Goodbye, Magnificent Mile. Hello, Mediocre Mile.
While a huge popular and economic success, North Michigan Avenue has descended to a new level of design mediocrity with the completion of the retail-cinema complex that led to the demolition of two quietly elegant buildings along the boulevard as well as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s serene Arts Club of Chicago.
The new building, known by its address of 600 N. Michigan Ave., was at the center of a heated landmark preservation battle two years ago, a fight won by Chicago developer John Buck. Now we know what all the fuss was about.
True, 600 N. Michigan isn’t the eyesore it looked to be when its design was unveiled. And yes, it’s welcome insofar as it breaks the mold of the sterile urban mall. But for all that, the $100 million building is hardly in the class of those it replaced or the precious few survivors that remind us how the avenue once raised the mundane act of shopping to an art.
All this is perfectly revealed by the structures that flank the 600 building on North Michigan Avenue. While it isn’t as bad as the 18-year-old Chicago Marriott Hotel to the south, whose unmitigated ugliness would require enormous effort to duplicate, it’s nowhere near as good as the 68-year-old Woman’s Athletic Club to the north, whose regal proportions and exquisite details represent a graciousness in short supply along the avenue today.
Instead, the new building is the worst of a group that includes three mixed-use behemoths completed on North Michigan at the end of the ’80s real estate boom–the garish City Place at 676, the overdesigned Chicago Place at 700 and the postmodern pastiche of 900 N. Michigan, the so-called Bloomingdale’s building. Each has been a boon for the tax base and a bane for beauty.
While the 600 building doesn’t fit their bill of bland gigantism because it lacks a gargantuan hotel-condominium-office tower, it demonstrates nonetheless that blandness comes in all shapes and sizes.
The irony is that this latest rending of North Michigan’s urban fabric was carried out by Beyer Blinder Belle, a New York City architectural firm with a national reputation for historic preservation. Yet in this case, the firm found itself in a very different role: accessory to the destruction of an entire city block.
Once, that block was home to Mies’ Arts Club, a second-story suite of rooms in an office building on Ontario Street. The block also contained the Michigan-Ohio and Erskine-Danforth buildings, respectively designed by Chicago architects Alfred Alschuler and Philip Maher. While unremarkable as individual structures, both helped endow North Michigan Avenue with its collective sense of dignity and permanence.
That Beyer Blinder Belle accepted this commission says much about the situational ethics many designers use when faced with the choice of sticking to their principles or paying the bills. That the firm carried out the job as it did shows the difficulty that even the most skilled architects face in making old forms and new functions compatible.
The problem, in essence, is that 600 is top heavy. In North Michigan’s fine old buildings and in its better new ones, like Crate & Barrel at 646, there is an extraordinary balance between the whole and the parts, the grand scheme and the divine detail. Not so here.
Placed atop this building, like an enormous mausoleum, is a nine-theater multiplex that throws its proportions completely out of whack. Take away the multiplex and you have something that’s almost visually appealing (go ahead, put your hand over it in the picture and see for yourself). But you also have a building that isn’t economically feasible, according to those familiar with the project’s finances.
So the architects had to figure out a way to minimize the huge bulk of the multiplex and to make it work with the building’s three-story retail base. That job was harder than it sounds. For while movie theaters require a windowless, “black box” environment, the latest trend in retailing is for stores like Crate & Barrel to resemble showrooms, their facades glassy and open to advertise their wares.
Beyer Blinder Belle’s first attempt at resolving these conflicts, unveiled during the heat of the preservation controversy, was no prize-winner. Not only would the multiplex have been housed in two windowless masses that would have been plopped atop the building like shoeboxes, but also there was little visual unity between these oafish, aluminum-clad cartons and the neo-classicism of the building’s retail base.
For whatever reason–a typical design refinement by a developer or an attempt to appease Mayor Richard Daley, who reportedly was furious that the Arts Club controversy disrupted his re-election drive–Buck announced in 1995 that he would spend an extra $1 million to upgrade materials. The ungainly base would be enlivened by fluted terra cotta pilasters (flattened columns) reminiscent of the Wrigley Building, while the blank-walled multiplex would get windows (albeit ones you couldn’t see through) as well as fluted metal pilasters that would relate 600’s top to its bottom.
Those changes averted a disaster. Seen from afar, the completed building fits reasonably well into its surroundings. Its bone-white terra cotta is more in keeping with the visual lightness of the avenue than is the brownish-red granite of City Place. Its pilasters create a sense of rhythm that is absent from the blank-walled Marriott. They echo, albeit weakly, the powerfully sculpted Corinthian columns of the First National Bank of Chicago across the street. And at a distance, blessedly, the set-back part of the multiplex cannot be seen.
A glass-walled cinema lobby, which is pushed to the building’s front, breaks up the mass of the multiplex. Not only will moviegoers be able to look out from the lobby onto the boulevard, but pedestrians also will be able to see the activity inside–a strong sign of vitality.
Relieving 600’s squat horizontality are the vertical forms of its drumlike corners. In contrast to the typical urban mall, they punctuate individual entrances to retailers located directly off the street. Levis and Eddie Bauer are in place so far along North Michigan (though there is a shared atrium entrance, complete with escalators, for a Marshalls and a Linens ‘N Things off Ontario).
To remark upon this feature seems akin to noticing that the sky is blue. Yet it is a significant departure from inward-turning urban malls that have become the norm on North Michigan. In such buildings, people get from store to store through a sanitized maze of corridors, escalators and elevators, and the public realm of the street becomes an afterthought, its motley activities filtered out.
The shift to a more street-oriented urban model undoubtedly is being driven by the profit motive–a desire to get stores closer to potential customers on the packed boulevard–but it is good news nonetheless. 600’s rounded corners and glassy facades along Ontario and Ohio may help draw activity from the Boul Mich back to once-teeming Rush Street, which has become a forgotten alley for North Michigan’s giants.
Initially, it seemed that the 600 building would worsen this problem because its Rush Street facade was an unrelieved stretch of metal and masonry. But in another shift, Buck this year hired Bridgewater, Conn., artist Elizabeth MacDonald to create a tile mural–more than 80 feet wide and 14 feet high–for the Rush Street side. The mural, which consists of nearly 12,000 pieces, is a startling sight, depicting an ocean wave crashing on rocks.
Like many aspects of this building, the mural improves upon the first plan, but it is essentially a Band-Aid, gussying up a scheme that is fundamentally awkward. The same can be said of many other details, from a green terra cotta cornice that seems applied like lipstick, to a horizontal band of blue tile that suggests a bathroom.
Yes, these features and others, like colorful canopies and Art Deco lanterns, give 600 a sense of visual excitement and human scale. But no, they are not synthesized into an aesthetic whole. A jumble is more like it. And many of the parts are not appealing in and of themselves.
The building’s corners are crudely handled in comparison to the refined sweep of Crate & Barrel or their ultimate inspiration, Louis Sullivan’s Carson Pirie Scott & Co. store on State Street. And even with its metal pilasters and cornices, the multiplex remains bloated, more white elephant than White City.
Pitfalls also are evident in 600’s showroom approach to retail design. For Crate & Barrel can work as a jewel-like exception to the solid-walled, Beaux Arts grandeur of North Michigan Avenue. But once that exception becomes the rule, the street loses the very quality that made it work so well as an architectural ensemble.
If a single feature sums up what has been lost in the shift from the old 600 block to the new one, then surely it is the escalator that leads to the basement-level Marshalls beneath the building’s Ontario front–just steps from where Mies’ revered steel staircase once seemed to float within the Arts Club foyer.
Nothing against bargain basements, but trading the Mies stair for the Marshalls escalator speaks volumes about a street that has discounted the emphasis on high design that made it one of America’s great boulevards. Now, it’s where you shop for mediocrity.
