Here’s a way to experience all the visual drama a city can provide: Wait until nightfall and watch the lights. Not just any lights, but the ones that turn skyscrapers into objects of rapturous beauty. What you’ll see gives new meaning to the words “bright lights, big city.”
There’s the frilly white Wrigley Building, bathed in high-powered spotlights as it preens for the weathermen on the evening news. There’s the gracefully stepped-back office building at 919 N. Michigan Ave. (originally the Palmolive Building), still a subtle knockout, but once even more spectacular with its Lindbergh Beacon knifing into the sky.
Darkness is a canvas on which lighting designers paint, and when they get it right the effect can be as drop-dead as the diagonal shafts of light that slice through the darkness on the canvases of the 17th Century Italian artist Caravaggio.
Done up in this divine effect, buildings become beacons. They flash a message about the center city: “It’s not dark, gloomy, dangerous or deadly here. This is where the action is. Come have a little fun.” Cue Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.”
So it’s good news that Richard M. Daley, the city-beautifying mayor who has a thing for tree-planting and wrought-iron fences, has commissioned a master plan for illuminating downtown Chicago.
As the Tribune’s Gary Washburn reported, the new strategy calls for bathing nearly 100 high-rises in tasteful splashes of light. Also on the mayoral agenda: illuminating city bridges and bridge houses that serve as gateways to the Loop and replacing hundreds of nondescript 1960s-style street lights with graceful ornamental models with turn-of-the-century designs.
The plan is welcome because it will make downtown more welcoming, if not quite a duplicate of Paris, “the City of Light,” which is where Daley got the idea on a 1996 sister-city trip. (And you thought those mayoral trips were just boondoggles.) A beautifully lit skyline would certainly show off the city to good advantage if Daley lands another national political convention in the year 2000.
On the other hand, figuratively speaking, I wish a few more light bulbs had gone on above the heads of the people who put together the plan. Mayoral aides are touting it as a “millennium project,” but the plan has the same retro appeal of Daley’s rebuilt bridges and other infrastructure improvements. In other words, it’s safe aesthetically and, thus, safe politically.
Even so, you have to admire the effort put forth for the document, titled “Chicago Downtown Lighting Master Plan.” It’s thorough, it’s thoughtful and it should yield crowd-pleasing results. How many other big cities in America are led by mayors who actually care about such arcane matters as nighttime building lighting? Surely you could count the number on one hand.
Prepared by architects Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and architectural lighting experts Schuler & Shook, both of Chicago, the plan takes in the area roughly bounded by Wacker Drive on the north and west, Michigan Avenue on the east and Congress Parkway on the south.
It recommends four corridors — Michigan Avenue, State Street, LaSalle Street and Wacker Drive bordering the Chicago River — where illuminating buildings would have the greatest impact. Almost 100 high-rises are considered prime candidates for exterior lighting. Most of the buildings date back to the 1920s and 1930s. In contrast to modern office buildings like Sears Tower, which glow from within at night, they have solid, masonry surfaces that provide just the right surface for exterior lighting.
No costs are computed to carry out the plan, but don’t worry about dollars and cents right now. The plan stakes out a vision. Better yet, it’s a “how-to,” as well as a “please-don’t,” manual that any nuts-and-bolts building manager ought to be able to follow.
Here’s one of my favorite suggestions, aimed at the Donald Trumps of the world: “The brightest is not the best. . . . No one building should be so bright so as to overpower its neighbors or seek to dominate the rest of the downtown skyline.” (The Wrigley Building, the report goes on to explain, is an exception to this rule; its white terra-cotta facade was expressly designed to be brilliantly lit at night.)
You wish somebody would have taped that plea for modesty onto the drafting board of Kohn Pedersen Fox, the New York architects whose 311 S. Wacker office building is topped by a 70-foot drum lit by nearly 2,000 fluorescent tubes. “A visual poke in the eye,” the American Institute of Architects’ Guide to Chicago rightly calls it.
Another good idea: Be judicious in the use of active light — light that blinks, changes in color or projects into the sky. This advice is accompanied by a picture of the Chicago Theatre marquee, which suggests that “active light” is appropriate in the Randolph Street theater district, but in few other places.
The plan has other pluses, particularly in setting priorities. Not only does it pinpoint the four key lighting corridors — Michigan, State, Wacker and LaSalle — but it also ranks buildings within them in terms of their importance to the overall plan.
In the Michigan Avenue corridor, which stretches from the Chicago River on the north to a few blocks south of Congress Parkway, the belvedere-topped London Guarantee Building at 360 N. Michigan Ave. and the Art Deco 333 N. Michigan Ave. building properly top the list.
Illuminating those skyscrapers, which are across the boulevard from each other, will create a superb nighttime gateway to the Loop. It will have the further benefit of matching the lighting of the Wrigley Building and Tribune Tower, making the area around the Michigan Avenue Bridge a stunning after-dark attraction, with all four of its soaring 1920s towers bathed in dramatic light.
The plan clearly can’t solve all of downtown’s problems. For example, while lighting buildings along State Street will enhance its return from boring bus mall to bustling big city street, as the document foresees, no one should forget that the illumination would largely be a cosmetic move. Yes, it would improve the perception of State. But the street still needs an infusion of retailers and entertainment attractions to compete with the powerhouses across the river, Michigan Avenue and River North.
More broadly, there’s something missing from the plan: risk-taking, far-sighted thinking, a spirit of creativity. With all the historical lampposts, subway canopies and planters going into the Loop these days, you have to wonder if Daley wants to turn back the clock and transform the Loop into a 1920s stage set. What’s next, Model Ts?
If the mayor’s aides really want to advertise their illumination idea as a millennium project, then it ought to celebrate the next 1,000 years by looking forward, not backward.
That means using the latest lighting technologies to produce spectacular visual effects, comparable to those Chicago artist John David Mooney realized in his illumination of an Atlanta office building for the 1996 Olympics — splashes of color, free-wheeling geometry, searchlights shooting into the sky.
To be sure, such a plan probably is too over-the-top to work night after night. But for a special occasion — say, when the clock strikes 2000 — that’s the way Chicago should paint the night.
