The five competing plans for a new downtown library have been studied, debated, questioned, praised and ridiculed. Thousands of Chicagoans have viewed the competition models and drawings on display in the Cultural Center. The jury will not declare its choice until June 20, but it should be clear by now that the design by Lohan Associates is the best of the lot.
Dirk Lohan and his colleagues have conceived a library that is handsome, functionally impressive, appropriately monumental in its interior and respectful of Chicago`s architectural heritage. It is cloaked with non-intimidating dignity and makes a strong and clear design statement of its own without resorting to current fashions in building that are more reminiscent of dressmaking than architecture.
To single out the best of the five entries is a task best done by the time-honored process of elimination. Comparing the dozens of elements in each entry cannot be done by some precise and generally accepted scoring process, as though one were judging a gymnast. The judgmental procedure in any architectural competition will always be partly subjective, even intuitive.
Yet there are also solidly tangible-in some cases even unassailable-standar ds of judgment that enter one`s deliberations. Moving through the five entries, one can reject the design schemes whose shortcomings are more than trivial. At the end of this process, Lohan`s library emerges as superior to the rest.
Let us see whose work should be set aside, and why.
The entry by Arthur Erickson Architects Ltd., of Vancouver, Canada (the only principal non-Chicago competitor) and Vickrey/Ovresat/Asumb Associates, Inc., is unthinkably inappropriate for the site at State and Van Buren Streets and would be an esthetically disagreeable building at any location.
Erickson-VOA created an idiosyncratically styled library whose curved walls and rooflines, slotted windows, obliquely spliced outdoor stairways and brobdingnagian scale come together in a clumsy composition that suggests no discernible genesis in architectural history or current practice. This strange building thumbs its nose at Chicago`s architectural legacy. It is a tasteless, overblown, upstart of a structure that deserves the swiftest possible dismissal from consideration.
Elimination of the other three entries that deserve rejection is much more difficult, yet all have clearly discernible weaknesses.
Helmut Jahn`s library, like Lohan`s, is in the Chicago tradition of structural expression and clearly gridded walls, yet its State Street side is unpleasantly cluttered with a lineup of sidewalk-level structures that are rather contrivedly dissimilar in form. They house such required amenities as a bookstore and a gift shop.
Jahn (like Erickson-VOA) also made the more serious mistake of extending his building across Van Buren, bridging the CTA elevated tracks and terminating the library on the tract of urban renewal land extending north almost to Jackson Boulevard. The city gave design entrants the ambiguous option of using the extra block if they wished, a foolish decision that, in effect, created two alternate sets of design criteria.
In any case, extending the library across the tracks would eat up construction money that could be put to better use on the primary block. It would also remove more land from the tax rolls and create formidable north-south walking distances for library users. Finally, a major building bridging a Loop street would set a disturbing precedent by tacitly approving the disruption of traditional vistas and sightlines. All of this argues against Jahn`s entry, despite its strength in other respects.
The library design by Adrian Smith of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill is another essentially solid performance, although hardly without flaws. Its facades reflect a failed effort to create an amalgam of Chicago-style imagery with older historicist references. The result is an uncertain and unacceptable eclecticism that does not measure up to Smith`s best work of the past, let alone the level of excellence that the new library deserves.
It is difficult to envision how the 11-member design competition jury
(which includes only one practicing architect) will deal with the esthetic as well as the functional and other issues raised by the five entries. The chemistry of such juries fluctuates wildly. If all of the jurors were architects, however, it is likely that the entry by Thomas Beeby of Hammond Beeby & Babka would stimulate the liveliest debate and raise philosophical issues of the most exquisitely arcane character.
Beeby has created a Neo-Classical library, clad largely in brick, that is informed by the Postmodern movement even though it eschews the cartoon-like manipulation of historic shapes and forms so beloved by the Philip Johnsons and Michael Graveses of the world. To know something of architecture and to think hard about Beeby`s entry is to risk sinking into an academic and semantic bog of measureless depth. This is true because the entry is germane to so many of the current questions about architectural directions and which of them are culturally appropriate to our time.
Is it esthetically valid to make a 1988 building look like an 1888 building? Does Beeby`s design support the notion that Postmodernism-having exhausted itself on naughty design hijinks in the 1970s and early 1980s-is now resolving into a responsible Classical focus that may dominate America`s architecture for many years to come? Or might we look back at Beeby`s library in a decade or two and regard it as a kind of thoughtfully put-together freak? Architects enjoy stewing over such questions for days at a time at design seminars that never seem to reach any conclusions. Yet the library competition allows no such intellectual indecision. At stake is a $140-million design-build contract, not a debate over whether Postmodernism is, say,
”transvestite architecture” (one of the kinder appellations employed by its critics).
Interestingly, Beeby`s entry is perhaps as well-liked at the grass roots level as it is among the academics who are perpetually yammering about semiotics, double-coding and other esoterica. It looks much the way grand old libraries used to look, and is thus as easily and quickly understood as a Barcalounger, or a Laura Ashley-styled bedroom.
Yet this is not enough. While the Beeby library is an admirable piece of work, it falls short, finally, because it is disconnected from the continuum of greatness that has marked Chicago architecture for the last century. It pays no heed to the architectural legacy forged by the likes of William LeBaron Jenney, Holabird & Roche and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. It makes no clear, Chicago-style declaration about structure and materials. The Beeby library can be rejected without regrets, for it turns its back on too much.
And so we return to the Lohan library: Clear, assertive, expressive of its structure and internal spatial organization, respectful of its environs, disdainful of design fads and touched by just enough urban romanticism to enrich its character. It is a relatively conservative building in some respects, but no less attractive for that-and sure to satisfy the eye long after the flashiest architecture of the 1980s has gone stale.
The facades of Lohan`s building, clad in limestone, metal and glass, present tripartite window shapes that are a reprise of those found on the Carson Pirie Scott store and other Loop landmarks. Slender, 30-foot, wall-mounted vertical lighting fixtures enhance the State and Congress Parkway sides of the structure, ornamenting it by day and casting a glow around the entrances at night.
Inside the Lohan library, a four-story-tall ”Great Hall” provides a monumental north-south interior space sweeping across the east side of the building. The signature element of the huge hall is a symmetrical pair of 22- foot-wide staircases that rise to unite the bottom floors of the library in an unstinting gesture that is grand without taking on imperious airs. In profile, the stairs resemble an open book and celebrate the ascendancy of knowledge.
Like all of the competing architects, Lohan was required to provide sites for public art in the new library, and he has handled that well.
Flanking the building`s main entrance on State Street are two low platforms for the installation of sculptured figures allegorically
representing the diverse groups who have given Chicago its energy over the last century and a half. Lohan favors figural over abstract sculpture for the library, and the average Chicagoan will probably agree with that after putting up with so much bent-pipe and twisted-scrap art in recent decades.
Even more attractive is Lohan`s proposal to provide three panels, each measuring 12 by 24 feet, on the interior wall of the Great Hall. These would accommodate mosaics, bas-relief castings, or murals depicting such Chicago literary figures as Willard Motley, Nelson Algren, Gwendolyn Brooks, Upton Sinclair, Harriet Monroe, Richard Wright, James T. Farrell and others.
The library will be named for Harold Washington, of course, but Lohan and his colleagues in the development firm of Metropolitan Structures have expanded on that memorialization by creating a generous archival space for the late mayor`s personal papers and other audio, visual and manuscript material. Lohan appears to have performed exceedingly well in planning for the library`s spatial organization, finishing materials, use of color,
furnishings, lighting, information retrieval, security and general user comfort. The building`s structural and mechanical systems are calculatedly orthodox to avoid the problems that sometimes accompany unusual approaches to such matters.
This is, finally, a building intended to be welcoming without losing its serious sense of purpose, and capable of meeting complex needs without confronting the average user with the specter of unnecessary complexity. If it becomes what it appears to be on the drawing boards, and if the jury smiles on it, the Lohan library should serve Chicago well through the next century.
