Spaceship Joe has landed in the United Center. But the white, cut-out letters floating atop its red steel truss do not spell out N-A-S-A.
They say N-B-C N-E-W-S.
Some Earthling named Brokaw has been sending out signals from the otherworldly looking broadcast booth at the Democratic National Convention this week. And the whole galaxy, or at least NBC’s audience on Earth, has been watching Chicago architect Joe Valerio’s latest exercise in wacky form-making.
Valerio once made a tilted steel ring look as if it were orbiting a column smack in the center of a lobby. In another lobby, he carved cloudlike shapes into the ceiling. He irreverently refers to the great Michelangelo, from whose dynamic Baroque forms he draws inspiration, as “Mike.”
But don’t be fooled. Beneath the sunny, George Jetson veneer of his designs and his own gregarious disposition, the 48-year-old Valerio is as driven, as rigorous and as disquietingly creative as any architect in town.
You do not get hired by NBC News to design the broadcast booth for a national political convention if you are a flake.
You do not get asked by U.S. Robotics, the booming Skokie-based modem and network-equipment maker, to do job after job if you can’t deal with high-tech functional nuances.
You do not win coveted national design awards–or have your work on the cover of top architecture magazines–by idly doodling futuristic shapes on the back of a napkin.
Valerio has been there, drafted that.
True, he has yet to complete a major building in Chicago. But now that he has joined architects Mark Dewalt and Jack Train to form the 40-person Valerio Dewalt Train Associates, Valerio seems poised to rocket into orbit.
Or Air.
For one of its newest clients, the Michael Jordan Golf Company, Valerio Dewalt Train will design family golf centers nationwide.
“We admire him,” says Kathleen Orser, a principal at the Chicago architectural firm of Perkins & Will. “He’s excellent at maintaining client relationships.”
To obtain the plum–or should we say peacock?–NBC job, Valerio Dewalt Train bested Perkins & Will as well as Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, both larger and better-established offices.
It almost surely marked the first time in the history of American political conventions that three A-list design firms competed to design a network broadcast booth.
The booth, which cost $500,000 and consists of five interconnected skybox suites, will be demolished after the convention. Yet it speaks volumes about contemporary culture that such an evanescent structure is a way for an architect like Valerio to get noticed–even though he has done award-winning work with far more lasting impact.
But Valerio knows that the publicity boost will live on, as will photographs of the booth. “It’s instant architecture,” he says without a trace of sentimentality in his voice. “Here today, gone tomorrow.”
Valerio grew up in north suburban Wilmette and graduated from New Trier High School, going on to architecture programs at the University of Michigan and UCLA. Clearly, he has his finger on more than the drafting pencil.
Architecture, Valerio will tell you, no longer is the sole province of wealthy individuals such as the legendary Medicis of Renaissance Florence. The New Medicis, in his view, are the upper-level managers of American corporations. Shaping their outlook is the new global marketplace and all that has followed in its wake–downsizing, economic anxiety and the need to rapidly alter products.
Valerio has demonstrated he can meet their functional needs while expressing the hard-driving, often frazzled spirit of the Nervous Nineties. In contrast to the serene modernism of 1960, his architecture is about ambiguity. Walls splay. Columns tilt. Facades warp.
“I’m always trying to add a level of uncertainty,” Valerio says. “Why? Because life is uncertain. This is the late 20th Century. Any architect who suggests that the world is simple is not understanding the times.”
While Valerio has been practicing since the early ’70s, his career took off in the last few years–in particular, with a quirky, low-cost senior citizen housing complex in Colton, a far eastern suburb of Los Angeles.
Amid tall palms, he laid out sparkling white, low-rise apartment buildings on a conventional street grid like Chicago’s. He punctuated the grid with landmarks such as a cylindrical library with a tilting roof. The project, known as Colton Palms, may not strike Midwesterners as the kind of place they’d like to spend their golden years, but residents love it–and its innocent mix of geometric order and oddball monumentality led to Valerio’s big break.
That came in 1992, when a U.S. Robotics executive, who had seen Colton Palms in a design magazine, called Valerio with this question: Want to compete with a few other firms for a factory renovation?
Knowing that he’d be up against much larger shops, Valerio brought his entire eight-person firm to the interview to make it seem big-league. He has since completed a dozen commissions nationwide for U.S. Robotics, a young, energetic corporation for which he seems perfectly matched in both skills and sensibility.
An unremarkable U.S. Robotics office building along the Edens Expressway sums up the state of Valerio’s art. The inside of the building was once a vast and dull-looking office floor, with scores of desks in long rows. It has been transformed into a lively, futuristic mini-city.
In the oval reception area, cloudlike forms seem to hover within the ceiling, bringing a sense of spaciousness to the low-slung room. An internal network of streets divides office zones, but instead of being cavernous, the streets are serene and luminous–their blue walls marked by narrow slits that emit a glowing artificial light.
At the intersection of streets, walls tilt backward, creating an impression of “energy bursts,” as Architectural Record magazine put it in a story about the building. Oval conference rooms resemble “scouts” to the reception room’s “mother ship.”
Thus, with little more than low-budget birch panels, paint and carpeting, Valerio has created an exuberant environment that expresses the personality of his client and these times. But the office is not cold and high-tech. Like Colton Palms, it is a loopy little village, at once strange and familiar.
After this week’s convention, there likely will be imitators of Valerio’s architecture. His NBC job is the class of this party–a bold departure from the typical convention booth consisting of little more than a glass box.
Two graceful ovals hang from a bowed truss, which grounds the design in the structurally expressive tradition of Chicago architecture. The larger oval contains the NBC studio. The smaller one frames a porch from which anchor Tom Brokaw can interview VIPs.
The booth’s size, color and sculptural form make it look as if it’s about to take off from its lower-skybox-level mooring. It also set off a serious case of booth envy among the other networks. After seeing NBC’s sprawling home-away-from-home, ABC expanded its booth several feet with the addition of red and white banners. CBS added a colored frame.
How did a Chicago guy like Valerio get this job? Needing a local designer to steer it through local building codes and transform luxury suites into a temporary studio, NBC contacted a former employee, now with the American Institute of Architects, who recommended top-drawer firms here. The goal, says NBC senior coordinating producer Phil Alongi, was to create a sense of transparency, making it seem that Brokaw was “right in the middle of the convention.”
Valerio has made that ideal real. While most of the other booths look like squashed huts crammed into the United Center’s lower skybox level, NBC’s seems ready to soar–just like the architect who designed it.
