Spanish superstar Ricardo Bofill is back with a new skyscraper design after his 1992 flop at 77 W. Wacker Drive, an affront to the muscular Chicago tradition whose wafer-thin stone columns look like they’re pasted onto a shiny glass facade.
His latest effort, which will be the Loop’s first skyscraper of the 21st Century, wisely dispenses with such postmodern applique. But it still needs considerable refinement — and maybe even some basic rethinking — before it can be considered worthy of its extraordinary surroundings.
Called Dearborn Center, the $305 million project will rise more than 500 feet from a long-vacant, half-block site bounded by State, Dearborn and Adams Streets. It is being built by Chicago developer J. Paul Beitler, best known for his unsuccessful 1989 bid to erect the world’s tallest building here, and the Prime Group Realty Trust, Bofill’s patron at 77 W. Wacker.
Beitler, who has no small ego, promises to transform the southern end of State Street’s shopping district into a hub of “glitz, pizazz and showmanship.” That ought to set alarm bells ringing at City Hall, given that State Street’s recovery has been proceeding quite nicely, thank you, without the Times Square-ization that has blighted North Michigan Avenue.
But State Street is hardly the only issue. Dearborn Street is a living museum of the skyscraper, and the intersection of Dearborn and Adams is one of its high points. To its south rises Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Chicago Federal Center, where two high-rises and a post office frame a plaza punctuated by Alexander Calder’s bright red “Flamingo” sculpture. To the north stands the prototypical late 19th Century Chicago office structure, Holabird & Roche’s Marquette Building, with its robust, gridded facades.
Adams Street, for its part, has the gentle Victorian scale of the Berghoff restaurant, a much-needed contrast to the Loop’s giants.
This is, in short, a context that requires an exquisite balancing act — between the festivity of the State Street retail corridor and the formality of the Dearborn Street office center, and between the powerful geometries of the nearby landmarks and the pedestrian-friendly scale that makes downtown Chicago such an appealing place to walk. The building, in short, needs to be both strong and sensitive.
Bofill appears to be shouldering the additional burden of working for not one but two clients — Beitler, who favors sleek, glassy buildings; and the Prime Group’s Michael Reschke, who has practically made Bofill’s classical pediments his corporate signature. Dearborn Center, which has been reviewed by city officials but has yet to be formally submitted to them, appears to have been crafted by a committee.
Designed in association with Chicago architect James DeStefano, the building consists of two main parts: an office tower of 37 stories along Dearborn and an office and retail portion, 11 stories tall, along State. Both have chunky proportions, and there is literally an underlying reason why: Dearborn Center will be built on the existing foundations of a 12-story Montgomery Ward store that occupied the site before it was demolished in 1985. The foundations won’t support a building any taller.
While that step saves a significant chunk of money for the developers, it also poses a problem for Bofill: how to make the blocky tower look svelte. In a telephone interview from Barcelona, Bofill’s partner on the project, Rogelio Jimenez, said the architects’ chief “slimming device” is a curving window bay, more than 25 stories tall, that projects slightly outward from the rest of the facade. To further reduce its bulk, the building will have notched corners.
In essence, the tower follows the century-old custom of dividing a skyscraper into three parts that resemble the base, shaft and capital of a classical column. Horizontal bands of stainless steel break down the tower’s scale and culminate in a cornice that caps its top. At ground level, see-through glass reveals classically inspired lobbies. The Dearborn lobby also has a modern, curving wall of red African wood and may contain an oversized replica of the famous Greek statue, the Winged Victory of Samothrace, in the Louvre museum in Paris.
But the chief difference between the State and Dearborn sides is that, on State, a huge recessed rectangle is sliced into the facade. This monumental entrance, Jimenez said, would be a “portal” to the building’s shops. It would use high-technology glass to turn the grand gateway into a giant electronic sign. Beitler is said to envision a device that would vary with the holiday seasons, showing turkeys at Thanksgiving, Santa Claus at Christmas and a big heart around Valentine’s Day.
This feature will not be the only technological innovation at Dearborn Center. It will be perhaps the largest building in the U.S. to use an under-floor air distribution system, which proponents claim generates cleaner air than more standard systems. Still, the building’s chief interest concerns the question of whether its design is generic or particular — whether it contributes to the Loop’s powerful sense of place.
At this stage, the design is both encouraging and cause for concern.
City planners were correct to insist that the office tower go on Dearborn with the lower retail section on State, and each seems appropriate for its respective street. The State Street section, in particular, is neither too small, like the low-rise Toys “R” Us store that is woefully out of place amid the street’s retail palaces, nor too big, as a high-rise surely would have been.
Another positive: Dearborn Center fills its block rather than being set back on a plaza, as so many Loop high-rises were in the 1960s. As a result, the building’s walls will act like the walls of a room, framing the public space of State Street as well as the northeast corner of the nearby Federal Center plaza.
The architects also appear to strike up a thoughtful conversation with both the plaza and Mies’ Dirksen Building directly across Adams. Like the Dirksen Building, the base of the office tower will be an open, flowing space defined by stilt-like columns. The lobby and its Winged Victory statue, similarly, will try to extend the plaza’s openness within the building, a departure from Bofill’s 77 W. Wacker lobby, which is more like an enclosed room.
The idea, Jimenez said, is “you don’t know if you’re outside or inside.”
Yet such well-conceived gestures only underscore the overall challenge facing the architects, who have yet to realize either the clarity of expression or the bold simplicity that characterizes the better architecture of both Dearborn and State Streets.
For all that they insist that Dearborn Center is not a modern building perched on a classical base, that is precisely the way things look, with the promising exception of the more contemporary Dearborn Street lobby. Perhaps there is a way to extend its richness of materials and details throughout the building’s ground floor.
Dearborn Center stands as a key departure from the structurally expressive architecture of its neighbors, particularly those on State Street. This is a building that emphasizes skin rather than bones, and if it is to succeed as architecture, it must, like Mies’ Federal Center, have glass walls that are as elegant as a tuxedo.
To eliminate the reflective, foil-like effect that makes all those Sun Belt office buildings look so insubstantial, the developers would have to pay for glass that is slightly thicker than normal. Should the developers do this? Absolutely. They’re asking for city tax breaks. If you’re going to get public assistance, you’d better upgrade the public realm.
Even that is child’s play compared with the building’s presence on State Street. Here, the architects’ monumental entrance shows that they recognize the need to make bold, larger-than-life gestures appropriate to the urban machismo of that great street. But the glass walls of the building’s State Street base appear utterly generic, and the much-hyped electronic signs raise the specter that Dearborn Center will resemble a billboard rather than a building — an outcome that would undermine the character of the street.
City officials are going too far in insisting that the State Street facade repeat the rhythms and proportions of Dearborn Center’s late 19th and early 20th Century neighbors such as Louis Sullivan’s masterful Carson Pirie Scott & Co. store. At the same time, the architects need to demonstrate, in a contemporary way, that their building fits in on State Street.
Is that asking too much? I don’t think so. Consider the different contexts addressed so handsomely by the twin faces of 333 W. Wacker Drive, the 1983 office building by New York City architects Kohn Pedersen Fox. A graceful arc of green glass makes a sculptural statement that works in the wide-open context of the Wacker Drive river corridor; meanwhile, the building’s other facade, which is sliced and notched, suits the grittier, more confined district of the Loop. Not only that, the color of the glassy, 36-story tower blends beautifully with its classically influenced stone base.
In architecture and urban design, those are the delicate balancing acts Dearborn Center still needs to achieve.
