Most architects would like to blow up the work of most other architects. So it was with some trepidation that 200 building buffs boarded the SS Ft. Dearborn for a two-hour, box-lunch cruise along the Chicago River led by Helmut Jahn, Stanley Tigerman and Thomas Beeby.
Would their guides, each a leading shaper of the Chicago skyline, fall into fisticuffs? Would the fiery Tigerman toss the acerbic Beeby overboard?
Might Beeby, in turn, whip out a pen and splatter ink on one of the dapper Jahn’s trademark white-linen suits? Would the waters of the Chicago River, which turn green each St. Patrick’s Day, run red from the bloody melee?
None of this occurred. By mid-afternoon Thursday, when the ship returned its guests to a riverside dock below the looming Merchandise Mart, there were only slight complaints, mostly about the torrid weather.
It had been obvious from the outset that this would be a day of high heat but little humility.
Tigerman, of Tigerman McCurry, had arrived at the ship dock first, in a lightly crumpled searsucker suit, a pink shirt with a white collar, a mostly-yellow tie covered with dots, and highly polished brown loafers.
Jahn, of Murphy/Jahn, both hands thrust into his pockets, showed up in a white linen suit, black tie and short-sleeved, black-checked shirt, with sunglasses on a safety chain dangling against his chest.
“He’s wearing white deck shoes,” said columnist Henry Hansen, tracking details for Chicago Magazine.
Beeby, of Hammond Beeby and Babka, the last to arrive, was dressed in a look that former Vice President Walter Mondale once described as “full Norwegian”: blue blazer, gray slacks, white shirt, black shoes and a darkly striped tie.
As the ship pulled out, all three quickly removed their jackets.
“Welcome to the Amazon,” quipped moderator Ross Miller, of the Chicago Institute for Architecture and Urbanism, a privately funded, not-for-profit organization dedicated to reinvigorating the American city.
“I don’t have to introduce any of these characters,” he said, wiping his brow and using a hand microphone to introduce them to the crowd, which paid $50 a head and included architects, stockbrokers, interior designers, several caterers, a major banker, book authors and a scattering of lawyers.
“We’ll start out by dumping on Chris,” said Tigerman, referring to one crowd member, Christopher Kennedy, vice president for marketing of a Kennedy family enterprise, the Merchandise Mart.
As the ship passed under its first bridge, Tigerman launched a vigorous attack against the Kennedy-owned Holiday Inn Mart Plaza and Apparel Center, 350 N. Orleans St., calling it “a barren fortress with a stumpy park” that “made no contribution” to the area.
Moving downstream, talk turned to buildings on the east side of the river.
Jahn said he felt that the old Kemper Insurance Building on South Wacker Drive “showed a certain attention to detail and simplicity of form that many buildings of the ’90s fail to achieve.”
Beeby liked the “brittle, neo-classical ornamentation of the Lyric Opera house,” which was “not one of the great theaters of the world, but fairly impressive.”
Tigerman, in turn, said he was drawn to the older bridge towers because they reminded him, in their ornateness, of the gates of Old Jerusalem. Downtown Chicago needs more such defining entry points, he said, noting that inbound travelers using the Kennedy Expressway are abruptly dumped into the River North area.
Similarly, motorists on the Eisenhower Expressway, driving underneath a post office, are denied the sweeping entry views of the central city available to those approaching, say, Philadelphia or New York.
“Now, I think we ought to talk nasty about Helmut, our very dear friend, because neither Beeby nor I have any buildings on the river,” said Tigerman, whose downtown contributions include the Hard Rock Cafe, a parking garage inspired by a Rolls Royce, and the dog-eared Anti-Cruelty Society building. Beeby, whose work stretches from the oft-revamped penthouse of the Drake Tower to the Harold Washington Public Library, agreed.
The problem was that nobody could think of anything demolishing to say.
Tigerman and Beeby liked all the Jahn buildings they could see from the ship, notably the sinuous Northwestern Atrium Center, which Tigerman praised for its “rigor.” So they decided instead to talk about everybody else.
Passing the Sears Tower, designed by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, Tigerman complained that its plaza looked as if it had been designed by Adolf Hitler’s architect, Albert Speer.
3 thumbs down
All three architects hated the stolid Presidential Towers of Solomon Cordwell Buenz and Associates, looming to the west, lacking in detail, a development that Jahn called “not only an architectural disaster but a financial disaster,” noting that “there sometimes seems to be a synergy between the two, in this case rightly so.”
They also dismissed the barge-like Sun-Times Building, which, Tigerman recalled, was designed by Naess & Murphy, a predecessor to Jahn’s firm.
“Perhaps Helmut will help us to rationalize this building,” Tigerman said.
“I’d like to put a new building there,” retorted Jahn quietly.
The Illinois Center complex drew mixed reviews. Though there were no specific complaints about buildings, Beeby said their placement contributed to “the Houstonization of the city. There is no sense of place. Buildings are just plunked down.”
Tigerman noted that the center’s traffic flow seemed to be inward, away from nearby streets and plazas. Instead of invigorating Michigan Avenue or the river’s edge, “you never see people outside it,” he said.
They liked Lake Point Tower, which, Jahn said, “couldn’t be done today, given the economy of the times. No apartment building in the past 10 years has had any kind of opulence. Only office buildings, built by high-profile developers for high-level tenants, have had that.”
Passing the 82-story Amoco Building, whose stony simplicity was admired, the three discreetly omitted mentioning the disastrous technical problem that forced the building’s owners to replace its outer marble sheathing at a cost in excess of $100 million. But they dumped on its neighbor, Two Prudential Plaza, a soaring tower commonly known as “Two Pru,” which Jahn called “a total misunderstanding of what a spire should be.”
They also threw bricks at the Stouffer Riviere Hotel (“no clue to Chicago traditions,” snapped Tigerman) and the R.R. Donnelley Center, a building of such severity that Tigerman called it “fascist.”
All three had praise for the curving, green-glass building, known by its address, that hugs a bend in the river at 333 Wacker Dr. “What makes it beautiful is the synergy between its form and its facade,” Jahn noted.
On to the South Loop
They also liked River City, which Tigerman described as “this eccentric project of Bertrand Goldberg,” calling Goldberg a “crusty, interesting architect” who uses cement and curves, “which he feels are more human.”
Moving through the South Loop, its riverbanks ripe with trees, bushes and, in some places, dumped office furniture, Beeby was excited by the tangle of emerging residential projects, filling in land now abandoned by railroads that, in urban planner Daniel Burnham’s day, had refused to consolidate their Chicago operations.
“It’s amazing,” said Jahn, “in one of the great cities of the world, how much spare land there is.”
Beeby paid tribute to architect Harry Weise, “the Darth Vader to Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, an amazingly innovative man of courage, who proposed novel plans for the lakefront and the river, who always seemed to be doing the opposite of whatever Mies wanted to do.”
He pointed out some of Weise’s “attempts to recolonize the river as a housing area,” notably putting apartments into a cold storage warehouse with walls so thick that workers had to blast window openings from outside and inside at the same time.
The three also liked the renovation of what is now the headquarters of Helene Curtis Inc. “Good railings,” Tigerman observed, pointing out an employee cafeteria with what looked like loge seats hanging over the river.
Praise for IBM building
Next to that, Beeby noted less happily, was a municipal parking garage built in the 1950s that illustrated “the city’s approach to the river at the time-as a toilet.” All three liked Marina City, though Jahn lamented its decline, and they praised the IBM building and the new NBC Tower.
“I love Chicago. It’s so overt,” said moderator Miller, as the ship headed in. “This city,” he added, “resists formal order with its entrepreneurial energy,” a kind of archi-speak phrasing that seemed to point to the city’s continuing capacity for surprise.
But just so things didn’t get too out of hand, the ship’s sound system wafted music into the air during most of the tour. What was it? “Mozart,” said a deckhand. “We always play Mozart. It’s soothing.”
