`It`s beyond state of the art: Nobody can define it,” said Ralph Barnett of his high-rise duplex at 900 N. Michigan Ave. ”We watch people try to describe it, and it`s hard for them.
”The other apartments in this building; why, one is prettier than the other. There isn`t a single one that isn`t a birthday cake. This one is like the Guggenheim Museum, in that if you took all the paintings and furniture out, you would still want to see the architecture of the building. That`s how great a job the architects did.”
Indeed. The American Institute of Architects (AIA) shares the owner`s enthusiasm by bestowing the residence with a prestigious AIA award last month. The duplex, designed by Hartshorne and Plunkard Ltd., a four-year-old Chicago firm, it was one of 14 projects saluted out of 128 submitted.
Carol Groh, a New York architect and one of the jurors, described the space as ”an aerospace museum,” an understandable reaction to what appears to be a Saturn 5 rocket ship colliding into the ceiling with gantry attached. While Raymond G. Hartshorne and James M. Plunkard broke through new layers of the design stratosphere, they risked the unknown by trying all sorts of things that never had been done before-from curved pocket doors to the rocket ship and an all-glass elevator in the center of the floor. Then there was the need to find unique ways to display one of the most visually assertive modern art collections in the city, all within 3,250 square feet.
”Our goal was to create a museum, whether it was a museum for Ralph`s art collection or to house parts of the architecture, which is the rocketship and the glass elevator. Everything else is background,” said Plunkard.
It all started almost three years ago when Barnett, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology and chief executive officer of Triodyne, Inc., a consulting engineering firm, bought the 63rd and 64th floor duplex.
Barnett and his wife, Dolores, actually live in a house in the suburbs, where he has ”all the things you would expect a professor to have, including a library and a laboratory,” he said.
But because they spend a lot of time in the city, near their grown children, they initially found, and used as a pied a terre in the city a a rehabbed coach house on Chestnut Street. It was ”all walls,” said Barnett, perfect for holding the paintings and sculptures he and his wife have collected over 37 years.
”We kept track of things and found we used the coach house six days a week. Then I heard that the Carnegie Deli was going to be in this building,” meaning that at 900 No. Michigan.
If I had my life to live over, it would be over a delicatessen,” jokes Barnett. (The deli has since gone, he said, but at least he can still get room service from the Four Seasons, one of the city`s finest restaurants.)
If victuals were one motivation to buy the apartment, visuals- the stunning view above Oak Street Beach- was another.
”There`s no place you can`t look out except from the bathrooms,”
Barnett said.
The couple interviewed architects with the mandate ”to create a gallery that was a place to live, where they could celebrate, hold parties and and family celebrations.”
Hartshore and Plunkard threw their hats into the ring. They won over the Barnetts by measuring and photographing every work of art in the Barnetts`
collection, which includes Andy Warhol`s ”Superman” and his ”Marilyn Monroe” tapestry; a large Miro painting and a Vasarely sculpture.
In order to show off the art to its best advantage, the architects suggested angling the walls, breaking flat stretches into two angled areas, so that massive paintings could be hung without conflicting with one another.
”We never talked to another architect after that,” Dolores Barnett said. ”We had chemistry.”
She also had excellent rapport with their general contractor, Bill Wangler of Wangler Construction. ”He was a meticulous overseer, on the job every single day,” she says, making sure things went right.
The architects also came up with an innovative solution for the staircase that others proposed wind around the massive structural column in the middle of the living room that interfered with the breathtaking vistas.
This gave Ralph Barnett an opening to do something different with the column.
An idea takes off
”Everybody tried to hide it in some way,” Barnett said. ”Mirrors, winding staircases, invisible paint. I decided I was going to incorporate it and make a modest version of Saturn 5 out of it.”
The architects, who had been the only team to propose tucking the staircase away in the back, rather than having it out front and center, thought Barnett was joking.
He wasn`t. Here`s where the professor of aerospace engineering became a contemporary artist himself, transforming the column into a visual play on his work, adding the final fillip of a Cape Canaveral-style gantry.
Actually, the Saturn 5 was one of the project`s simpler tasks.
”It`s just a regular concrete column; we painted it and added the hardware to create the illusion,” said Ralph Barnett. ”See the boltheads?
Those are thumbtacks without the pins, glued on,” he adds.
The four-person glass elevator with its 12-volt battery emergency system was more complex. Nothing like it had ever been done before, and the first version was returned to the drawing boards. Both the column and the floor had to share its weight load.
Nevertheless, the mission was accomplished, and less expensively, at a savings of $80,000 over the proposed lucite staircase, which would have cost $165,000.
Besides, the rocket ship idea was perfect for what the apartment was meant to accomplish for its owners.
”This is a place where the Barnetts want people to come and have surprises,” said Plunkard, who used the rocketship and gantry to launch a complex design geometry that continually challenges a viewer`s perspectives.
Once a solution for the column was found, Plunkard addressed what he considers the strongest interior design elements: floors and ceilings.
The floors are 5-foot-square slabs of black granite, simple and elegant so as not to distract from the walls.
To create the visually complex ceiling, ”we dropped in soffits, coves and recesses, like floating sculptural objects, allowing for the recessed lighting,” Plunkard said.
The ceiling`s geometry is very specific, he says. Some of it relates to the structural grid of the buildings. Some relates to the views, repeating the same forms and details.”
For example, the cross-bracing from the Saturn 5 rocket to the elevator reflects the cross-bracing on the exterior of the John Hancock building, which is visible from the living room.
Reflections take shape
”We wanted it to have a harmonious feel,” Plunkard said. ”We realized we could make those shapes really interesting, make it look as though there`s no sense of gravity. You look at the floor and you see the reflection of the ceiling; you look at the ceiling and you see the objects that look as though they`re floating. Then you look out the window and if you`re in the clouds, you have no sense of where you are.”
This feeling of ”zero G`s” can be disconcerting. One child refused to walk on the black granite floor when reflections of light make it seem unsubstantial.
Illusions are everywhere. At night, with the rocket reflected in the black granite floors, ”it looks deeper, as if it`s really taking off,”
Barnett said.
At night, the reflections of the paintings often richochet from surface to surface, until they rest on the glass curtain wall, where they appear suspended in space.
The neon ”Smoking Lady,” which hangs in the all-stainless-steel kitchen is, in fact, reflected even in daylight in the glass skin of the building, so it looks like a glowing ghost glaring in the window.
Carrying out these innovations was often incredibly difficult, Plunkard said. Barnett, with 40 years on the faculty at IIT, used his engineering expertise to find solutions. He didn`t want electrical motors inside the walls because of the danger of fire, opting instead for pneumatics, ”which don`t harm anything,” he said.
Other challenging tasks were walls that extend and retract (Dolores Barnett`s contribution), curved pocket doors and a closet door upstairs that opens to fit into a second door jamb to close the bathroom for privacy.
”No one makes curved tracks for pocket doors,” Plunkard said. The two custom curved doors were replaced three times before the doors met in a perfect curve.
Making it all work
”There were snags throughout, but we worked them out,” Plunkard said.
The furniture is minimal, some of it built-ins by artists such as Neraldo de la Paz. Some of it, like the stunning geometric black dining table, was designed by Dolores Barnett. The artist in her, too, rose to the occasion, brought out by the project.
Some pieces the Barnetts brought from their suburban house, which Dolores Barnett described as ”modern but not high-tech.”
One thing that seemed to help make this challenging project work was a system of mutual checks and balances.
”Dolores tries to put as much in here as possible,” said Plunkard of the creative tension between the couple. ”Ralph tries to get as much out of here as possible. Ralph is reductive, and she`s very additive.”
”You`ve got to fight against ungapakt, the German word for overdone, or packed to the point where you are carrying things from room to room,” Ralph Barnett said. ”When you create something, you have to know when to stop, when you have the appropriate amount of detail. When Dolores said `too much,` the architects listened.”
