It’s like seeing a great but time-worn fresco — one thinks of the Sistine ceiling — brought back to its legendary splendor. Once-vivid colors emerge from decades of dust and grime. The bold outlines and sharply etched details of the artist are revealed anew. You see a brilliant, total work of art, not faded fragments.
That is the near-miracle wrought by the architects who have transformed the 104-year-old Reliance Building, the gossamer-gorgeous Chicago skyscraper that anticipated the taut-skinned, steel-and-glass office buildings that now etch the world’s skylines. Their achievement is all the more astonishing because they have converted the renowned Reliance to an entirely new use without compromising the building’s brilliant original design.
Four years ago, when the big-windowed, white terra cotta exterior of the Reliance was returned to its ethereal glory, it was half a victory. Now, with the interior sparkling as a new, 122-room luxury hotel (renamed the Hotel Burnham in honor of architect Daniel Burnham, whose firm designed it), this triumph of preserving the past is complete.
From a dazzling elevator lobby to a dramatic internal staircase, the job has been executed with meticulous attention to detail. Never has the often-grubby business of recyling old buildings seemed so artful or so significant.
The Reliance boosts an already resurgent State Street and fuels the emerging trend of giving Chicago’s aging skyscrapers new life as hotels or condominiums. And at a moment when a developer wants to erect the world’s tallest building in the Loop, the comparatively diminutive Reliance, at just 16 stories, offers a timely reminder about what endures in architecture: not what is biggest, but what is best.
Credit for the final leg of this six-year odyssey, which cost more than $30 million in public and private funds, goes to architect Joseph Antunovich of Antunovich Associates of Chicago and his restoration adviser, T. Gunny Harboe of McClier Corp. of Chicago.
But it would be remiss not to mention either the developers who backed the project, McCaffrey Interests, Mansur & Company and Granite Development, the hotel managers, the San Francisco-based Kimpton Group, and Mayor Richard M. Daley, without whom the restoration of the Reliance would have been impossible.
In 1994, a year after the city won control of the Reliance from a longtime owner who had allowed the building to go to seed, Daley had to endure jeers from the City Council before recalcitrant aldermen finally agreed to fund a $6.4 million restoration of the Reliance’s crumbling exterior. “This building is not worth a dime,” said John Steele, then 6th Ward alderman.
Now, though, it’s easy to appraise the Reliance’s true value: priceless.
No other building so dramatically encapsulates the engineering and aesthetic advances that made Chicago the birthplace of the skyscraper: the shift from load-bearing walls of masonry to curtain-like walls of glass supported by an internal metal cage; the invention of elevators and new foundation technology that gave the new cloudbusters firm footing in Chicago’s soft clay soil.
The early skyscrapers, finished in the 1880s, were clad in stone, a material associated with solidity; it was used to soothe pedestrians jittery about the structural stability of the new kids on the block. But the Reliance, which was completed in 1895, eschewed the heavyweight cloak for a thin membrane of generously scaled windows and white terra cotta panels. The latter marked the first time glazed terra cotta had clad an office building.
Projecting window bays added to the Reliance’s sense of verticality while flooding its interior with daylight, a major improvement over the dim wattage of the primitive electrical fixtures then in use. That feature proved especially useful in the examining rooms of the doctors and dentists who were among the building’s original tenants.
Yet for all the Reliance was a precursor to the bare-boned boxes of Ludwig Mies van Rohe, the skyscraper partook from history, as the 1995 renovation made clear.
Once all the grime was wiped off the terra cotta, you could see how the Reliance’s designers drew upon the soaring Gothic cathedrals of medieval France to dramatize the form of the tall building. Clusters of thin columns, or colonnettes, for example, made the building’s corner seem delicate rather than blocky.
But the fragile beauty did not last. Gradually the pristine white facade became encrusted with soot and blighted by klutzy signs and fire escapes. Panes of some windows were boarded up with plywood. By 1993, the building had just six tenants, including Ella’s Tea Leaf Studio on the seventh floor. Its street-level retailers included a shop selling peek-a-boo bras and other exotic lingerie.
One of the principal virtues of the restoration is that it reclaims the work of two great architects — Burnham’s partner, John Root, who shaped the very glassy brown-granite base of the Reliance before he died in 1891; and the man who replaced him as Burnham’s chief designer, Charles Atwood, who was responsible for the Reliance’s equally revolutionary upper floors. (He gets his due in the Hotel Burnham’s ground-floor eatery, the Atwood Cafe.)
To passersby on State Street, who have been eyeballing the Reliance’s restored terra cotta facade and cornice since 1995, the most noticeable change will be to the bottom of the building, where a temporary wall of glass and aluminum panels has been replaced by new brown granite walls that are overlaid with a delicate reproduction of Root’s original Gothic filigree.
The brown granite endows the base of the Reliance with an appropriate feeling of solidity without repeating the heavy, fortress-like appearance of such earlier Root buildings as the Rookery. Huge sheets of glass allow pedestrians to glimpse the tall-ceilinged Atwood Cafe while visually unifying the bottom of the building with the big windows of the Reliance’s upper floors. There are new, curvy drapes up there, but they do not disturb the building’s overall sense of transparency.
The hotel, whose official address is 1 W. Washington St., has entrances on both Washington and State, the former leading to a new and largely conventional hotel lobby, the latter pointing the way to a restored elevator lobby that is nothing short of extraordinary.
Here, the visitor encounters a small but soaring space that repeats in miniature the perfect proportions of the skyscraper. It has a glistening mosaic floor and exotic polished marbles — some red, some green, others black. The most striking of them, a white Italian stone with inky black and blue veins, is arranged in wall and ceiling panels that form near-perfect mirror images.
Despite the bold display of color, the lobby never goes over the top. And, like the exterior, it has an incredible sense of transparency, accentuated on one side by the Gothic metalwork of new elevator grilles and, and on the other side by an enormous interior wall of glass. Together, they make the lobby, the cafe and the street outside seem like one continuous space.
What marks the Hotel Burnham as truly unusual, however, is that when hotel guests venture upstairs they will get a sample of what the interior of a turn-of-the-century office building looked like. The hotel even allows architecture buffs to visit one of the rooms, provided they have an escort. Thus, the Hotel Burnham is something of “a living skyscraper museum,” says Jim Peters, who helped oversee the project as director of Chicago’s landmarks commission.
People used to beige-carpeted, white-walled corridors in modern office buildings will encounter something very different here: terrazo tile floors, white marble wainscoting and mahagony door and window frames. In a wonderful touch, the hotel room numbers are painted onto the translucent glass doors in an old-fashioned format that precisely recalls the office numbers that once graced the Reliance.
The room numbers exemplify the balance struck by the architects and the interior designer, Susan Caruso of Los Angeles, between preserving key features of the office building and giving the interior enough in the way of hotel touches so that it doesn’t seem cold and institutional.
Happily, that balance continues in the guest quarters — former office cells that were small enough to be easily adapted into hotel rooms. The drapes, for example, are a clubby blue on the inside, but white on the outside, so they blend in easily with the building’s milky exterior.
Best of all, by inserting two new fire stairs in the back of the building, the architects were able to preserve the openness of the Reliance Building’s richly decorated internal staircase, which sweeps through the upper-floor lobbies like a piece of sculpture.
All this painstaking detail work adds up to a supreme example of historic preservation.
A world-renowned skyscraper that could have been lost to the wrecking ball now proves that old buildings can be recycled to good effect. Long heralded for what it foreshadowed, the Reliance today can be appreciated for what it is — the culminating achievement of Chicago’s early skyscrapers.
But the reconstitution of the Reliance teaches a broader lesson about architecture, and it is one that deserves special attention in a tradition-bound city that sometimes seems to have lost its nerve: The same daring that gave us the landmarks of yesterday is needed to create the landmarks of tomorrow. Only if we heed that lesson will we fully appreciate the restored glory of this total work of art.
