A man in a tuxedo wearing white socks–that was the unflattering tag a tour guide once pinned on the mighty John Hancock Center, where 99 of the 100 stories were clad in black aluminum and the first floor was decked out in a white marble that looked positively declasse.
Now, the big fellow in the tux seems to have splattered a plate of mushrooms all over his new gray socks.
That, at least, is the way vocal residents of the office-condominium-retail tower and other Chicagoans view the still-unfinished canopies at the Hancock’s new Cheesecake Factory restaurant. In their opinion, the sensuously curving awnings are completely out of character with the powerful, structurally expressive geometry of the X-braced skyscraper, the eighth-tallest building on Earth.
“What do they have do with cheesecake?” these critics say about the canopies. “They look like mushrooms.”
And that is one of the nicer comments being aimed at the canopies, which are the work of renowned Chicago restaurant designer Jordan Mozer. Here are others culled from interviews with brown-baggers sitting in the Hancock’s sunken plaza, Chicago architects and others who’ve noticed the change:
“Mutant fungus.”
“Dippy eyebrows.”
“More of that Planet Hollywood-Capone’s Chicago junk.”
“Gaudy.”
“A Las Vegas kind of look.”
“An eyesore.”
“I stick my tongue out.”
The chairman of the company that manages the Hancock, Robert Wislow of U.S. Equities Realty Inc., defends the canopies, which protrude from the Hancock’s East Chestnut Street facade and the face of its below-ground plaza. Contrasting the relative size of the 1,127-foot Hancock and the awning addition (21 feet long on Chestnut, roughly 70 feet long in the plaza), Wislow says: “It doesn’t take away from the building. It’s almost like a little cartoon added onto it.”
Workers last week were applying hundreds of copper pieces to the canopies, which are made from wood-framed steel and sheathed in a black synthetic membrane. Eventually, weathering is supposed to turn the bright copper the color of an old penny. Then, Wislow predicts, “this issue will go away. It’s too bad had to go through the construction project looking so ugly.”
As silly as it seems, the debate raises broader questions about the ongoing life of buildings, especially those without landmark protection because they aren’t 50 years old, the age Chicago buildings customarily must reach before being considered for landmark status.
Should their owners and those who renovate them strive to be faithful to their original design? Or is it more realistic to acknowledge that as functions change, forms should, too?
These issues are by no means restricted to the Hancock’s bottom. Its architect, Bruce Graham of the Chicago firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, reportedly was infuriated when two giant (and very profitable) broadcast towers were plopped like rabbit ears above the Hancock not long after its completion.
Still, the tower at 875 N. Michigan Ave. became a beloved urban icon, its muscularity emblematic of Chicago’s urban might. “Big John,” Chicagoans once called it, as though it were a member of the family.
The Hancock is a “monumental presence,” says Robert Bruegmann, professor of architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “On the other hand, retail is about change and flux. It’s a collision of interests. . . . This is just the latest version.”
A century ago, critics lambasted the emergence of a new building type–the skyscraper–that was creating the very sort of jagged skyline that is now considered the emblem of the American city.
Today’s design wars are being waged at ground level, especially on North Michigan Avenue, where a retail boom is creating such exercises in controversy as the former I. Magnin store just north of the historic Water Tower. Recently renovated, it has 14 signs plastered over its facade (20 if you count signs within its windows), plus the shrieking pink interior of a Victoria’s Secret store that is clearly visible to passersby through its facade’s glass negligee.
“Bad bordello,” critical pedestrians call it.
That a version of this aggressively commercial architecture has visited itself upon the Hancock is supremely ironic. For shortly after it was completed in 1970, the tower set in motion the very forces that now have returned to haunt it–not only the hulking blockbusters that have wiped out many of the boulevard’s old neo-classical buildings, but also the form-follows-fantasy architecture some would rather limit to Las Vegas and Disney theme parks.
Once characterized as a shaper of dining dreamlands, Mozer did not consult Skidmore, Owings & Merrill about his design, although the Greater North Michigan Avenue Association–the group of developers, property owners, real estate brokers and others that review building proposals along the avenue–approved it.
“We recognize architecture has a life,” says Thomas Fridstein, who runs Skidmore’s Chicago office. “Needs change. Functions change. I don’t think that buildings are fixed forever.”
On the other hand, says Fridstein, who declines to comment on Mozer’s design, “I think it’s important to be sensitive to the original intent.” The building’s original architect, Bruce Graham, now practicing in Florida, could not be reached.
The Hancock’s transformation is clearly rooted in economics. For decades, the building’s base not only looked awkward, but also was a retail dud, with clumsily arranged entrances and poor visual exposure for tenants such as the now-departed retailer Bonwit Teller.
Then, in the late 1980s, the owner, the Boston-based John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance Co., proposed filling in the sunken plaza in front of the tower and replacing it with a three-story retail atrium. Even Mayor Richard M. Daley couldn’t abide that idea, which would have defiled a triumph of modern architecture. So the Hancock people retreated and their architects, the Chicago firm of Hiltscher Shapiro, devised another plan.
As built, it provides clearly marked entrances with steel canopies and turns the once-rectangular sunken plaza into a more welcoming and less moat-like ellipse. It also replaces the old white travertine base with gray granite. The whole plaza, in fact, is faced in that material to make it seem like the tower rests on a carved piece of rock, according to architect John Hiltscher.
“We wanted it to look as though it always was that way,” he says.
Then along came Mozer, an inventive designer whose Chicago restaurants like Vivere have won international acclaim. His client is a Southern California-based restaurant chain that, despite its name, serves more than cheesecake (its menu includes pizza, pasta, seafood, sandwiches and steaks).
Mozer’s modus operandi is over-the-top and this job is no different: It is an astonishing assemblage of voluptuous plaster columns and meticulously hand-crafted details like copper floor medallions. The restaurant draws upon sources that range from the paintings of Thomas Hart Benton to Asian religious art that reflects the Pacific Rim influence on the Cheesecake Factory’s menu.
In contrast to the architectural machismo of the Hancock, Mozer says, his design is a celebration of all that is “soft, warm, fuzzy and feminine.”
The canopies themselves, he acknowledges, are designed to provide street-level visibility for the restaurant, which is mainly located on the sunken plaza level and has a smaller dining area along Chestnut. But the canopies have an artistic function, too, Mozer explains, for they project the restaurant’s identity to the pedestrian.
“What we have on the face of the restaurant is the soul of the restaurant,” Mozer says.
Running his hand across the black granite on the restaurant’s Chestnut Street facade, he adds: “I think this is actually pretty polite.”
Perhaps. But another view is that Mozer has done the wrong thing impeccably, beautifully detailing a design whose bulbous forms inevitably clash with the Hancock’s machined expression of structure. Rather than being a sympathetic exercise in visual counterpoint, the canopies can be seen as the melding of crass commercialism and artistic self-indulgence–the very opposite of the deference and dignity Hiltscher brought to the Hancock’s original design.
Mozer admits, for example, that his canopies are comparable to what the Philadelphia architect Robert Venturi once memorably labeled a “duck,” a roadside building contorted into the shape of a duckling to catch the driver’s eye.
True, the Hancock’s unusual shape endows it with certain duck-like qualities. But the tower’s tapering form has proved to be superbly functional, providing big spaces to the offices below and smaller ones to the condominiums above. The exception, of course, was a retail base that clearly needed fixing. But was Mozer’s the right way?
A bit of roadside architecture has been applied to the Hancock. So perhaps the man-and-woman-on-the-street reaction isn’t far-fetched.
Big John no longer wears white socks. Now, it’s a man in a tuxedo who goes quack.
