You can ignore a painting or a sculpture in a museum. But architecture is the inescapable art.
At its best, it represents a creative synthesis of art and technology. At its worst, it inflicts wounds upon the body politic that take decades to heal.
To understand the great buildings, you have to experience them first-hand. Books and videos help, but there is no substitute for seeing architecture yourself.
Watch a building from afar and up close, in different seasons and at different times of the day. Check its proportions. Step inside. What feelings does the building provoke? What personality does it have? What memories does it bring back? How does it interact with its surroundings?
There’s no better place to go through this exercise than Chicago, a living museum of American architecture. So with all due respect to the rest of the world and its wonders — the Parthenon, the Taj Mahal, the Pyramids — here are some examples of what’s stood the test of time or is likely to retain its present stamp of importance when architectural historians make judgments in the future.
Each represents a stylistic period in Chicago’s history. For good measure, I have added some helpful books, tours and videos — and a few buildings I wish would go away.
GREAT BUILDINGS (AND ONE GREAT URBAN SPACE)
– Monadnock Building
53 W. Jackson Blvd., Burnham & Root, 1891; addition, 54 W. Van Buren St., 1893, Holabird & Roche. The Monadnock illustrates the breakthrough that won Chicago its reputation as birthplace of the skyscraper. The buildings north half has thick brick walls of traditional, load-bearing construction. Its south half, on Van Buren, has a thin curtain wall made possible by a modern frame of structural steel. William Le Baron Jenneys Home Insurance Office Building, completed here in 1885 and demolished in 1931, was the first tall commercial building with a metal frame.
– Reliance Building
32 N. State St., 1895, D.H. Burnham & Co. This glassy skyscraper, “a thing of space rather than stuff,” as an architectural historian once put it, anticipated by more than 50 years the steel and glass high-rises of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. A recent renovation removed decades of grime from its white, neo-Gothic ornament, returning the Reliance to its original luster.
– Carson Pirie Scott & Co.
(originally Schlesinger & Mayer Department Store) 1 S. State St., 1899 and 1903, Louis Sullivan. Sullivan brought the technology of the skyscraper to this masterful department store, notable for both the forthright expression of its structural steel cage and the intertwining geometric forms of its ornament. The 1889 Auditorium Building, 430 S. Michigan Ave., is another Sullivan triumph.
– Robie House
5757 S. Woodlawn Ave., 1909, Frank Lloyd Wright. This home is the ultimate distillation of Wright’s Prairie style, with broad overhanging eaves that echo the wide-open Midwestern landscape and a massive chimney that anchors the composition. Oak Park and River Forest also have extraordinary ensembles of Wright houses.
– 919 N. Michigan Ave.
(originally the Palmolive Building)
1929, Holabird & Root. This is Chicago’s foremost example of the stepped-back Art Deco style, although the Chicago Board of Trade Building, done a year later by the same architects, rates a close second. Other notable Jazz Age skyscrapers include Tribune Tower, the Wrigley Building, 333 N. Michigan Ave. and the Carbon and Carbide Building.
– Grant Park
Between Michigan Avenue and Lake Michigan, from Randolph Street to Roosevelt Road, 1903-07, Olmsted Bros.; 1915-30, Bennett, Parsons, Frost & Thomas. Chicago’s front yard is not a building, of course, but its grandly scaled civic space is every bit as much a part of the city’s identity as its skyscrapers. The park’s formal neo-classicism illustrates the pervasive impact of the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 and the 1909 Plan of Chicago, by Daniel Burnham and Edward Bennett. Both sought to turn the Hog Butcher to the World into Paris on the Prairie.
– 860 and 880 North Lake Shore Drive
1951, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Called “the glass houses” when they were built, these towers feature an extraordinary interplay of shapes, demonstrating the care Mies lavished on the spaces between buildings as well as within them. They helped change the look of cities around the world. Another Mies icon, Crown Hall at the Illinois Institute of Technology, was equally influential. Sears Tower and the John Hancock Center, by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill of Chicago, also are in the Miesian mode.
– Marina City
300 N. State St., 1959-67, Bertrand Goldberg Associates. Its two cylindrical concrete towers, which now house condominiums, still are compared to corncobs, showing how Goldberg broke from the convention of right-angled steel and glass. The five-building, multi-use complex on a downtown riverbank reflects Goldberg’s belief in high-density downtown development.
– 333 W. Wacker Drive
1983, Kohn Pedersen Fox. This elegant geometrical exercise, an office building designed by a New York firm, has a curved green glass wall that echoes and reflects the Chicago River’s southward bend. Responding to its surroundings in a way that many modernist buildings didn’t, it heralded the dominance of postmodernism here in the 1980s. Other examples are the NBC and AT&T towers by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.
– United Airlines Terminal
O’Hare International Airport, 1988, Murphy-Jahn. Helmut Jahn followed the controversial James R. Thompson Center with this gem, which re-creates the romance of travel once provided by railroad terminals. Its grandly scaled, barrel-vaulted spaces reflect high-tech design sensibilities but retain a timeless dignity. And its spectacularly lit underground passageway cleverly disguises what otherwise would be a mere tunnel.
BOOKS
Befuddled by the jargon known as “archi-babble”? These texts should help: “What Style Is It? A Guide to American Architecture,” by John C. Poppeliers, S. Allen Chambers and Nancy B. Schwartz (Preservation Press), and “A Visual Dictionary of Architecture,” by Francis D.K. Ching (Van Nostrand Reinhold). Vincent Scully’s “American Architecture and Urbanism” (Henry Holt) provides an introduction to American design that is at once lyrical and incisive.
Among the illuminating Chicago guidebooks are “The American Institute of Architects’ Guide to Chicago,” edited by Alice Sinkevitch (Harcourt Brace); “Chicago’s Famous Buildings,” by Franz Schulze and Kevin Harrington (University of Chicago); and “Chicago: A Guide to Recent Architecture,” by Susanna Sirefman (Artemis).
The fountainhead of architectural information — books, magazines, you name it — is the Prairie Avenue Bookshop, 418 S. Wabash Ave. Call (312) 922-8311.
VIDEOS, TOURS AND MUSEUMS
– In cooperation with the Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois, Perspectives Videos of Wilmette has produced a fine five-part video series that covers Chicago’s riverfront, Loop skyscrapers, Michigan Avenue and the city’s parks (with a forthcoming installment on the city’s neighborhoods). Call (312) 850-0250.
– The Chicago Architecture Foundation’s river cruise offers spectacular views of the skyline and expert commentary. Also highly recommended: the foundation’s Loop skyscraper tours. The foundation is at 224 S. Michigan Ave. Call (312) 922-3432. Call the Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio Foundation in Oak Park for tours of the Robie House and Wright’s buildings in the western suburbs. Call (708) 848-1976.
– The Kisho Kurokawa Gallery of Architecture at the Art Institute of Chicago, Michigan Avenue at Adams Street, and the Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture, 6 N. Michigan Ave., have revolving exhibitions about architecture.
BUILDINGS I WISH WOULD GO AWAY
– Chicago Marriott Hotel
540 N. Michigan Ave. This modernist clunker disgraces the Magnificent Mile.
– 600 N. Michigan Ave.
At least the Marriott is quietly ugly. This postmodern pastiche is loudly offensive, both garish and ill-proportioned.
– The Rain Forest Cafe
605 N. Clark St. Who ever thought it would be possible to outdo the theme-park tackiness of Capone’s Chicago? Amazingly, this restaurant/shopping attraction, which replaced Capone’s, turns the trick, especially the giant green frog that seems to have hopped onto its roof.
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MORE ON THE INTERNET
For a multimedia presentation of this installment and a look at the previous Essentials, go to: chicago.tribune.com
