For as long as anyone can remember, boys and girls have stacked building blocks atop one another, constructing skyscrapers of the imagination that go as high as a child’s hand can reach.
Now, a real-life verson of that game is playing out in Chicago, the city that invented the skyscraper–a building that will grow upward as the company inside it grows.
It is the first office tower started in downtown Chicago in five years. For that reason, and because it is rising at a prominent location–300 E. Randolph St., just east of the Amoco Building and the northern edge of Grant Park–the $200 million building is inducing plenty of rubber-necking.
What the gawkers may not realize is that the high rise, which initially will have 30 floors and be 411 feet tall, will have the capacity to grow taller in stages. It will eventually be able to reach 54 floors and 731 feet, roughly half the size of the Sears Tower.
The high rise is being built for fast-growing Blue Cross-Blue Shield of Illinois, the state’s oldest and largest health-care insurance company, with nearly 2.5 million customers. And, like all architecture, it speaks volumes about its times.
Nearly everything about the building, from its floor plan to an unostentatious exterior design that verges on the bland, is a product of the Nervous ’90s, a time of diminished economic expectations, despite record-breaking activity on Wall Street.
This is no cathedral of commerce or monument to corporate ego. It is as austere as the antique Shaker armchairs in the present office of Blue Cross-Blue Shield president and chief executive officer Raymond F. McCaskey (no relation to Chicago Bears president Michael McCaskey).
If the building bespeaks a certain confidence, it is confidence of a very limited sort–this health insurance giant expects not to pare its payroll, as everyone else seems to be doing, but to add employees.
“Corporations build buildings for different reasons in different periods of time,” says James Goettsch of Lohan Associates of Chicago, the building’s architect. The developers are Walsh, Higgins & Co. of Chicago.
Currently housed in the Two Illinois Center office building, 233 N. Michigan Ave., a short walk from the site of the new building, Blue Cross-Blue Shield has a Chicago work force of 2,900, roughly four times the number it had 30 years ago.
Blue Cross-Blue Shield not only will own the new building, it also will be the only occupant.
At the moment, the high rise consists of two concrete cores about 200 feet tall, which will house service elevators, washrooms, electrical vaults and a vertical mail conveyor in the middle of each floor. They are so ugly that Chicago appears to be building a prison by the lake.
Wags joke that one of the cores is for Blue Cross, the other for Blue Shield. McCaskey cracks that “someday we’re going to put a Saturn rocket in between (the cores) and send it up.”
Already, the monoliths are being girdled by a cage of structural steel. In time, they will disappear behind a facade of stainless steel, aluminum, granite and glass that, on its broad faces, will be as long as a football field.
In essence, everything has been put in place to construct a 54-story office building–only construction crews will stop when they hit the 30th story.
For Chicago, an innovation
Nothing could be more different from the heady days of the early 1970s, when Sears, Roebuck & Co. built its 110-story tower, still the world’s tallest office building.
At that time, Sears could proceed with confidence that other companies would lease the skyscraper’s top half while it would occupy the lower portion, gradually growing upward as it needed more space.
Today, if Blue Cross tried to rent extra floors to some other company, no one, in all probability, would want them. There are, after all, millions of square feet of vacant office space in downtown Chicago, a legacy of overbuilding in the 1980s.
Though they are unable to cite specific examples, experts in skyscraper construction say the high-rise expansion plan is not unprecedented. At the very least, it is the first time a plan of such scope is being carried out in Chicago, where the skyscraper was born.
Engineering advances derived from bridge construction, the development of hydraulic elevators and new foundation and fireproofing technology made possible William Le Baron Jenney’s nine-story Home Insurance Co. Building of 1885, which was at the northeast corner of LaSalle and Adams (it had two stories added in 1890). Later skyscrapers were built by the same method, wherein a steel cage of columns and beams, rather than walls of brick and stone, braced buildings against the forces of wind and gravity.
Though the Blue Cross-Blue Shield high rise offers no comparable technical breakthroughs, it nonetheless required some unconventional moves to accommodate the company’s growth:
– The building’s caissons, sunk 90 feet into the soil, have a bell-shaped bottom 25 feet in diameter to help support the projected 54-story height. That’s 5 feet larger than if the building had been limited to 30 stories.
The additional structure needed to support a 54-story building is costing Blue Cross-Blue Shield $6 million, or 3 percent of the construction budget, according to company officials. But the company estimates that it will save $6.2 million annually in leasing costs because it will own the building.
– Structural steel columns will rise one foot above the roof of the 30-story building and will be protected from the elements by an aluminum covering. When an addition is needed, the covering will come off and new structural columns will be bolted directly to the old ones. Roofs atop elevator banks willbe made of easily removable metal decks that will allow the banks to be extended upward.
Non-movable parts of the roof, in effect, “will be a foundation” for the additional floors, says architect Dirk Lohan, who heads Lohan Associates. Stainless steel-clad columns on the perimeter of the building’s uppermost mechanical floors will express this “add-on” architecture.
– Normally, elevators are placed in the core of office buildings. But Lohan Associates took the unusual step of placing four passenger elevator banks along the building’s northern face, where they will create an atrium that draws natural light into the workplace.
Two passenger elevator banks will serve the building initially, with two others reserved for future use. They will be sandwiched around glass-walled conference rooms located on every third floor. As a result, employees in meetings will be able to see elevators whizzing by.
This step will free the center of the building for housing files, equipment and storage areas, eliminating noise and clutter from work areas. It also will activate the north face of the building with the motion of the elevators and the expression of the atrium.
That the most visually interesting part of the building has been generated by internal activities, rather than decorative clip-ons, should not be surprising. This is a skyscraper whose form has been rigorously shaped by its function, as well as an eye toward improving on the productivity and flexibility afforded by Blue Cross-Blue Shield’s 800,000 square-foot present space. The new building initially will have 1.3 million square feet, with the capacity to reach 2.5 million.
Security by design
In the company’s current quarters, policy-holders whose claims had been denied occasionally went right up to the company’s floors at Two Illinois Center and verbally harassed claims processors and executives, company officials say.
In the new building, there will be just one secured entrance at street level. The arrangement also is designed to stop the more typical problem of thieves prowling floors and rifling the coats, billfolds and purses of employees, who have no lockers.
Two Illinois Center does not have enough elevators to handle a single tenant with many employees, company officials say. So at busy times, employees must wait as long as seven minutes for an elevator to arrive. To alleviate that problem, the new building will have furnished stairs (not just fire stairs) connecting every floor.
The new building will be chunky-looking because its office floors will have 36,000 square feet of space, a third larger than the typical downtown office building built in the 1980s.
The smaller floor plates of those buildings were intended to maximize the amount of perimeter space, especially for lawyers and other executives requiring private offices and the prestige of a window. In contrast, Blue Cross-Blue Shield uses an open office environment for the claims processors who make up the majority of its work force. The company prefers related departments to be on the same floor to enhance productivity.
But while the amount of room on each floor will increase, the amount of space for each employee is expected to drop in the new building, to 172 square feet from 195 square feet per person. The offices of executives will shrink; McCaskey will lose a private conference room. He predicts, incidentally, that the cost savings associated with the building ensure that it will not drive up premiums.
All very well, but what sort of contribution will the building make to the region, the city and the skyline?
It will work against sprawl by keeping jobs downtown. By fronting directly along Randolph Street, it will frame the setback plaza of the adjacent Amoco Building and continue the wall of other buildings along the street.
But architecturally, the building has been influenced by a very ’90s conundrum: Its client picked a prominent site, but didn’t want a prominent building.
Certain features–such as horizontal stainless steel bands and a glass detail that will produce effects of shade and shadow–may enliven its bulky facade. The architects also have tried to taper the building, notching its broad face diagonally so it decreases in bulk from south to north. But ultimately, the high rise needs to be taller in order to be beautiful as well as useful.
Will that happen after Blue Cross-Blue Shield occupies the high rise in fall 1997?
No one is saying exactly when an addition will be built. That leaves open the possibility that this experiment in building-block architecture will leave Chicago’s skyline with a squat box. “By the time we get ready to build (the addition),” jokes McCaskey, “we’ll probably be in virtual offices and everybody will have an office at home.”
