Expressway drivers are doing a lot of rubbernecking these days out around Woodfield Mall. And it’s not some ghastly fender bender that’s grabbing attention. It’s a 500-foot-long office building that seems frozen in place seconds after a devastating earthquake.
Just east of Interstate Highway 290, massive concrete columns lean in and out like a crooked version of Stonehenge. A curving glass and aluminum pavilion lists to one side, seemingly propped up by steel columns. Meanwhile, another pavilion, this one clad in tilting brick, seems to be heaving from the force of violent aftershocks.
Because its earthquake architecture is so weird looking, a lot of people are going to dismiss this building — the Midwest headquarters of 3Com Corp., a computer-network equipment manufacturer based in Santa Clara, Calif. — as just another wacky California import. But that, I’ll venture, would be a mistake.
There’s something fascinating going on here — a provocative challenge to the sober, soulless modern office buildings that line the highways of America’s suburbs. You drive by those oh-so-serious, form-follows-function structures and you don’t give them a second thought. But this one, designed by Chicago architect Joe Valerio in cooperation with the San Francisco firm of Studios, makes you react.
Its off-kilter, out-of-plumb architecture is a sign of our times, the Nervous Nineties, when static right angles are out and dynamic diagonal lines are in. You see them in everything from television advertisements to newspaper pictures that look as if the photographer had been standing on the deck of the sinking Titanic.
The question, of course, is whether all this tilting is being done for art’s sake or for mere shock value. At 3Com, it’s both. If you can get past the bizarre, shake-rattle-and-roll facade — and I’ll admit that’s not easy — what you find is a stunningly sensible lesson in making the interiors of huge buildings habitable, even uplifting. Anybody who works in one of those office buildings where people are shoehorned into cubicles should be able to relate to that.
A word first about Valerio, a principal at the medium-sized Chicago firm of Valerio Dewalt Train Associates and one of the rising stars in Chicago’s design constellation: The appearances of his buildings to the contrary, he’s no nut.
His credits include award-winning interiors for U.S. Robotics, the Skokie-based network-equipment-maker that 3Com swallowed in 1997, plus the bright red NBC booth for the 1996 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Though the 3Com Midwest headquarters is Valerio’s first major building in the Chicago area, it is merely his latest essay in expressing cultural ambiguity through the medium of masonry, glass and steel.
“I’m always trying to add a level of uncertainty,” the 51-year-old Valerio says of his energetic architecture. “Why? Because life is uncertain. This is the late 20th Century. Any architect who suggests that the world is simple is not understanding the times.”
Located in Rolling Meadows at the intersection of Interstate 290 and the Northwest Tollway, the 3Com headquarters eventually will be the hub of a corporate campus with as many as 10 buildings. Though it looks new, most of the headquarters is in fact a renovated AT&T office building: a massive, rectangle-shaped structure stripped to its concrete columns and then slightly expanded for 3Com. The whole job was done in a single year — and for three-fourths the cost of erecting a new building of the same size.
In essence, Valerio has cleaved the headquarters into two parts. The first is a long, narrow strip marked by the oddball facade facing Interstate 290; this chunk contains a sun-washed atrium and the two pavilions. Directly behind it are the office floors, faced on the remaining three sides with glass-and-metal curtain walls that seem utterly conventional, at least in contrast to the building’s front.
But look closely and you realize that these walls — taut and sleek in contrast to the brute, bulky columns out front — are in reality another of Valerio’s playful exercises in ambiguity. Most office buildings have one kind of window; this one mixes and matches windows with horizontal and vertical proportions. As Valerio himself jokes, this kind of wall is “highly disciplined in its lack of discipline.”
It’s also quite good, at once elegant in its own eccentric way and human-scaled, breaking up what could have a massive, monolithic box. It also gives this part of the building the edginess Valerio wants while also serving a function: drawing lots of light inside.
The facade along the highway, which Valerio and his counterparts from San Francisco designed as a series of shapes that are easily grasped from behind the windshield as you whiz past at 70 m.p.h., is another story.
Its monolithic, precast concrete columns evoke the strength and permanence of such Chicago landmarks as Soldier Field even as they seem to rock back and forth jovially. Meanwhile, the two strange-looking pavilions — the glass and metal one, by Valerio, houses an espresso bar; the brick one, by Studios, is home to a multipurpose room — punctuate the long wall of columns like a couple of off-kilter exclamation points.
This is an architecture of collage — powerful, provocative and unsettling. Yet the effectiveness of any collage depends not only on its collective impact but also on the quality of its individual parts. In this case, neither is satisfactory.
The Studios pavilion, with its crazily tilting brick facade, is utterly arbitrary, simply there to shock. Valerio’s, while structurally ingenious (like a double wedding cake turned on its side), is ultimately little better. And the precast concrete columns of Valerio’s highway facade are too bulky, almost crude — strong without being subtle, unlike the best of Chicago design.
Taken together, the parts fail to rise beyond the level of an aesthetic jumble, illustrating just how difficult it is even for talented practitioners, such as Valerio, to do earthquake architecture well. Architect Frank Gehry, of Santa Monica, Calif., has mastered this approach in his similarly disquieting buildings, such as the stunning Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. But while Valerio has used the 3Com headquarters to issue a pointed critique of the bland buildings along the nation’s highways, he has failed to provide a wholly persuasive alternative.
Step inside 3Com, however, and you see that Valerio and his Studios colleagues have crafted a model of suburban office design and planning.
Office buildings in most suburban complexes are plunked in the middle of parking lots with no true public space between them. This one is different, its long atrium the equivalent of a big main street that eventually will connect all the buildings on 3Com’s campus.
This spinelike atrium draws on the exterior’s edginess, but its design is far more successful. The big columns still lean in and out, but inside — because their surface is drywall rather than exposed concrete — they’re far less ponderous. Light pours through tilting windows set between the columns, bringing the big space alive. Structural steel trusses, painted white, seems almost lacy in contrast to the concrete columns that support them.
Still, the atrium would seem like an airplane hangar were it not for the way that Valerio has deftly broken it up with a series of sculptural elements, such as cascading birch panels above the reception desk or a houselike structure clad in aluminum shingles. The latter, which houses 3Com’s Midwest control room, has a futuristic feel without being self-consciously high-tech, as it might have seemed had it been designed in the obvious chrome and glass.
The range of colors, scales and textures along the atrium is a sheer delight, even if the interior designs of both the espresso bar and the multipurpose room are chaotic and over the top. Wisely, 3Com insisted on placing these and other people-attracting features on either side of the atrium, so the narrow space becomes as lively as possible, like an urban street flanked with storefronts and cafes.
Because of their sheer size, with roughly four times as much space as Sears Tower, the office floors could have been vast and anonymous. They might have been dark, too, because there was no money for installing skylights or punching light wells into the old building. In reality, however, they are cheery and easy to navigate.
To make it easy for office workers to find their way around, Valerio divided each floor into six parts that are like the blocks of a city street. Each is color coded — orange for one zone, green for another, and so on.
Long corridors are animated by tipping wall panels that indicate the presence of conference rooms and service areas while recalling the leaning columns of the exterior. That’s a welcome contrast to conventional office buildings where an architect does the outside and an interiors specialist handles the offices, often in ways that are utterly incompatible.
There is plenty of light in the work areas, where everyone sits in cubicles (there are no private offices), because the renovation tripled the amount of window area. Valerio also has guarded against anonymity by varying ceiling heights, sometimes leaving the old building’s waffle-shaped ceiling exposed.
Surveying his creation, he happily says: “It’s the American office interior — done warped.”
Perhaps. Behind the loopy veneer and the chaotic sensibility is a clarity of purpose that makes 3Com’s Midwest headquarters a model for humanizing the modern workplace. Valerio and his clients deserve credit for treating architecture not simply as packaging, but as a total environment aimed not only at communicating an image but also at enhancing the experience of employees.
Even if the building’s earthquake architecture doesn’t hold up, Valerio’s essential idea — that the architecture of the workplace should engage and inspire us, expressing the spirit of our time — remains on very solid ground.
