You’ve got to hand it to Chicago architect John Vinci. He’s no weather vane, changing direction with the winds of architectural fashion. His new Arts Club of Chicago, just off North Michigan Avenue, is an austere brick block, resolutely right-angled, that snubs its nose at trendiness and aims instead for timelessness. Its uncompromising toughness recalls the defiant attitude of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who once said: “I don’t want to be interesting. I want to be good.”
Whether the Arts Club, which opened Friday is indeed good should be of considerable consequence to anyone who prizes Chicago’s identity as a center of design innovation. For small though this two-story building is, it nonetheless looms large, sending a message to the world and to Chicago itself about the state of the city’s architecture.
That message is not encouraging. The new, $9 million Arts Club is a banal box that looks backward rather than forward. It unimaginatively takes its formal cues from a lithe, white-painted steel stair that was salvaged from its former, Mies-designed home and has been reassembled in its new one. It is less a reinterpretation than a recapitulation.
To offer such a harsh assessment is not to deny the integrity of Vinci’s approach, his sound handling of proportions and materials, and the precision of his detailing, particularly the care he has lavished on the famous stair. In many respects, he has done the wrong thing impeccably.
But his reverence for the past, which has made him a leader in historic preservation, has prevented him from taking a creative leap into the future, which is what the Arts Club is all about.
The reason its little building is freighted with such symbolic significance is the club’s storied history of enlightened patronage. Not only has the private, non-profit group fearlessly championed avant-garde artists such as Pablo Picasso since its 1916 founding, but it also has been a strong supporter of progressive architecture.
In selecting Mies in 1947 to shape an elegant, second-story suite at 109 E. Ontario St., which was reached from street level by the famous staircase, the club decisively signaled its embrace of the crisp, spare architecture of International Style modernism instead of the florid forms of the Victorian era.
The choice foreshadowed — and, by virtue of its imprimatur, fostered–three decades of dominance by the International Style in Chicago, a creative surge that produced such masterpieces as the John Hancock Center.
The Arts Club itself lasted more than four decades following its 1951 completion. Then Chicago’s self-destructive streak took over. Despite an international outcry in 1994, the Commission on Chicago Landmarks failed to stand in the way of Chicago developer John Buck’s plan to raze an entire block, including the club, for what turned out to be a garish North Michigan shopping center.
Fortunately, the Mies stair and its thin, white-painted steel railings were saved from demolition even though the rest of the club was destroyed in 1995. Meanwhile, the Arts Club, flush with cash from the $12 million sale of Constantin Brancusi’s sculpture “Golden Bird” to the Art Institute in 1990, purchased a new site at 201 E. Ontario, three blocks east of the old one.
Thus, the way was paved for a new debate: Should the stair be reused? If so, how? And what kind of face should the Arts Club show the world?
The club, after all, always had been a tenant. By erecting its own home, it had to confront the question of its public identity–and whether its building would maintain its tradition of supporting the avant-garde.
So in 1995, the club turned to three respected figures to select an architect: Carter Manny, former director of the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts; James Wood, president of the Art Institute; and Myron Goldsmith, a former partner at Skidmore, Ownings & Merrill, who died in 1996.
After reviewing more than 40 candidates, all Chicago firms, the jury settled on Vinci, a principal at Vinci-Hamp Architects. The runner-up was Ronald Krueck of Krueck & Sexton Architects, who unlike Vinci, did not favor retaining the Mies stair.
Vinci’s building consists of two adjoining masses, one taller and narrower than the other, at the southeast corner of St. Clair and Ontario Streets. The materials–buff brick; black granite windowsills; and white steel window frames that evoke the stair–are nobly restrained. The building, in essence, is a masonry monolith out of which the architect has chiseled deeply recessed openings. To the extent that this treatment makes a small building seem monumental, the exterior is a success.
But it has to do more than that, yet it doesn’t. A casual passerby could be forgiven for wondering if Vinci sought to mimic the red-brick U.S. Post Office, circa 1956, two doors to the east on Ontario. The two nestle at the base of a skinny, silver office tower like bookends, both exhibiting a sense of institutional anonymity.
In a way, Vinci intended it to be that way; the Arts Club, he maintains, is not a star architect’s personal statement. But that does not mean it should lack personality. Dignity, yes. Dullness, no.
It’s as if architecture had been trapped in a time warp, and that modernism still had to learn from Las Vegas about responding to its surroundings, no matter how ugly, ordinary and neon-lit they might be. Now, having survived the postmodern assault, modernism again is pushing the envelope, with advanced glass technology enabling today’s state of the art structures, like Jean Nouvel’s Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art in Paris, to resemble diaphanous veils.
Compared with Nouvel’s gem of a building, which houses gallery space as well corporate offices for the international jewelry producer, the new club cannot help but seem old and tired. Yes, the form of the club’s exterior suggests the functions within (art galleries below, dining room and salon/theater above) in the classic modern manner. But Mies knew that functionalism was a dead end; a wiser course, he showed, was to infuse architecture with an expressive spirit. It’s one that’s sadly missing here.
While the Arts Club is a less than appealing aesthetic object, it also does not enhance the public realm. Vinci deserves credit for a facade that democratically reveals ground-floor gallery space and thus invites pedestrians inside but the building marks its corner bluntly, and its outdoor landscaped garden along St. Clair gobbles up too much of the sidewalk.
The interior, which has 50 percent more space than the old club, is much better, but not brilliant. It all revolves around the stair, which Vinci has placed in the middle of the rectangle-shaped building, not along the sidewalk, as it used to be. So the visitor moves through one of three, handsomely proportioned, naturally lit galleries and reaches the stair, which is off-center in keeping with Mies’ penchant for asymmetry. This arrangement has the further advantage of allowing those in wheelchairs to proceed directly to an elevator that brings them to the top of the stair, a functional necessity Mies did not face.
The stair itself looks wonderful. Its travertine marble walls and floors have been lovingly rebuilt. The stone is sensuous, ravishing, while the steel railings and the landings seems as gravity-defying as ever. Vinci has placed a translucent skylight above the stair to ensure that it is bathed in a cool, northern light, as in the old club. In its new position, the stair becomes a platform from which to view the galleries below, a happier prospect than the street traffic one saw at 109 E. Ontario.
Yet even as there is an undeniable benefit in seeing the real thing preserved and reused, something has been lost. Unlike the Stock Exchange Trading Room at the Art Institute, which Vinci and a team of architects heroically rescued and rebuilt when Adler & Sullivan’s Chicago Stock Exchange was foolishly demolished in 1972, the stair is a passage as well as a place. It cannot stand alone. It has to connect with what’s around it.
Before, as Krueck has said, the stair was a stem to the flower of the suite of rooms above it. Now, it more closely resembles an object under glass–a revered reference point from which all else springs. Ironically, though, its presence is diminished by both its off-center placement and its new, expanded surroundings.
The other spaces, especially upstairs, are hard to fault–a reception area outfitted with new editions of Mies’ exquisite Barcelona chairs; a salon/theater that is far more spacious than its predecessor at the old club; and a light-filled, pavilion-like dining room, with windows facing north and west, as at 109 E. Ontario St. But ultimately, this simply cannot be the old Arts Club.
That interior was every bit a creation of its time, and so is this building insofar as it bespeaks our nostalgia for Mies’ clarity of vision. Engaging the stair in a dialogue with the architecture of the present would have been more adventurous solution than having them speak the same language. It might have been wiser still to place the stair in a museum, acknowledging that the time had come to move forward–and to create a new landmark instead of paying homage to an old one.
