After reigning for more than a century as the unofficial capital of American architecture, Chicago’s pre-eminence has vanished–its crown knocked off, its nerve lost, its capacity for future greatness diminished.
The most tangible evidence is a series of major projects, completed in the first half of the 1990s, which collectively represent a squandered opportunity to extend the city’s design leadership into the next century.
But the trouble runs deeper and must be addressed from the ground up if the city is to regain its role as wellspring of design innovation.
The newly renovated Navy Pier is a third-rate festival marketplace and convention hall that lessens the majesty of the lakefront with its jumbled silhouette and cheap construction details.
Four-year-old Comiskey Park and the year-old United Center are shopping-mall-like behemoths, bigger but in no way better than the human-scaled, distinctly urban stadiums they replaced.
And while the Harold Washington Library Center is more thoughtfully conceived, it nonetheless is architecture in a time-warp–its leaden facade seemingly built at the close of the 19th Century, not a decade before the onset of the 21st.
The bungled big buildings matter enormously. For architecture is the art that most visibly and viscerally defines Chicago–its tough beauty, its hustler’s pragmatism, its quintessentially American optimism.
To be sure, Chicago retains enormous strengths, from a public that is astonishingly conversant about architecture to a cache of historic buildings that no other American city can match.
But a range of factors, including the absence of a tough-minded design journal and a lack of permanent leadership at the city’s two major architecture schools, is hindering the flow of ideas that is essential to the creation of great architecture.
More important, a cautious clientele–epitomized by the First Client, Mayor Richard M. Daley–seems content to live off old laurels rather than be part of the creative process that gives birth to new ones. Indeed, Chicago has become a prisoner of its past.
No one’s taking risks
When architect Carol Ross Barney submitted a dynamically modern design for a West Side public library completed in 1994, city officials forced her to make the library look more like the Prairie School houses of Frank Lloyd Wright.
Had they been around 100 years ago, those officials surely would have been telling Wright to ditch the Prairie School and to revert to something Victorian.
This is the central problem of Chicago architecture today: It seeks reassurance and runs from risk.
When Cleveland of all places is outdoing this city in putting up acclaimed modern architecture–as it has done recently with I.M. Pei’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Jacobs Field baseball park–alarm bells ought to be going off.
As recently as 1991, designers polled by the American Institute of Architects ranked Chicago first among U.S. cities on the basis of design quality and innovation.
Indeed, from Louis Sullivan’s poetic essays in the skyscraper to the flowing interior spaces of Wright’s Prairie houses to the urban grandeur of Daniel Burnham to Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s glass-box office buildings, Chicago fearlessly invented the American city’s future.
But ever since the plague of postmodernism hit Chicago in the 1980s, the quality of large-scale projects here has dropped dramatically while many smaller commissions, though competent, have hardly set the world on its ear. When the dean of American architecture, Philip Johnson, suggested during an appearance here last fall that Chicago no longer was at the forefront of design, no one bothered arguing the point.
If a single city has replaced Chicago as the vanguard of change, it undoubtedly is Los Angeles, where the freely expressive, explosively sculptural houses of architect Frank Gehry and his followers have won wide acclaim.
More important than a particular style, however, is an approach to design that opens the door to new ideas, technologies and urban forms–precisely what gave Chicago its advantage over the tradition-minded cities of the East at the end of the 19th Century.
After all, it is in age-old Europe and Japan, not just in relatively youthful Los Angeles, that some of the world’s most exciting architecture is emerging.
Helmut Jahn’s experience is telling. For while the architect goes virtually without work in his adopted hometown, he is pushing the envelope in his native Germany.
In Munich, he has completed an airport hotel, the Hotel Kempinski, that will eventually be the hub of a commercial airport “city.” The hotel is striking not only as a building type, which deals in a visionary way with the edge cities now clustering around airports, but also as a work of design.
Crossing roof arches enclose a soaring lobby-garden between the hotel’s two wings. The visual transparency of the lobby-garden makes it a legitimate public space, entirely different from the typical, hermetically sealed hotel atrium.
Why Chicago became timid
It may be that Chicago’s reticence to embrace the realities of the present simply reflects America’s nostalgic mindset as well as construction management practices designed to save money rather than build better buildings.
Yet architecture, like politics, is inevitably local, and two structures stand out in explaining Chicago’s timidity.
The first–Jahn’s glassy glitter palace, the State of Illinois Center (now the James R. Thompson Center)–suffered highly publicized air-conditioning problems after its 1985 opening.
Coupled with the rise of postmodernism, the Thompson Center fostered a reaction against risk-taking that turned reactionary, leading to such backward-looking buildings as the Washington Library, by Hammond, Beeby and Babka of Chicago; and the United Center and Comiskey Park, both by the HOK Sports Group of Kansas City, Mo.
The second significant structure, the $284 million McCormick Place expansion completed in 1986, piled up $75 million in cost overruns, leading to a move to construct public buildings in Chicago for a fixed cost. Though this arrangement protects the taxpayer, it often cheapens the quality of the built environment, enabling a construction manager to cut key aspects of a design, effectively shaping the building for the architect.
That’s what happened at Navy Pier, where the original scheme by Chicago’s VOA Associates and BTA architects of Boston–no prize-winner to begin with–was substantially downgraded in the course of construction.
But more than impersonal trends explain Chicago’s fall from grace.
When Richard J. Daley ran Chicago, he knew modern architecture would dispel downtown’s image as being over-the-hill. It was no accident that the acclaimed Civic Center courts building (now the Richard J. Daley Center) was designed as a modern skyscraper, as gleaming as any corporate headquarters upon its completion in 1965.
In contrast, Richard M. Daley reflects the current popular disillusionment with modern architecture. Whereas the building programs of his father were pathbreaking, his tend to be conservative: the renovation of neo-classical bridges, the de-malling of State Street, the proposed renovation of Soldier Field for the Bears.
Daley’s leanings are positive insofar as they stitch together the physical fabric of the city. But they don’t spur innovative architecture. Significantly, the one major recent project here that has won across-the-board critical acclaim–the modern International Terminal at O’Hare International Airport, by Ralph Johnson of Perkins & Will–was begun under Mayor Harold Washington.
What needs to be done
Just as great architecture requires enlightened patrons, it flowers in cities that seed new talent, cultivate new ideas, and meticulously care for its design institutions. Yet those things aren’t happening in Chicago.
The city’s two major architecture schools have been without permanent leaders for nearly three years–the University of Illinois at Chicago since Stanley Tigerman was ousted in early 1993, and the Illinois Institute of Technology since Gene Summers resigned in spring 1993. New and creative directors are needed to attract talented students and faculty.
Once, Chicago had a distinguished design journal in Inland Architect. But ever since the feisty, but debt-ridden, magazine was purchased by trade publisher Real Estate News Corp. in 1994, it’s traded its critical bite for toothless puff pieces. Every effort should be made to get a new architectural magazine staffed and funded.
Chicago also needs curators and gallery owners who will fearlessly exhibit experimental work, like that of the postmodern “Chicago Seven” architects who challenged modernist orthdoxy in the late 1970s. Modern-art museums in New York and San Francisco have architecture departments. Why doesn’t Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art?
Encapsulating the city’s plight is a small but significant commission for the private, non-profit Arts Club of Chicago. In 1951, the club took the adventuresome step of asking Mies to design its interior. But after developer John Buck demolished the space to make way for a Michigan Avenue shopping mall, the club opted for the plan of architect John Vinci, which calls for an austere two-story structure at the southeast corner of Ontario and St. Clair Streets.
Though the new building will incorporate the famous steel staircase from the Mies-designed space, it promises to be an homage to the past rather than an exploration of the future.
A better way is for Chicago to reinvent itself, not by imitating old glories, but by understanding the essence of what made the city great–and bringing that intelligence to bear on contemporary problems and processes.
That approach still activates the work of such designers as Jahn and Johnson. And it presents a significant alternative to Los Angeles. For while the houses of Gehry and his followers have won critical acclaim, they have yet to make an impact on the American mainstream in a way comparable to Chicago’s previous triumphs.
Chicago’s challenge is to re-establish the crucial link between use and beauty, form and function that originally made it America’s architectural capital. To do that, the city must realize that it’s more than a static museum of architecture. It’s a living museum that should have a living tradition.
