Downtown Chicago has been getting some embarrassingly ungainly office and mixed-use towers of great height in the last few years. Yet in the same period it also has been blessed by a number of finely designed buildings that top out at only around 30 stories.
Among the best of these politely scaled, non-intimidating structures are the office buildings at 303 W. Madison St., 225 W. Washington St. and 123 N. Wacker Drive. The first two are by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and share the characteristics of taut but well-articulated facades and an elegance achieved without self-conscious preening. The third one, by Perkins & Will, manages considerable exuberance at its pyramidal summit, but well within the bounds of good taste.
And now comes 225 W. Wacker Drive, another midsized office tower that proclaims its presence with clarity, vigor and crispness. Certainly 225 is among the best new buildings in the Wacker corridor running along the Chicago River from Michigan Avenue west and south all the way to Van Buren Street.
The New York-based firm of Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF) designed 225, and therein lies a point of more than passing importance.
Founded in 1976, KPF quickly attained a solid national reputation that was locked into place by the honors heaped on its first tall structure, the 333 W. Wacker Drive office building finished in 1983. Its curving green reflective glass curtain wall, in sympathy with the nearby bend in the river, has made 333 one of Chicago`s most publicly popular architectural icons.
When 333 was completed, the 225 site immediately across the street on the east corner of Franklin was an empty lot used for parking, and no developer seemed to have any scheme for using it, let alone selecting an architect. KPF`s designers were worried that someone might insensitively decide to build another reflective-walled building there, thus setting up a double mirror game and dulling the panache of 333.
To KPF`s delight, however, it was chosen as the design firm and in concert with developers it decided that a 31-story office building clad with stone would be constructed at 225. Perkins & Will served as associate architects.
Settling on a building of 225`s modest height and ground dimensions is no automatic assurance that a comely work will result, of course. Hack architects botch the smallest of buildings as well as some of the largest.
Still, the task of designing a 60- or 80-story tower-in addition to grappling with complex structural and mechanical complications-poses often insoluble problems of scale. Rarely do such giants simultaneously make welcoming gestures to pedestrians at street level, get along with neighboring structures and coherently declare themselves on the broad sweep of the skyline.
Shorter office buildings offer special opportunities, then, and at 225 KPF has made the most of them. This is a particularly happy triumph to achieve in the Wacker corridor, where the breadth of the river gives every building particularly high and permanent visibility.
Approaching 225 from any direction, one quickly becomes aware of the pleasing vertical base-shaft-capital organization of its volumes. This arrangement is derivative of a classical column, has been commonly used on tall buildings for a century and continues to work well in sensitive hands.
With well-defined cornice lines and by other means, KPF`s designers also made stylistic bows to Chicago buildings of the 1920s when they gave form to 225. One of these is the 1927 Builders Building just a couple of blocks east, at LaSalle and Wacker, and you can easily find others.
Still, 225 is far from being any sort of copycat structure, and it attains particularly strong singularity in its uppermost stories and summit ornamentation.
A law firm occupies the top six floors of the gray granite-clad building. That uppermost block of space is enhanced by large expanses of glass set back a bit from the stone skin. Above is a vaulted penthouse space sheltering mechanical equipment.
But the building truly writes its skyline signature with the four 25-foot, finial-topped aluminum corner towers (or ”lanterns,” in formal nomenclature), which surmount its rooftop. They rise with grace as logical extensions of the building`s vertical thrust and carry a finely machined look, as if some giant had turned them out on a lathe.
Some may find the perfectly scaled, crisply detailed towers recollective of that world-of-the-future look favored by designers at the 1933 Century of Progress and kindred settings of the times. In others, the lanterns may even evoke images of industrial design applied to consumer products of those years. Yet even if such parallels seem discernible, nothing about the 225 summit is gimmicky. KPF has brought it off in classy fashion, and handled its nighttime illumination with skill, as well.
Viewed at closer range, 225 maintains its design integrity in every respect.
At 225`s base, KPF architects made a tastefully contrived bow to their 333 building by dressing 225 with the same green marble and studding it with circular grills similar to those near the bottom of the older structure. Other stylistic reprises are found in 225`s semicircular, marble-clad, rotunda-like main lobby on the Wacker side. Behind the new building, a low parking garage was built, buffering the office tower from the noise of Lake Street elevated trains.
Viewed within a broad historical perspective, the recent esthetic success achieved by KPF and other firms in the design of moderately scaled buildings is a reminder of what skylines used to be like before advocates of giantism took over.
In Daniel Burnham`s utopian Chicago Plan of 1909, few buildings rose higher than 12 stories, a prospect that did not seem too far-fetched at the time. As late as the 1950s, Chicago`s tallest buildings were lower than 50 stories, and the scale of the central area was still under control and much the better for it.
For the present, Chicago`s real estate slump has squelched most plans for ego-and-greed-driven office towers of major height. Perhaps it is only a matter of time until a new period of Brobdingnagian towers is born. Meanwhile, the elegance of 225 and other new office midrises reminds us that while less is not unfailingly more, shorter is usually kinder to the fabric of the city.
