In architecture, the art for which it is perhaps most celebrated, Chicago is known around the world as a citadel of bare-bones modernism. But those familiar with the city’s design scene say the public hungers for buildings with meat on their bones.
Scholars and architects revere Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s minimalist glass-box apartment towers at 860 and 880 N. Lake Shore Drive. Yet it is the Prairie School houses of Frank Lloyd Wright, with their profusion of hand-crafted decoration, to which the public flocks for tours.
“Chicagoans love fancy buildings. They’re uncomfortable with plain architecture,” says the award-winning Chicago designer Joseph Valerio.
Because this is the iron-pants Midwest, not fancy-pants Manhattan, the unwritten rule is that architecture here can be ornate but not overdone. Nothing on the Chicago skyline equals the Jazz Age exuberance of Manhattan’s Chrysler Building. Its dominant image, Sears Tower, has been characterized as 110 stories of soaring nonchalance.
“Chicagoans have a taste for glamor, but glamor doesn’t necessarily mean glitz,” says Alice Sinkevitch, executive director of the Chicago chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) and editor of the AIA’s guidebook to Chicago.
She and other experts list the following recently built structures as public favorites: The 333 West Wacker Drive office building, with its curving facade of reflective green glass, by William Pedersen of Kohn Pedersen Fox of New York City; the United Airlines Terminal at O’Hare International Airport, where skylit steel-and-glass vaults evoke the romance of travel, by Helmut Jahn of Chicago-based Murphy-Jahn; and the NBC Tower, with its powerful setbacks and stone-clad buttresses, by Adrian Smith of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill of Chicago.
Any claims about public taste in architecture represent calculated guesswork. With the exception of the residential housing market, there is no equivalent of the box office to provide a definitive indicator of popular preferences.
Still, there are hints of what the public likes. The commercial potency of all things connected with Wright, from house tours in Oak Park to chain-store knock-offs of his interior furnishings, is a sure-fire sign of his mass appeal. Surveys can be telling, too.
Last year, the AIA asked 535 people in downtown Chicago to name their favorite office building. The co-winners: the neo-Gothic Tribune Tower and Jahn’s futuristic James R. Thompson Center (formerly the State of Illinois Center), initially reviled as the building from outer space. Today, the center’s 17-story atrium, with its exposed elevators and glittering walls, is one of the most popular tourist spots in town.
Despite Chicago’s reputation as a city of architectural innovation-the skyscraper was invented here in 1885-some maintain that such heroic figures as Wright, Mies and Louis Sullivan are exceptions rather than the rule.
“This is a city of two extremes, conservatism and radicalism, but in the end, it’s really more conservative than radical,” says John Zukowsky, chief architecture curator at The Art Institute of Chicago. He points to the continuing popularity of architecture by Daniel Burnham and his successors, including the wedding cake-like Wrigley Building.
If there is a constant in Chicago, designers say, it is hard-nosed clients. They demand that architects justify everything, explaining exactly what functions their forms will serve.
“Los Angeles is far more experimental. New York is far more conceptual. Chicago is practical,” says Valerio. “You don’t just look at the horse. You open its mouth and look at its teeth.”
Though Valerio questions the creative value of this approach, he acknowledges that it forces architects to design structures that can be built on time, on budget, and with little maintenance. The result transforms construction into art-and less schlock per block than in New York or L.A.
