Helmut Jahn`s newest downtown Chicago building is a visually cool and elegant office tower whose base doubles as the entryway to the Chicago & North Western railroad station. It stamps Jahn irrefutably as the city`s preeminent designer of spectacular public interiors that have revived the art of civic monumentality.
Jahn first displayed his mastery of the grand spatial gesture with a handsome atrium in the Board of Trade addition at Van Buren and La Salle Streets. He employed it in an even more expansive way at State of Illinois Center, which for all its serious shortcomings still presents the most breathtaking contemporary interior in the city. And now Jahn has done it again –but in a fresh manner, not by mere repetition–at the 40-story structure named Northwestern Atrium Center.
Northwestern Center (which we will call it for short) stands at the corner of Madison and Canal Streets on the site of a 1911 railroad station torn down three years ago after an unsuccessful battle to give the station landmark status. Its neighbors range from the handsome old Riverside Plaza Building at 400 W. Madison St. to the nearby parade of monoliths known as Presidential Towers.
From the outside, Jahn`s building presents an unlikely but compatible synthesis of historicist references. Overall, it makes a deep bow to the streamlined Art Moderne style of the 1930s, which in its heyday was applied to everything from Woolworth dime store facades to the Chrysler Airflow sedan. On the Madison Street side, Northwestern Center`s arched main entrance strongly echoes the curved portal of Louis Sullivan`s Transportation Building at the World`s Columbian Exposition of 1893.
The emphatic Art Moderne exterior manifests itself with rolling curves at several points on the north and south walls, while the east and west facades are flat planes. Roughly speaking, the outside of Northwestern Center resembles an early design Jahn did for the Board of Trade addition. That was rejected by the Board of Trade people because it looked too much like a slot machine. Still, it would be impertinent to say that Jahn merely revived the rejected scheme when he created Northwestern Center. The new building`s shape is far more richly detailed and complex, for one thing.
It was never Jahn`s intention to give Northwestern Center the tapered, finial-topped romantic skyscraper look that is again in vogue after years of flat roofed International Style dominance. This is a speculative office building offering large floor areas, not a corporate symbol depending on sheer height.
Yet Jahn enlivened the shell of the building not only by giving it a wavy shape, but by also cladding it in reflective blue glass accented with silver and black vertical bands suggestive of the racing stripes on a Grand Prix driver`s coveralls. (Jahn`s blue has a good deal of green in it, by the way, and comes in three shades; the similarly cool palette for the rest of the building also includes gray and white).
Strolling around the perimeter of Northwestern Center, one finds carry-overs from other Jahn buildings: the arcaded sidewalk along Madison Street, for example, and the way in which Jahn pulls the thin skin of his buildings down the sides of externally visible columns in two carefully separated layers. There is still no sharply defined Jahn ”look,” but the architect is fond of pointing out that he is consistent in his use of materials, techniques and certain formal aspects of design.
It follows, of course, that Jahn`s design weaknesses–as well as strengths– are reflected in Northwestern Center. The chief failing is an appearance of insubstantiality. Jahn is only one of many architects to employ reflective glass curtain walls on downtown office buildings, yet his idiosyncratic manipulation of design elements yields a peculiar feeling of theatrical ephemerality. You find yourself wondering whether a giant stagehand is going to come along one day and strike the set.
Not that Jahn is unaware of the need to articulate and enrich glass surfaces that are otherwise annoyingly scaleless–and boring, as well. At Northwestern Center, he has run projecting, tubular mullions all the way up the north and south facades, much as Mies van der Rohe affixed slender ornamental I-beams to the exterior columns supporting his glassy towers.
Again, in a somewhat Miesian way, Jahn has also paid close attention to the way the building ”turns the corner,” as architects say. But instead of worrying about detailing on metal corner columns, Jahn makes his turns by controlling the color of glass as it passes from one plane to another at a 90- degree angle.
If you talk to Jahn about this, he will tell you that all of his work begins at a Miesian departure point, then begins bending the old dogmas. It`s something like composing an intricate piece of music after one has mastered the scales.
The irony here is that while Mies expressed the musculature of his buildings on the outside and covered it up within, Jahn goes the opposite way. If you watched Northwestern Center while it was under construction, you know that its steel framing system includes large X-shaped girders marching up the sides just as they do at John Hancock Center. But Jahn`s glass skin now hides the braces employed by Lev Zetlin Associates, which handled the building`s structural design.
Inside, it`s another story. Having passed through the Sullivanesque entrance on Madison Street, you encounter a series of broad and tall interior spaces marked by thickets of steel trusses, hundreds of exposed bolts and other metalwork intended to be reminiscent of old-time railroad sheds. If you look straight up at the interior along Madison, you will see six huge horizontal X-shaped girders that insure rigidity of the southern atrium structure. (Another atrium on the building`s north side rises above the grandly scaled area adjoining the North Western commuter platforms.)
Jahn combines all this with highly reflective interior glass surfaces, patterned terrazzo floors and intense indirect lighting. The terrazzo, in squares and linear shapes, runs in continuous rhythms up stairways and out of doors onto sidewalk paving. Yet while the overall effect is more than a little busy, it never gets out of hand.
The day-and-night lighting in the lower floor areas of Northwestern Center is worth remarking. Most of it is beamed upward from fixtures and bounces back in a diffused glow that nonetheless creates sparkling highlights on metal and glass surfaces. Art Moderne sconces were inspired by the ones Jahn created for the Board of Trade. After dark, Northwestern Center`s lower interior levels glow especially brightly and take on an almost surreal quality.
Careful detailing is also observable in elevator cab doors and interiors, office directory boards, public seating and other objects designed by Jahn and his colleagues to fit the high-tech-slick-1930s ambience of the building. The only false note is an antique clock salvaged from the old station–a well-intended idea that doesn`t work.
Aside from all of this care lavished on color, form and light, it is with the manipulation of large and flowing spaces that Jahn makes his strongest and most impressive architectonic gestures.
The openness of Northwestern Center`s base structure does not provide a single, visually startling effect like the atrium at State of Illinois Center. It is, rather, a procession of broad, high-ceilinged (up to 100 feet) spaces that begin at street entrances. These spaces take on strikingly different visual aspects as you stroll or travel up and down three sets of escalators to reach shops and restaurants, an office elevator lobby, commuter platforms and a pedestrian bridge linking the new structure with the 400 West Madison building.
Jahn intended that the spaces be grandly scaled partly in recollection of monumental old-time railroad stations such as the demolished North Western. The generous sweeps of openness also serve the pragmatic aspects of accommodating rush hour foot traffic and helping merchandise the building as an extraordinary place.
Observation of Northwestern Center during morning and evening rush hours persuades one that Jahn and his client–Tishman Midwest Management Corp.–made good on their promises to construct an office building that would not impede the movement of 50,000 train passengers a day. Unfortunately, the Metra commuter railroad division of the Regional Transportation Authority has not yet done its share of filling the vacuum created when the old terminal was torn down.
Having reached the splendorous north atrium and passed through one of the revolving doors there, you find yourself standing on a grubby Metra train platform in a dilapidated shed encrusted with 75 years of rust and grime. The disgraceful ”temporary” commuter waiting room just off the shed has the character of a cattle pen. Harry Weese & Associates has been commissioned to renovate the entire structure, but that job may not be fully funded and finished for four or five years, according to a Metra spokesman.
It`s too bad Jahn`s civic design gestures are terminated so rudely at the edge of his turf, but that is no fault of the architect. Jahn is still the unchallenged master of the big space in Chicago, and Northwestern Center is surely among his best American buildings. See for yourself the next time you`re in that part of downtown. The building never closes, and it is certain to become a staple of every respectable downtown walking tour.
