Perhaps the most extraordinary architectural transformation performed in the burgeoning South Loop residential area so far is that which has converted the old YMCA Hotel into an apartment-retail-cinema complex called Burnham Park Plaza.
It is not without shortcomings, this venerable and formerly beehive-like building at the northwest corner of Wabash Avenue and 9th Street, now opened up into far more spacious rental apartments for those who seek the middle class chic prevailing in downtown`s southern fringes.
Yet the architecture firm of Schroeder Murchie Laya Associates Ltd. has turned in a solidly professional and, in most ways, tasteful job that could not be done by the numbers like a conventional built-from-scratch apartment highrise. Intuition and even improvisation-always supported by sound construction practices, of course-had to play a role here.
The old, 20-story YMCA Hotel was built in 1916 as a warren of 1,600 tiny rooms, where bewildered newcomers to the big city and low-budget transients paid as little as 30 cents a night. Even as late as the 1970s, the YMCA`s rates started at $9. Only the giant Conrad Hilton Hotel (while in a far classier league, of course) could accommodate more guests.
When rising operating costs forced the closing of the hotel on Wabash in 1979, YMCA officials first sought money to demolish it. Yet the building stood vacant and boarded-up until 1985, when developer Jerry Karp began his collaboration with Schroeder Murchie Laya to give the structure a second life. Kenneth Schroeder-a gentle, shambling man with a fey sense of humor-had earlier completed work on Cobbler Square, a once peculiar melange of light industrial buildings turned into a smart housing complex on Wells Street in Old Town.
He applied a bit of similar conceptualization at the Wabash YMCA, which is to say he viewed it as an archaeological-style challenge, carving away some of the old structure, leaving bits of its innards exposed and overlaying still other sections with bright, lively and unmistakably contemporary skins.
Cosmetics aside, it is essential to understand that the biggest problem facing Schroeder and his colleagues was the internal reorganization of residential space.
In the old hotel, many of the tiny rooms faced onto four windowed airshafts that rose the full height of the building but provided only the bleakest of brick wall views and precious little air. Schroeder eliminated the shafts, decked them over with steel plates at every level and gained enough extra floor space to make the economics of the development scheme work.
This did not, however, solve the problem of how to bring maximum daylight into the 292 new apartments, created by tearing out interior walls and otherwise combining spaces from the old YMCA beehive. To achieve that, the architects came up with 33 different floor plans serving apartments from studio to two-bedroom, two-bath size. Windows are concentrated in living rooms and bedrooms, of course. Their absence from kitchens and bathrooms is no different than the windowless walls found in even the newest highrise apartments.
Still, the juggling of space created some peculiar apartment configurations and floor layouts within a given type of unit. Interior walls jog, cant and produce awkward nooks and crannies. This is not without a certain charm, and some doubtless prefer it over the sterile, boxy symmetry of conventional apartments.
Schroeder further enlivened the look of many apartments by leaving exposed some of the original brick that once faced outdoors into the airshafts, but is now embedded in interior wall surfaces. Moldings, arches and other detailing add interest, and close attention was paid to color (the new window sash is beige and boysenberry).
Yet if Burnham Park Plaza`s interior is unusual almost to the point of idiosyncrasy, the exterior it presents to the passing public is even more arresting.
Deciding that the previously flat top of the building needed a strong new identity, the architects surmounted it with a ”folly”-a frivolous, basically British invention that can mean any sort of whimsical structure of trifling usefulness.
In this instance, the folly is a multilevel rooftop sundeck pieced together with industrial materials, looking vaguely sculptural and topped with a series of open trusses that do absolutely nothing but call attention to themselves. It is, therefore, just what a folly should be.
The original brick facades of the former YMCA were cleaned and tuckpointed, and look fine in the context of the total project. Unfortunately, results were much less visually satisfactory when a new skin was applied to the bottom stories along Wabash fronted by retail spaces. Worse yet, the architects seemed to lose all sense of esthetic control when they designed a new south wing housing the small movie theaters.
The spatial organization and entrance locations along the base are straightforward and logical enough. Retailing spaces accessible directly off Wabash are in the tradition of that street. Having the cinema box office, marquee and theater entrance face the main thoroughfare adds sparkle to a neighborhood that can surely use it. Tucking the residential lobby entrance around the corner on 9th Street and half concealing it is a nice touch, for it yields a feeling of separateness and privacy. One finds similarly secluded entrances at some of the best old apartments on the Gold Coast.
But the collective character of this effort at streetside pizzazz is, in the end, almost garishly overdone. The theater complex and the connections it makes with a parking garage and other facilities are turned out in a disorderly hodgepodge of cylindrical, vertical and horizontal shapes and mock colonnades. Patterned brick, metal, glass block, granite and tile are interwoven to no comely purpose. On the Wabash side, one might say the effect is vaguely Mondrian, fuzzily Le Corbusier-both gone a bit daft.
Having said all this, it must still be acknowledged that Schroeder Murchie Laya have, in large part, solved a set of extremely difficult problems with sure-handed ingenuity. Like other recycled South Loop buildings, Burnham Park Plaza has become a rather special place. If only the architects had simply built the deliberate folly on the roof and not perpetrated an accidental one at street level, they would have come much closer to perfection.
