In Chicago, the city that calls itself the cradle of modern architecture, local designers feel like snapping their drafting pencils when a plum job goes to an outsider.
It happened again Tuesday when the Art Institute of Chicago announced it had chosen the Italian architect Renzo Piano, last year’s winner of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, to map out the museum’s first addition in more than a decade.
The hiring of Piano, best known as the co-designer of the high-tech Pompidou Center in Paris, culminates an 18-month international search by the museum. It also caps a recent spate of major Chicago commissions being snagged by out-of-towners who, in the view of some clients, bring a brand-name bite and pack an aesthetic punch many locals can’t match.
California architect Frank Gehry–another winner of the Pritzker Prize, widely considered the Nobel Prize of architecture–is negotiating with city officials to do a bandshell in Grant Park. The University of Chicago announced last month it is bringing in for an athletic center Cesar Pelli of New Haven, Conn., designer of the Malaysian complex that stripped the Sears Tower of its world’s tallest title.
Put aside for a minute the issue of whether importing such talent represents a boon–or a bane–for the cityscape. The invasion of their home turf has Chicago architects fuming. “What do people around here think this town is? Peoria?” said architect Laurence Booth, who has designed a 17-story dormitory for the School of the Art Institute at the northwest corner of State and Randolph Streets.
“I thought we were a world-class town with world-class architects. Instead, they seem to think they’ve got to go someplace like Naples or Buenos Aires . . . It really shows a lack of confidence in the home team,” Booth said.
Said another: “The rest of us claw after scraps while the plums go to the out-of-town architects of notoriety.”
To be sure, some major Chicago projects always have gone to outside firms. Indeed, the Art Institute’s century-old main building at 111 S. Michigan Ave. was designed by Bostonians. In the main, however, big jobs ranging from the Field Museum of Natural History to O’Hare International Airport have been done by Chicagoans.
But their dominance has been waning since the 1980s, when real estate developers, tired of glass boxes, brought in out-of-towners such as New York City’s Kohn Pedersen Fox to inject some pizazz into buildings here.
The emergence of a global economy has accelerated the trend. Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas was picked last year to design a campus center at the Illinois Institute of Technology, while Berlin architect Josef Paul Kleihues completed a high-profile commission at the Museum of Contemporary Art in 1996.
There’s also this daunting reality: Many of the outsiders are widely considered more talented than their Chicago counterparts, though the design quality of their output in Chicago is uneven. Its range is symbolized, on one hand, by KPF’s beloved curving green-glass office building at 333 W. Wacker Drive and, on the other, by Kleihues’ stolid, uninviting Museum of Contemporary Art.
“It’s a big world out there. We can’t be provincial. I get on planes all the time,” architect Joe Valerio said Tuesday after returning from New York City, where he had closed a deal to design the apartment of a multimillionaire.
“What am I supposed to do? Tell (Piano) he can’t get a job in Chicago?”
Piano, a modernist who has won acclaim for such buildings as the Museum for the Menil Collection in Houston and the world’s largest air terminal built on a manmade island in Osaka Bay, Japan, could not be reached at his Paris office.
But Art Institute President James Wood said in an interview that the architect will design a building housing galleries of roughly 75,000 square feet, to be completed no later than 2005. No funds are committed yet, but given Piano’s appeal in the worlds of art and architecture, raising money is not expected to be a problem.
“We intend to realize an addition that speaks to the 21st Century while respecting the art of the past,” Wood said.
The current thinking calls for the Art Institute to build a deck over the commuter railroad tracks that create the museum’s unique H-shaped configuration. The building would go on top of the deck and probably would be located on the south side of the museum, between the Morton and Rice wings.
The Rice building, completed in 1988 and designed by Chicago architect Thomas Beeby, was the last major addition to the museum.
Gardens open to the public also are envisioned as part of the museum’s plan to deck the railroad tracks.
Perhaps as a shield from the criticism leveled at the Museum of Contemporary Art when that institution had no Chicago architects on its list of finalists in 1991, Wood said five Chicago architects were on the museum’s list of 18 contenders.
“There were a number of Chicago architects who were serious contenders,” Wood said.
But the Chicagoans, who were not identified by the museum, were “not as interesting as (Piano) in the end,” the Art Institute president said.
His remarks were of little solace to Chicago architects hungering for the equivalent of an actor’s big break.
The incursion of out-of-towners has reached the point that Chicago architect Daniel P. Coffey actually keeps a list of the jobs lost to outsiders during the last 10 years.
His litany is at 30 and counting, with the projects representing millions of dollars in fees. It includes such prominent buildings as 900 North Michigan, home of Bloomingdale’s and designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox, plus the 2-year-old expansion of McCormick Place, which was shaped by the Atlanta firm of Thompson Ventulett Stainback.
“It’s not a good thing for Chicago architecture,” said Coffey, whose renovation of the Oriental Theatre opened to acclaim last fall. “There’s an architectural community just the way there’s a financial community, a journalism community. . . . In the absence of opportunity on the more creative projects, you don’t get to expand your horizon.”
But to others, the infusion of outside talent is a healthy phenomenon, reflecting a new variety of architectural styles–and the reality that there no longer is a single dominant figure, such as the great modernist Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who is setting the tone for Chicago design.
“Qualitatively, are (the outsiders) better than the bulk of Chicago architects?” veteran Chicago architect Stanley Tigerman wondered aloud.
“I’d say certainly. I believe that this community continues to need to be challenged.”
