A roomful of developers, real estate attorneys and brokers gathers on the 49th floor of the newly-opened, two-thirds empty Chicago Title & Trust Center. The band plays “Dancing Cheek to Cheek.” The booze flows freely. And as the late 1992 party wears on-and the reality of the huge glut of office space in downtown Chicago sinks in-the 50-story granite and glass spire becomes, in the words of the partygoers, “the last building of the decade,” “the last building of the century” and, finally, “the last building of the millenium.”
The next millenium, it seems, is getting off to an early start.
The Chicago Plan Commission recently approved a $50 million proposal by developers Ronald and Miles Berger to erect a 599-foot condominium tower at 180-192 E. Walton Pl., directly south of the Mayfair Hotel on East Lake Shore Drive. Construction of the 47-story high-rise, a sculpted masonry- and glass-clad structure designed by Chicago architects Booth/Hansen & Associates, is expected to begin in 1994-a good six years before the arrival of the next millenium.
That a skyscraper of this size is in the works at a time when Chicago architecture is allegedly down for the count should prove once and for all that developers are as prone to overstatement as they are to overbuilding. But there is a larger lesson: So central is the skyscraper to Chicago’s standing as the architectural capital of America that when a skyscraper boom goes bust, developers are wont to proclaim-and the public is all-too-ready to believe-that architecture as a whole has gone bust, too.
It hasn’t.
If the skycraper dominated the roaring 1980s, then another kind of architecture-civic architecture (or, perhaps more accurately, architecture that purports to be civic architecture)-is assuming center stage in the scaled-back 1990s.
From the expansion of McCormick Place to the new international terminal at O’Hare, from the renovation of Navy Pier to the de-malling of State Street, Chicago is being re-made before our eyes.
But if skyscraper myopia continues to afflict us, we will be blind to the profound impact such architecture and urban design ventures will make upon the lakefront, the Loop, North Michigan Avenue, the city’s neighborhoods and O’Hare.
And we will have only ourselves to blame if we get blind-sided by them.
We need a new set of lenses to focus on these projects, providing a clarity of vision that allows us to scrutinize low-slung, horizontal buildings as well as towering vertical ones.
If anyone needs a reminder of the consequences of looking the other way while massive public works get built, just take a ride by the big black box of McCormick Place and try making your way through its tangle of expressway ramps, roads and parking lots to the South Side lakefront.
It’s not called “the mistake by the lake” for nothing.
The new importance of the civic realm is not unique to Chicago. On both coasts, as well as in the nation’s mid-section, the skyscraper binge has come to a halt, and it is the public sector and cultural institutions that have the cash to drive building forward and to spur debate that rivals the late 1970s battle over the Chippendale top of Philip Johnson’s AT&T Building.
In New York City, the celebrated Philadelphia architect Robert Venturi is readying to build a new Staten Island Ferry terminal that would be crowned by the world’s largest clock-120 feet in diameter. The architect says his giant timepiece will be a grand civic gesture at the tip of lower Manhattan; critics claim the King Kong-size ticker will remind commuters that they’re late for work-again.
In Los Angeles, another noted architect, Frank Gehry, has fashioned a new concert hall for the Los Angeles Philharmonic with curving limestone walls that, depending on your viewpoint, resemble billowing sails or a building exterior that’s just gone through a major earthquake. The project, the Walt Disney Concert Hall, is now under construction, one of the few under way in downtown Los Angeles.
Unlike New York and Los Angeles, Chicago has several large-scale civic projects under way simultaneously. And something else sets it apart from the cities on the coasts: the perspective of history. This year, after all, marks the 100th anniversary of the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893.
Organized by the late, great architect and planner Daniel Burnham, the South Side fair was much more than an excuse to celebrate Chicago’s rebirth after the Great Fire of 1871 or to ogle a famous belly dancer named Little Egypt.
The exposition was a mini-city that represented a sparkling clean alternative to the “Gray City” of soot-covered skyscrapers that rose in the Loop during the 1880s. The fair and its ornate, neo-classical pavilions became known as “The White City”-a place where civic, rather than commercial, values held sway.
The same civic emphasis would characterize Burnham’s famed 1909 Plan of Chicago and the so-called “City Beautiful” movement, with its plans for monumental city halls, courts, municipal offices, libraries, museums schools and plazas.
In his book, “Constructing Chicago,” Columbia University’s Daniel Bluestone writes: “This effort to establish a monumental civic landscape confronted the fact that, through their sheer size and novelty, skyscrapers had overwhelmed religious, civic and cultural buildings once central to the city’s public landscape and skyline.
“Whereas the city hall and county courthouse had earlier stood out in the center of downtown, now the looming Chamber of Commerce building took its place. . . . City Beautiful proponents aspired to reinstate a civic dominance eclipsed, in their view, by the city’s commercial development. It was no accident, in other words, that the Columbian Exposition and the 1909 plan of the city, with its striking embodiment of City Beautiful aspirations, both took place in the city of skyscrapers.”
Whatever one thinks of the Burnham plan and its legacies-from Chicago’s lakefront parks to double-decked Wacker Drive to the classically-inspired bridgetender houses along the Chicago River-the centennial celebration of the fair provides a timely reminder that Chicago’s architectural identity is much broader than the skyscraper. If another reminder is necessary, we need only look to the path-breaking Prairie School houses of Frank Lloyd Wright.
As Joseph Gonzalez, a design partner at the Chicago architectural firm of Skidmore Owings & Merrill, remarked during a recent appearance on WTTW’s “Chicago Tonight” program, the city has bones and flesh as well as a commercial heart.
This is the time, then, to focus anew on the civic realm and to ask whether the big architecture and urban design projects now under way will be boon or bane for the people of Chicago.
For starters, it is time for city officials to require that the Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority install pedestrian bridges across Lake Shore Drive as part of the McCormick Place expansion. Taxpayers who live in and around downtown are helping fund the expansion by paying a restaurant tax, so the expansion ought to do more than generate business for half-empty hotels. It ought to give the taxpayers back their lakefront.
Open your eyes, Chicago. With a couple of notable exceptions, the skyscraper boom of the 1980s is over. But the making-and mauling-of the city goes on.
