Cesar Pelli`s new 50-story office tower at 181 W. Madison St., in most respects, represents the level of performance one would expect from one of America`s best-known architects who only now is making his Chicago debut.
The building is a crisp, clearly composed statement which in its massing, setbacks and strongly vertical lines recalls Art Moderne skyscrapers of the 1930s. Its visual shortcomings, evident primarily in the lobby, tend to recede under its successful presence on the skyline and its happy marriage to the pedestrian scale of the street.
Pelli is one of about a dozen famous architects based around America and abroad who began penetrating Chicago designers` monopoly on home turf commissions in the 1980s. His new Chicago tower breaks no fresh ground so far as his own oeuvre is concerned, yet it is worth appraisal within the broad context of his older work.
Argentina-born Pelli, 63, began his U.S. career working in Michigan for the late Eero Saarinen. He then spent a dozen years as top designer for the large Los Angeles-based firms of Gruen Associates and Daniel, Mann, Johnson and Mendenhall. The most widely publicized building he turned out in the architecturally sterile environs of Southern California was the Pacific Design Center, an idiosyncratic creation whose shape and color inspired its nickname, the ”Blue Whale.”
Other notable Pelli creations during his Gruen Associates years included an orangery-like commercial winter garden in Niagara Falls, N.Y., which anticipated the glass boxes that have now become ubiquitous features of office and other complexes. In the architectural showcase city of Columbus, Ind., Pelli created the Commons and Courthouse Center, a lively town-square-under-glass.
In 1977 at the age of 50, Pelli finally founded his own practice in New Haven, Conn., and became dean of architecture at Yale University, a position he held for eight years. His first major commission in that period was for the expansion of New York`s Museum of Modern Art and construction of an adjacent apartment tower.
For much of his career, Pelli demonstrated an almost obsessive fondness for taut, practically seamless, wet-look glass skins. He has since turned to often stone-clad buildings of greater sculptural quality and livelier, carved- out profiles. The latter forms are found in Pelli`s huge World Financial Center complex in lower Manhattan.
Aside from the look of his work, Pelli`s professional profile is that of a mature practitioner unencumbered by the kind of blazing ego that marks some design stars. He is known as a solidly pragmatic sort of fellow who is comfortable with tight construction budgets and timetables.
In making his Chicago debut, Pelli was presented with a site at the southeast corner of Madison and Wells Streets which denied him the kind of high-visibility showcasing afforded on, say, Wacker Drive or North Michigan Avenue. Still, that did not blunt his achievement, scored in collaboration with the Chicago architecture firm of Shaw and Associates.
Anyone who has been to Minneapolis recently may notice that the Pelli-designed Norwest Center building, completed in that city two years ago, was something of a stylistic forerunner of the 181 W. Madison office tower. The resemblance is superficial when one gets down to details, however, even though both structures are recollective of Art Moderne.
In its original heyday, the Art Moderne style became the apotheosis of romantic skyscraper design, and splendid examples of it are extant in dozens of American cities. Applied to single buildings, it resulted in such marvelous set pieces as Chicago`s Board of Trade and Palmolive buildings. Moderne`s virtues also included its fitness for harmonious complexes of tall buildings, Rockefeller Center being a prime example.
Many of today`s architects have embraced Moderne as a form-making departure point variously resulting in everything from finely detailed `30s-look buildings to pallid and watery Postmodern posturings. Pelli`s reprise on the look falls somewhere in between, but on the side of authenticity and certainly to good effect.
From considerable distances, 181 W. Madison presents itself as a steel-framed building which in silhouette, surface detail and other respects projects a visual message of strength as well as delicacy.
By day and by night (when its facades are floodlighted unstintingly), 181 carries itself with grace and a becoming simplicity.
In his detailing of 181`s curtain walls, Pelli eschewed the polychromatic and geometric overkill that blemishes too many of today`s tall buildings done by architects who don`t know when to turn off their computer-driven drawing machines.
Pelli chose slender, vertically soaring strips of off-white granite and glass as his basic wall materials. Metal mullions give the illusion of dividing the windows, but actually are affixed a few inches outside the planeof the glass. The result tends to enhance 181`s pleasingly feathery appearance, but intrudes on the views offered to office tenants. Whether the trade-off makes sense is problematical.
Short, brightly polished, rather delicate metal finials along the top of each setback and at 181`s summit are effective antidotes to a blockiness that might otherwise have demeaned Pelli`s composition.
The main entrance of the building on Madison Street is strongly defined, sheltered and given a feeling of comfortable pedestrian scale by a portico whose slightly raised base is reached by three stairs. The city allowed limitation of ramped wheelchair access to the building`s secondary east and west entrances, a compromise by which the handicapped and the building`s good looks are both well served.
The portico`s transparent glass roof, subtly patterned with ceramic stripes, makes the most of the sunless northern exposure. Daytime indirect floodlighting further prevents gloomy shadows. The portico roof is supported by six columns whose detailing is obviously meant to harmonize with the rest of the building, but is a bit out of kilter with it nonetheless.
One city mandate, carried out as part of the zoning process, was that a low ”bustle” structure providing retail space be nestled against the east wall of the main tower. The bustle masks an alley area and creates a mini-plaza space. Another amenity is an east entrance to 181 that is linked to the office tower next door and provides pedestrians with a pleasant, sheltered route from LaSalle Street to Wells.
Pelli`s deft insertion of the handsome skyscraper into the streetscape at Wells and Madison underscores the fact that no one balks at constructing new buildings next to the CTA`s Loop elevated tracks anymore. Still, the CTA track and station structure next to 181 is a dirty, rusty mess. Doesn`t anybody in City Hall care about such blight?
Finally, while 181`s massive exterior is visually appealing, its lobby demonstrates that even Pelli`s sure-handedness sometimes falters. In common with most aggressively sumptuous office lobbies these days, it boasts an explosion of varicolored marble (Pelli`s palette is white, gray and green) and lacks any place to sit down (an annoying deficiency, particularly if the party for whom you are waiting is 20 minutes late).
Pelli gave the soaring room a vaulted, coffered ceiling of Caracalla-like aspirations. The patterned recesses in the ceiling`s silver-painted, moulded plaster surface come off as unsatisfactorily flat, however, and suggest no conceptual continuity with the rest of the lobby. Nor do the pairs of piping that Pelli arched across the ceiling and down the walls add anything that enhances the composition. A pair of Frank Stella sculptures affixed to the sidewalls are harsh and unrewarding.
And so Pelli has driven his personal guidon into the soil of Chicago, mostly to splendid effect. Overall, he has again demonstrated his propensity for architecture of quiet good taste, which is a relatively scarce commodity in our time. Pelli`s 50-story skyline debut here, the ground floor fluffs notwithstanding, must be called a success.
