This is a tale of two city shopping hubs–one a concrete hulk that deadens its neighborhood with windowless walls half a football field long, the other a pair of buildings that enliven their environs with a clever cosmetic job.
Both the Pointe (where Clark and Halsted Streets converge with Barry Avenue) and the Wieboldt’s site (at Lincoln, Belmont and Ashland Avenues) are at six-corner North Side intersections. Both show how national retail chains, used to doing business in suburbia, are staking claim to urban areas with lots of disposable income. Yet the two new projects could not be more different.
In the suburbs, national chain outlets typically are found in one-story “big boxes.” These cookie-cutter buildings have few windows, maximizing the interior wall space for displaying merchandise. To deter shoplifting, they have only one entrance. And, of course, they offer acres of parking. But many of those qualities can have a disastrous impact on the urban environment. The Pointe is a case in point.
Designed by Amstadter Architects and developed by HSS Real Estate Inc., both of Chicago, the wedge-shaped complex extends roughly 300 feet along Clark and Halsted. One of its few redeeming features is a four-story, half-round glass tower at the sharp-angled intersection of those streets. With a white-painted tubular steel frame and a “Jetsons”-style crown of reinforced fiberglass, the tower has a crisp, lacy presence that does the traditional job of punctuating the corner in a modern way.
Rows of tall, narrow windows continue the tower’s visual panache, marching along Clark and Halsted–only to be cut off at the knees by klutzy marquees. Made of cheap-looking synthetic stucco, the marquees overhang the building’s entrance and advertise its tenants: a basement-level DSW Shoe Warehouse, a ground-floor Linens ‘N Things and a second-floor Marshalls. Above are two levels of parking. As for the architecture, it soon descends to a level of banality matched only by North Michigan Avenue’s Marriott Hotel.
To walk along the Pointe is to experience an affront to the idea that buildings contribute to the civility of the public realm. For more than 150 feet, there is almost nothing but cold, precast concrete–four soulless stories of it. Even the new branch of the Cook County Jail has more windows.
Architect Marc Amstadter has done what he can to relieve the bleak expanse, using three shades of precast concrete and giving the behemoth classical details that are supposed to relate it to the traditional storefronts of the neighborhood. Rectangular concrete panels at street level suggest windows; in the future, they can be converted to glass. Instead of the gaping horizontal slots you see in most parking garages, the Pointe’s top story has vertical openings that resemble windows.
But all that is like trying to make an elephant pirouette. This building doesn’t dance. It squashes everything around it. The worst touch is the concrete back it shows to busy Belmont Avenue, presenting nothing but big signs announcing the tenants–a building become a billboard.
Though the blame ultimately belongs to Amstadter, the tenants and developer share some of it. This is what you get when you want as few windows as possible and a single, easily monitored entrance. The Pointe’s entrance consists of sliding glass doors that open to Clark and Halsted. They lead to a light-filled, three-story atrium that directs customers to stores off the coveted ground floor.
Yet pushing the entrance to a single part of the facade, instead of stringing front doors along the street, contributes to the Pointe’s anti-urban character. Doors and windows are bunched at one end, as if the building were an accordion. Nearly everything else has been left blank, and the cityscape is far the worse for it.
A much happier story has emerged at the Lincoln-Belmont-Ashland intersection, once home to a bustling shopping district. Just to its north, two Chicago developers–LR Development Co. and Enterprise Development Co.–have restored a 79-year-old, long-vacant Wieboldt’s building as a Service Merchandise outlet with 80 lofts above it. A block north, across School Street, is a new Whole Foods grocery, parking garage and surface parking lot, designed by Chicago architects Pappageorge Haymes.
Service Merchandise had the usual national chain needs, but the developers manipulated them far more creatively than at the Pointe. Instead of a blank wall, Service Merchandise has smoked-glass windows at street level. The windows at once allow the retailer to place displays behind them and create a facade, not a fortress. A few transparent windows open the store to the city, as do entrances on Ashland and Lincoln.
When it comes to endowing the city with human scale, two large buildings on two blocks invariably are better than one megastructure on a single block. Yet nothing guaranteed that Whole Foods would complement the verticality of the seven-story Wieboldt’s tower and such ornamental flourishes as its muscular cornice. More garage than grocery, the Whole Foods building has three levels of parking atop its ground-level supermarket. It easily could have been a faceless clunker comparable to the Pointe.
Instead, Pappageorge Haymes played a classic game of fool-the-eye, placing four 55-foot towers at the corners of the building and cladding them in buff-colored brick and classical details in precast concrete. The towers draw the eye away from the garage and echo Wieboldt’s upward thrust. Far warmer than the Pointe’s cold concrete, their details provide the facade with pleasing depth and texture.
While two of the towers have internal stairs, the others are largely decorative. One forms a gateway to the garage, the other exists mainly to mark a highly visible corner along Lincoln Avenue. By no means is this great architecture, yet it excels at the art of making a sense of place.
The only weak points are the barren surface parking lot, which the grocer insisted on; the parking deck’s exposed concrete facades; and ugly mechanical grates on the building’s Lincoln Avenue backside. But this project is superior to the Pointe, and for that, credit must go to the developers, who paid a premium for the architecture, and city planners, who pushed to make the building a positive visual presence.
It is that and more. For the street–and how buildings choose to address it–is a barometer of the social contract. When buildings turn their backs to the sidewalk, it is as though we are turning our backs on one another. But when buildings present their faces to the street, it reminds us of our shared destiny and of architecture’s inherent humanism. After all, the word “facade” is simply another way of saying “face.”
