Oh beautiful for golden arches, hot-red neon and the high-tech highway signs that have been glimmering in the spacious skies of suburbia since the days of the Jetsons and fin-tailed Cadillacs.
Take a minute, though, and look out your windshield. They`ve got company. Classy company.
Like cut-rate Calvin Klein coming to K mart, the columns and keystones of classical architecture have regained favor in the salons of American design and are trickling down to strip shopping centers and fast-food joints like those in Du Page County.
An Oak Brook fashion store sports a classical arch supported by flashy metal columns. Keystones and medallions at a Westmont strip shopping center lend traditional touches to a facade of rich, red brick. A Naperville restaurant features stucco that has been molded to recall the cut stone walls of turn-of-the-century Main Street banks.
”It`s not like we`re building the Parthenon,” says Arlington Heights architect Roger Wood, who designed the Naperville outlet of Portillo`s Hot Dogs with owner Dick Portillo. ”We just want to try and do things that the public will enjoy. We don`t really consider ourselves a high art form.”
It may not be high art, but low-brow classicism is new to the commercial strips of Du Page, and that counts for something in a setting where architectural styles change quickly.
The irony is that classical architecture traditionally has been associated with public buildings that were monumental and had an aura of permanence-the Lincoln Memorial, the U.S. Capitol, the Museum of Science and Industry.
So architecture snobs are likely look down their noses and ask: ”What is a Naperville hot dog stand doing dressing itself in the same style as the Art Institute of Chicago?”
The answer, of course, is that architects have been taking bits and pieces of classical Greek architecture and transforming them into something new for centuries.
The Romans did it. The Italians did it. The French did it. The British did it. And the Americans have done it in spades, turning Southern mansions into Greek temples (Tara), making sports stadia into latter-day Roman forums
(Soldier Field) and draping everything from suburban office buildings to Main Street banks in columns, keystones and cornices that lent dignity and a sense of place where, once, there was nothing but cornfields.
”We have never been so high-handed and offended when something was done in a less-schooled way,” says Helen Searing, an art history professor at Smith College in Northhampton, Mass. and an expert on classical architecture. ”That`s not part of our tradition.”
The move to classicism stems in part from the uprising against the steel-and-glass boxes of modern architecture, a revolution that achieved one of its greatest victories last month when the neo-classical design of Chicago architect Thomas Beeby won the designer-builder competition for Chicago`s $144 million Harold Washington Library Center.
Other factors have powered the classical revival. New technology, for example, has made traditional materials such as granite both less expensive and easier to mount on steel frames.
But mostly, changing architectural fashion has propelled the change. Once derided as overblown wedding cakes out of touch with the times, classical buildings have returned to vogue because they offer a weighty dignity seldom achieved by the glass facades of modern design.
”They had a different feel,” says Itasca developer Allan Hamilton, referring to classical structures he saw in Europe. ”They didn`t feel like they were going to blow away.”
Hamilton Partners has commissioned architects such as Skidmore, Owings & Merrill to design showcase office buildings reflecting that philosophy. But the company also has asked designers to cut more modest buildings out of traditional architectural cloth.
St. James Crossing, a new 50,000-square-foot strip shopping center near Ogden Avenue and Ill. Hwy. 83 in Westmont, is one example, although, strictly speaking, its round, archlike forms and blocky columns make its architecture more Romanesque than classical.
Designed by Wilson-Jenkins & Associates architects of Itasca, the center`s most distinguishing feature is a 30-foot, roadside clock tower that is at once a reference to European clock towers and a strong departure from the pulsating neon signs often found on American commercial strips.
The center`s two retail buldings represent a similar break with convention. Rather than sheathing the structures in a featureless metal skin, Wilson-Jenkins dressed them in a rich, red brick. Then the architects accented the structures with traditional details that were fashioned in decidedly untraditional ways.
Just below roofline gables, for example, are medallions with the project`s initials-St. J.-incised in them. But instead of stone for the medallions, the architects used a less expensive material, pre-cast concrete. The center`s columns were designed in a similar way. Rather than employing the stone cylinders that might be found on Greek temples, the architects specified whitish, concrete blocks that were flecked with black specks in an attempt to give them the solid look of granite.
”You don`t create European environments in Du Page County necessarily, but . . . it`s nice when you approach a shopping area to have it have a real substantial feel to it,” says developer Hamilton.
If it sounds like the classical revival is simply trickling down to suburban strips from the high plains of architecture, then the reality is somewhat more complicated.
The movement against the aloof structures of modern architecture was given a big push in 1972 by a thin, but mighty, volume written by Philadelphia architects Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour.
The volumne was called ”Learning From Las Vegas,” and it castigated architects for trying to improve the world by tearing things down and starting anew, as they had done-with socially disruptive results-in the infamous
”urban renewal” projects of the 1950s and `60s.
Venturi called for something different: enhancing the existing enviroment, rather than changing it altogether.
Where other designers saw Las Vegas as so much flash and trash, he looked deeper and found honky-tonk high tack-an eclectic mix of signs and structures that was rich in cultural symbolism.
Take Caesars Palace, for example. Part Roman. Part Etruscan. Part Italian. Part neon. Part Modern. All inclusive, where modern architecture was sleek, clean, and, most of all, pure.
”Venturi, more than any other architect, showed the way to a strip style of classicism where you didn`t feel it was necessary to reproduce in any particular way the details or proportions of classicism, but you could do it in a kind of shorthand,” says Searing, the Smith College art history professor.
And that`s what architects are doing-in projects such as the Limited Express store in Oakbrook Center and the Portillo`s Hot Dogs restaurant in Naperville.
The Limited Express store takes a Roman triumphal arch and distorts it into a high-fashion stage set. Stone columns become pairs of flashy metal cylinders that flank the entrance. An arch pokes above a roofline that has a shorthand version of classical cornice. And stylized, gold-colored wings frame red letters that announce the store to the approaching car.
At Portillo`s, the effect is no less striking, particularly since non-descript outlets of Burger King and McDonald`s are nearby.
Architect Wood has taken plain old stucco and formed it to resemble keystones, columns and quoins, the meeting of blocks of stone at the corner of a building.
Throw in yellow-and-white canopies, and the obligatory red illuminated sign, and you`ve got what Wood calls ”the mix-and-match style.”
”It`s a comfortable feeling for people,” he says. ”It`s something they can relate to.”
Hamilton, the developer of St. James Crossing, says that such buildings are marginally more expensive to construct than conventional strip structures. But in a society that puts high value on quality and authenticity-”The real thing,” as the Coca-Cola commercial says-that extra cost is well worth it.
A fancy wrapper, after all, helps to sell packages with ordinary contents.
”Most people are motivated by their own perception of what something is,” says developer Hamilton. ”If someone sees a substantial-looking , pleasing architecture and think`s it`s high quality, then they might think the merchandise inside is high quality when, in fact, it might not be any different from any merchandise down the street.”
