hard to say how future art historians will characterize the interior of Helmut Jahn`s State of Illinois Center, but it is in a league of its own and probably deserves its own classification. Jahn`s atrium also raises the question of ”wasted” energy required for heating and cooling any ceremonial space. The design rationale is that grandeur never comes cheap; what are we to do, put dropped ceilings in churches and state capitol rotundas every time OPEC raises the price of oil?
Chicago, then, has caught up with the national big space boom and is likely to more than hold its own in the future. What the ultimate
manifestation of all this may turn out to be is hard to say, however.
The late Buckminster Fuller proposed the doming of entire cities, but that was pure fantasy. It seems more likely that before the mall and the atrium get out of hand, American designers and their clients will find some other architectural form that seems ripe for revival. In an age when architecure sometimes seems more like the manipulation of fashion than the practice of an art, a skyline can change as fast as a hemline.
