Stanley Tigerman has turned out his first tall office structure, a major event even for a practitioner of his architectural maturity and distinguished career.
Chicago, after all, is a city where an architect hasn`t quite made it until he wins visibility on the downtown skyline. Frank Lloyd Wright was an exception, but even he felt obliged to propose a mile-high Chicago skyscraper. Tigerman`s new 16-story Chicago Bar Association headquarters at 321 S. Plymouth Ct. is no skyscraper when measured on today`s gargantuan scale. Still, it proclaims its middling tallness with dash and class. Tigerman has followed the spirit of Louis Sullivan`s advice to make every tall building a
”proud and soaring thing.”
The architect is quick to say that the CBA building was a collaborative affair with his partner, Margaret McCurry. It was she, in fact, who put together the basic design scheme in only a week to meet a client deadline while Tigerman was abroad on other business. Still, it takes nothing away from McCurry`s role to say that one tends to see Tigerman in the structure`s detailing.
The CBA building`s site presented challenges, and its designers took careful cognizance of its architectural and urbanistic context.
Plymouth Court is a somewhat gritty but interesting street that begins at Jackson Boulevard, maintains an old-time Loop look as far south as Congress Parkway, then becomes a key thoroughfare in the born-again residential area terminating at Roosevelt Road.
Across the street from the CBA site is the Standard Club, a 1925 exercise by Albert Kahn, the Detroit architect who slipped into Beaux Arts and Italian Renaissance styles when he wasn`t turning out the clean-lined industrial buildings that really made him famous. Tigerman made no bows to Kahn with the CBA, but paid close attention to the old structures flanking his client`s site and to the Federal Center`s Kluczynski Building by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe less than a block away.
Abutting the north side of the CBA is the John Marshall Law School, an eclectic but not unpleasant work designed by Pond & Pond in 1922. Against the CBA`s south wall is Binyon`s Restaurant, whose stylistic genesis is lost in the mists of time but which qualifies as a landmark if only for the high quality of its turtle soup and the fact that its waiters eschew the recitation of their names.
In any case, Tigerman recognized that insertion of the CBA between the two old buildings would have to be done without creating visual discomfort, and he succeeded in that. More to the point, he found certain inspiration in the nearby Kluczynski Building and at least one other highrise done under the hand of Mies.
Tigerman has long held Mies in high esteem even when mocking other architects` slavish adherence to the International Style. It was no act of self-contradiction, then, to pick up certain threads of Mies and weave them into a composition informed by a pluralistic array of other influences.
The most direct Miesian resonance deliberately employed by Tigerman is a repeated stepping back of the CBA`s concrete frame columns, and of its wall planes, in a manner reminiscent of Mies` first tall Chicago building, the Promontory Apartments at 5530 South Shore Drive.
Combined with these structural gestures are Tigerman`s allusions to Gothic form manifested in small, buttress-like elements that girdle the building at several points and strengthen its verticality while helping to demarcate changes in window patterns. (Mies at times employed what he called
”the Gothic principle of organization,” which helps make one connection between the nearby Kluczynski Building and Tigerman`s more overtly Gothic CBA.)
Tigerman used granite, some of it rusticated, to clothe the bottom of the building. Stainless steel helps define and ornament the entrance and its flanking windows, which at the second-floor level signal the presence of CBA dining rooms. Precast concrete forms the rest of the building`s skin up to the mechanical level at the summit. Sixteen decorative aluminum finials in groups of four crisply proclaim the building`s topside.
Bright metal boltheads march up the sides of the building where the precast panels are attached to the frame, and exposed bolts with decorative caps similarly stud some sections of the building`s interior. Tigerman used them partly as a historicist echo of the boldly declared aluminum bolts in Otto Wagner`s famous 1912 Post Office Savings Bank in Vienna.
A final flourish is a nine-foot cast aluminum sculpture of ”Justice.”
One might expect the traditional figure of a blindfolded woman holding a sword and a scale for the weighing of opposing claims. Sculptor Mary Block instead chose an interpretation dating to medieval times, when Justice was a man holding a globe and a dove, suggesting a system of integrity within everyone`s reach.
Tigerman`s amalgam of stylistic references never gets out of control. In the end, the building fits its slightly odd site with a vigorous identity all its own. If it is most reminiscent of a single genre, it is the Art Moderne work of the 1930s, and that feeling is sustained in the building`s ground floor interior spaces as well.
Immediately inside the main entrance is a domed lobby area done in marble, dark wood and stainless steel. Decorative light fixtures encircling the dome carry abstracted geometric patterns that are repeated as ornamental detailing at other points. The terrazzo floor is patterned with a compass-like design radiating out from a center point that marks the location of a time capsule.
Adjoining the handsome lobby is a snug lounge area with a working fireplace that is actually stoked with wood every day, not made hokey with fake logs concealing gas jets. A small space connecting with the lounge was intended to be a bar, but is an office for the time being.
Because the CBA`s private second-floor dining rooms accommodate a daily burst of luncheon guests, Tigerman provided an elegant one-flight curved staircase up from the lobby to ease the elevator crush.
However attractive its architecture and appointments, the CBA building
(built on a modest budget) can hardly be called opulent, nor was it ever intended to be. The CBA is not a clubby retreat for old men snoozing in leather armchairs after dining on pot roast and mashed potatoes.
Moreover, the CBA had to arrange co-ownership of its new building with care because of its not-for-profit status. It did this by having a private developer build the structure and co-own it under a condominium arrangement. Several floors of the building are being leased out to private firms. The top floor sports an extra high ceiling for a tenant in search of something special, and at the sixth floor the CBA connects directly with the John Marshall Law School library next door. The new building makes functional good sense.
Thus Tigerman becomes the Compleat Architect, as it were. He is best known, probably, for his houses, although his oeuvre includes a church, apartment buildings, a library for the blind, a museum, a power station, an animal shelter, a garage shaped like an automobile and the design of merchandise from teapots to bed sheets. Tigerman holds impressive scholarly and curatorial credentials as well.
But now, finally, the office tower-a proud and soaring thing that had somehow eluded Tigerman during the first 30 years of his career. A wiseacre might say it is one of the shortest tall buildings constructed in downtown Chicago for the last decade, but surely it is among the best.
