Halloween was Friday, but there’s still a masquerade going on at North Michigan Avenue’s latest home for high-end stores. It’s essentially one big building dressed up as four little ones. Architectural purists are going to hate it. I think it’s fine, if only because it restores human scale and visual variety to a street where, for years, giant vertical malls have been ringing up sales and descending to new depths of design mediocrity.
Known in the shorthand of its developers as 730 N. Michigan, the building doesn’t actually have a single address, a telling sign that it is different from the monolithic malls that have become North Michigan Avenue’s norm. Its Michigan Avenue tenants are strictly A-list, and each has its own address and design identity: Art Deco for Tiffany & Co., neo-classical for Pottery Barn, sleek modern for Banana Republic, and a Beaux-Arts mansion look for Polo Ralph Lauren, which doesn’t debut until 1998. (The other stores open this week.).
To the unsuspecting, 730 N. Michigan will look like four different buildings designed by four different architects at four different times. In reality, it was all done at once, with the tenants occupying spaces of vastly different shapes and sizes that had to be pieced together like a Rubik’s Cube. The tenants share a common loading dock on Rush Street, and for the most part the building is a single, integrated structure of steel-reinforced concrete. Its four fronts, in other words, are pretty much a stage set.
But there’s much more to this building than its failure to intregrate structure and form. Instead, the building is about making an urban sense of place. At that, at least, 730 N. Michigan can be deemed a success.
“We don’t think of this as a mall. We think of this as a city block we’ve redeveloped,” says Karen Klutznick, vice president of the Thomas J. Klutznick Co. of Chicago, which did the project with co-owner McDonald’s Corp. The building replaces other low-rises, including a bank and a McDonald’s outlet, which led Tribune writer J. Linn Allen to quip upon the project’s announcement: “Goodbye Egg McMuffins. Hello, Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”
The cost of the project, which also has a Comp USA at Chicago and Rush streets, is not being disclosed.
The chief designer, Elkus/Manfredi Architects, worked with architects selected by the tenants to design the individual facades. Elkus/Manfredi is a Boston shop whose other Chicago credits are the dynamic Sony Gallery at 663 N. Michigan and the suave Henri Bendel Store at 900 N. Michigan. It also does lots of retail design for the Walt Disney Co., including the Disney store in New York’s Times Square.
So perhaps it should not be surprising that 730 N. Michigan has that Disney whiff of instant history. At first glance, it almost looks out of place, too diminutive, like a row of townhouses dropped into North Michigan’s retail canyons. But it will grow. Land this expensive brooks no alternative. There’s enough steel in the foundation to accommodate a 10- to 12-story luxury hotel, which would be built on top of the building’s retail base and set back from North Michigan, with an entrance on Superior.
Already, 730 N. Michigan marks a departure from the mall model and a return to the tradition of the big-city shopping street. That shift is welcome.
The exterior of a vertical mall typically is a bland box that does not express the character of individual retailers. Inside, people get from store to store through a sanitized maze of corridors, escalators and elevators. As a result, the street becomes an afterthought, its motley activities filtered out. Public space gets privatized.
Not here. Howard Elkus of Elkus/Manfredi has designed 730 N. Michigan to reinforce the importance of the street. Want to go from Tiffany to Ralph Lauren? Step outside, pal. That’s the only way.
Of course, the year-old 600 N. Michigan Ave. building also has stores that open directly to the street. But it still looks like a vertical mall — a single, overwhelming white mass that’s been tarted up with blue tile and other ornament to give it a human scale.
Here, in contrast, the different looks of the stores break down the building’s bulk. And even though 730 N. Michigan has the big windows that have come into vogue since Crate & Barrel made transparency the name of the retail game, it still resembles a block of masonry out of which openings have been carved.
Gray Indiana limestone, used on portions of the Tiffany and Ralph Lauren facades, is the material that gives North Michigan Avenue its panache. At Pottery Barn, a golden Kasota stone — a dense form of limestone quarried in Kasota, Minn., that is harder than the Indiana rock — echoes the yellow Joliet limestone of the historic Water Tower.
Monumentally scaled entrances provide the building enough visual heft to stand up to its bigger neighbors, while rounded and flattened columns create visual rhythms that mark a beat along the street. A variety of window shapes and sizes, as well as swelling window bays, will make this building a pleasure for pedestrians.
The building fills the site and frames the public realm, not only the street but also the square just to the north that contains the Water Tower. That, in fact, may be its most important urban design contribution. Rather than calling attention to itself — with garish signs and window displays like those that initially were installed at the Borders Books-Victoria’s Secret building, also on the Water Tower square — it is a civilized supporting actor that allows one of Chicago’s most cherished landmarks to occupy center stage.
To be sure, 730 N. Michigan is not without urban design faults. Its Rush Street facade is, in the main, a blank wall of precast concrete that furthers the impression that once-lively Rush has become North Michigan’s back alley. Also, along North Michigan there are crude fire-exits that are at odds with the building’s otherwise elegant bearing. Finally, its Michigan Avenue facades vary considerably in quality.
Tiffany & Co. is the best, characterized by simple streamlined elegance. Although it uses motifs the jeweler frequently employs in its stores — a sculpture of Atlas holding a clock, small square windows, a monumental two-story entrance — it escapes the trap of being generic.
For a store that sells housewares and furniture, Pottery Barn looks incongruously like a bank — a postmodern pastiche whose metal studs try, but fail, to freshen traditional classicism. At least its chunky, two-story columns hint at the two-story atrium around which the interior is organized.
Banana Republic is crisp and straightforward, unlike the faux tropical exterior New York architect Robert A.M. Stern designed for this site in 1991. His facade was taken apart to make way for this expanded version of the store, but the foundation and some of the walls remain, along with Stern’s handsome interior steel and glass staircases.
It is too early to pass judgment on the incomplete Polo Ralph Lauren store, which owes much to Beaux-Arts urban mansions in New York. But the store seems dignified but not officious, even though certain details — like a miniaturized roof-level balustrade — are unconvincing. A Chicago Avenue extension, where the base’s exaggerated classical details contrast with the thinner expression of upper stories, is wonderful.
As architecture, then, this is a building that is less than the sum of its parts. But as urban design, it succeeds at joining a larger ensemble, enhancing the public realm of North Michigan Avenue. Even if it symbolizes the larger problem that afflicts so much of American architecture today — our ability to make coherent cityscapes but not coherent buildings — this urban stage-set makes the Magnificent Mile a little more magnificent.
