Two questions rise above all others in assessing Chicago’s new, $316 million post office: Will it improve the city’s dismal mail service? And how does it rate as a work of architecture and urban planning, particularly when compared to its next-door neighbor, the old Main Post Office?
To Chicagoans who have endured chronically late mail delivery, only the first question matters. For them, mere efficiency surely would suffice. They couldn’t care less what this building looks like.
Yet any new public building, particularly one this large, has an impact on those who use it and the city around it, so taxpayers would be foolhardy to ignore it. The new post office, officially known as the Chicago Central Processing and Distribution Center, also is of interest because of what it says about the Postal Service’s efforts to transform its sorry image.
That is really where the tale of its design begins.
For decades, the Postal Service was a big, government bureaucracy organized on a military model (thus the title Postmaster General). It built post offices that looked like government buildings–classical, symmetrical, weighty structures that reflected Americans’ reverence for their government.
One of these, Chicago’s old Main Post Office, was constructed in 1932 to the design of Chicago architects Graham Anderson Probst and White. It was the nation’s largest post office, but it spoke of quality as much as quantity. Its limestone facade conveyed a sense of permanence, like classically inspired government buildings. Its Art Deco features give it a look of Machine Age modernity, like streamlined passenger trains.
The building was a planning tour de force. Following a recommendation in Daniel Burnham’s 1909 Plan of Chicago, a tunnel was carved out of its bottom to make a path for a major roadway. Twenty-four years later, the Congress (now Eisenhower) Expressway, was built through that tunnel. So the Main Post Office not only reinforced the importance of Congress Parkway, the main axis of Burnham’s plan. It also offered a prominent reminder of the significance of government in American life, forming a powerful urban gateway.
Today, though, government is thought to be the problem, not the solution. So the Postal Service has been trying to remake itself along corporate lines, after the very companies that proved adept at taking business from it. In this mindset, the Postal Service does not want to build post offices that remind potential customers of long lines and lousy service. It wants to project an image of a company on the make.
So it should be as no surprise that the new post office–at least the front of it–comes wrapped in a snazzy, corporate package, complete with sweeping green glass and a diagonal yellow steel and concrete arcade. These moves practically shout that a once-clanking bureaucracy has transformed itself into a nimble, forward-looking enterprise. “This is not your father’s post office,” they seem to say.
What, then, are we to make of the building that’s been delivered to 433 W. Harrison Street and is touted as the largest, most automated post office in America? The short answer is that while the building appears to represent a great leap forward in function, it leaves a great deal to be desired in form.
It is no faint praise to say that the firm responsible for the post office, Knight Architects Engineers Planners, Inc. of Chicago, got the building built. They faced enormous obstacles, including the need to span 13 sets of working railroad tracks. Adding to the project’s complexity, the new post office encompasses an eight-story office tower, a 475-seat cafeteria, a postal police station, 100 loading docks, underground parking for 1,200 cars, and enough linear feet of conveyors to stretch to St. Louis.
This city within a city this sits across the Chicago River from a gentrifying area. So Chicago planners wisely insisted that the architects camouflage the post office’s myriad loading docks by running a roadway, nearly a mile long, around the inside. That enables the building to swallow up unsightly trucks as they make their way to and from the docks, freeing the area from one visual blight. Unfortunately, others were permitted to intrude.
Knight split the post office into two parts–to the south, a back-of-the-house mail processing and distribution center; and to the north, front-of-the-house facilities geared to the public. The problem with this arrangement is that it creates one front and, in effect, three backs..and the back along the river is no beauty.
To be sure, the Postal Service has explored the possibility of putting office towers in the 75-foot setback between the new building and the river. (It is studying future uses for the old building.) Yet the office plan, which would cover the back that the new building turns to the river, undoubtedly is a long way off as a result of all the empty floor space around town.
So for now, passing boaters and neighboring apartment-dwellers are stuck with looking at building that could be mistaken for a bus depot. Berms, trees and shrubs will soften this eyesore. The sooner this greenery goes in, the better.
In designing the building’s front, Knight was strongly influenced by an approach to design known as Deconstructivism, which warps orthodox geometries or brings forms into unresolved collisions. That explains why the green glass appears to crash through the post office’s west end and why the non-structural yellow steel and concrete arcade seems to pop out below it.
The idea is suggest dynamism, but this clumsy composition and its mish-mash of materials unwittingly convey an impression of chaos–precisely the image the Postal Service is trying to escape.
The interior public spaces are third-class. An entry hall, which reaches four stories high, is a visual pastiche. Further marring it are floor tiles with discolored splotches. Even if the Postal Service places new product displays in the largely colorless hall, it is bound to strike the public as wasted space.
Maddeningly, customers entering the building’s western side are directed to walk a distance equivalent to a football field to reach an escalator that leads to a second-floor retail store.
The store itself has been smartly designed as a showroom for postal products, while a third-floor cafeteria allows employees to refresh themselves with skyline views and a big, if bland, dining space.
The mail processing areas, on two floors, and in operation 24 hours a day, have a horizontal layout that enables mail to move more easily than in the old post office, where full automation was impossible because different steps of the sorting process were on different floors. Now, instead of moving on dollies pushed by hand, stacks of letters and packages zip along on overhead conveyors.
It’s Flash Gordon technology. And here, Knight got things right, painting the conveyors and storage bins bright blue, yellow, red and purple. Along with good lighting and a reflective black floor that has more “give” than concrete, the colors make the vast processing area less oppressive. Machines become industrial sculpture. Art elevates the daily routine.
Had this approach been employed throughout the new post office, it might have been something to write home about. Instead, it will be, at best, an essay in efficiency. The customer didn’t get cheated here–just the cityscape. The pity of the post office is that it doesn’t serve both.
