After a decade of delays, Chicago finally has a plan in place for the long-vacant, hugely significant chunk of real estate whose very name-Block 37-has become a civic embarrassment. With all that time and with nearly $40 million in city subsidies behind the plan, you’d think it would fit the Loop like a glove and would provide usable public space for the taxpayers shouldering its cost.
But you’d be wrong.
This retail, hotel and condominium complex looks woefully out of place on State Street, as if someone had picked up one of the vertical malls of North Michigan Avenue and plunked it down across State from Marshall Field’s. Its architecture is equally unappealing, with a retail base that resembles a fieldstone-clad, suburban shopping mall, circa 1950, and a hotel-condo tower that suggests a sleek, mirror-glass hotel in Dallas or New York.
Very little of this is right for State Street, with its grand retail palaces, or for Daley Plaza, where mighty buildings frame a public square punctuated by the enigmatic Picasso sculpture.
Worse, this publicly supported project promises a mock public space-a rooftop garden that is supposed to ease the hurt of losing the block’s summertime art program and wintertime skating rink that have proved so popular. But as anyone familiar with the elegant but underused Winter Garden of the Harold Washington Library Center knows, rooftop public spaces tend to be out of sight and out of mind.
To be sure, there are some good strokes in this $251 million plan, which was designed by the New York City firm of Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF). Its materials will be high-quality. As urban design, it promises to enhance Daley Plaza.
But the proposal needs substantial refinement and rethinking before it can become a positive addition to the North Loop and meet the high standards KPF already has set in Chicago. The firm designed the popular 333 W. Wacker Drive office building, whose curving green-glass facade brilliantly punctuates a bend in the Chicago River.
Fortunately, there is both time and wiggle room. Groundbreaking won’t start until early next year, and KPF’s lead architect, William Pedersen, acknowledges that the design can still be tweaked.
This is how the project, which will go by the name of 100 North State, would look once it is completed in 2004:
Along State would be a Lord & Taylor department store, clad in a rough-hewn, yellow limestone. It would be topped by a roof garden with restaurants encased in dramatic wedges of transparent glass. Additional retail outlets–a Gap is one possibility–would be located along the street and in the underground pedway system.
Set well back from State would be a sliver-thin 39-story tower sheathed in blue-green reflective glass. Atop the building’s four-story base would be 13 stories housing a Marriott Suites hotel and 22 more stories devoted to condominiums.
At midblock, halfway between Washington and Randolph, the tower would take a slight diagonal bend. That would shift it away from the mighty Daley Center and open up room for an outdoor cafe on Dearborn and other street-level activities that would help enliven the city’s nascent theater district.
Pedersen’s main architectural challenge at 100 North State is to come to terms with the mighty buildings surrounding Block 37. They range from the massive, masonry-clad buildings on State Street to the macho modernism of the Daley Center and its powerful, bridgelike spans of rusting steel.
He has chosen to relate to the Daley Center and Field’s not by imitation, but by juxtaposition–a yin to their yang. Instead of a structurally expressive, skin-and-bones box, he offers something different–a taut, sleek, angular tower set atop a massive base of limestone. The diagonal bend of the tower defers to Daley Plaza, as if 100 North State were shying away from its big-shouldered neighbor.
It’s a risky strategy, one that could pay off in the long run. But as it’s currently conceived, the project’s adventurous modernism is half-baked.
Surely the project’s familiar North Michigan Avenue formula–a setback slab rising from a retail base–is no coincidence. The lead developer, JMB Realty Corp., also was the force behind the quintessential vertical mall, Water Tower Place, and its postmodern progeny, 900 North Michigan (which also happens to be a KPF design).
Certainly, Chicago is fortunate that JMB never carried out its threat–made during the dickering over city subsidies for the project–to ditch its ambitious plans and put up a Target store. The presence of such a low-rise, “big box” retailer on State Street would have been a travesty, turning the heart of the Loop into a suburban strip mall. The present plan is better, though far from perfect.
Its greatest strength is the way it restores Daley Plaza’s identity as a monumentally scaled public space.
The plaza is a huge outdoor “room,” as architects say, and its “walls” are the buildings, including the grand old City-County building to the west, that surround it. Yet the eastern part of this enclosure was destroyed in 1989 and 1990 when the city demolished almost everything on Block 37 in anticipation of a JMB-backed, Helmut Jahn-designed office building/retail galleria. That design got scrapped after the office market collapsed in the early 1990s, creating the vacant lot Chicago has been struggling to fill ever since.
Placing a tower of considerable height just to the east of Daley Plaza, as Pedersen proposes, will help the plaza regain its old character. It certainly is preferable to turning the urban renewal block into a park, as some well-intentioned people have suggested. That would have made permanent the unhappy temporary situation that now exists.
But if the broad outlines of the 100 North State design seem to work for Daley Plaza, they promise an entirely different impact on “that great street.”
State is nothing if not a collection of powerful buildings–relatively tall, block-filling retail palaces that epitomize the tradition of the “Big Store.” Amid this architectural Murderer’s Row, especially with Field’s 12 stories of white granite rising like a cliff across the street, a four-story department store seems pretty feeble.
Ultimately, the problem is one of scale, not height. On State, buildings need to seem big even if they aren’t.
Appropriately, then, Pedersen has tried to make Block 37’s retail base a little building with a big presence. Cantilevering out over the street, those glass-enclosed restaurants could be jewel-like and entrancing. People in the restaurants would further animate the building, much as shoppers lend life to the glassy facade of Crate & Barrel on North Michigan Avenue.
But as it’s currently conceived, this project is no Crate & Barrel.
For one thing, the shopping mall-like base lacks windows that would duplicate that building’s signature showroom effect. And its yellow limestone cladding seems more rural than urban, as if an architect sitting in Manhattan thought: “Ah, the Midwest. Prairie School. Frank Lloyd Wright. Let’s make it look like fieldstone.”
Mostly wrapped in stone, the retail base seems strikingly inward-turning, a key departure from State Street’s tradition of sidewalk-friendly retailing.
The 100 North State complex also doesn’t seem to do much for the theater district, where millions of dollars in public funds have been invested to bring night life back to the Loop.
True, there would be a restaurant on Randolph, but that’s it–no movie theaters, no bright lights, almost nothing, in short, but the side of a department store.
There also is good reason to think that the public will get very little out of the proposed rooftop garden that is being advertised as a public space.
The garden would be reached from an elevator placed along the building’s State Street front. As Pedersen suggests, the green space would act as a “fifth facade,” ensuring attractive views for office workers looking down on it.
But public space needs to be used, not just seen, for it to work.
And the trouble with this one is that public spaces on the top of buildings invariably filter out those who lack the income or the inclination to enjoy them. Private building managers will run 100 North State’s rooftop garden, all but guaranteeing that anyone who seems the least bit scruffy will be shooed away.
The end result would be a privatized public space–an enclave used largely by hotel visitors and condominium dwellers, and thus little more than a sop to a mayor who loves trees and shrubs.
There is a better way: Fill the rooftop garden with year-round uses that make it a true public space. How about a shallow pool or fountain that would cool things off in the summertime and serve as a small skating rink come winter? True, the restaurants would have to shrink to make room for it, and a replacement for Skate on State is planned at Millennium Park. But the payoff would be spectacular–skating amid the skyline.
Another way to encourage people to use the garden would also lend the project’s State Street facade some much-needed visual oomph.
Instead of a mere box projecting unimaginatively from the facade, their proposed elevator to the rooftop could pick up on the bold geometry of the restaurants, splaying outward in a dynamic display of glass.
At the very least, the elevator needs to be an enticing journey, a vertical equivalent of Jahn’s neon-lit, subterranean passageway at the United Terminal at O’Hare.
If it is not better handled, the rooftop garden seems destined to fail as a public space. And that also goes for Pedersen’s strategy of relating to 100 North State’s neighbors through contrast rather than imitation.
At best, his sleek tower resembles Kevin Roche’s abstractly sculptural United Nations hotel in New York, which is covered with a skin of blue-green reflective glass. At worst, it looks like it parachuted in from Dallas, one of those bland mirror-glass buildings that scream out to the driver on the freeway and then have nothing else to say.
Either way, it has miles to travel before it seems at home next to either Daley Plaza or State Street. For starters, the building’s stone and glass cladding needs to be far more sophisticated and urbane. At a more basic level, the architect might want to make his building, especially its base, even more glassy and transparent; that would allow it to become, amid State Street’s massive blocks of stone, a brilliant, jewel-like exception, not unlike Crate & Barrel on North Michigan.
It all goes back to the main issue–whether this project strengthens or dilutes its sense of place.
Certainly, there’s reason for hope.
Pedersen, for example, seems to be on the right track with the bottom of his building along Daley Plaza. There, the big stone base would engage the massive forms of both the Daley Center and City Hall without imitating them. Now his task is to expand upon and enrich that gesture, moving from initial concepts to the intricate interweaving of form and function that characterize his best work.
The crown jewel of State Street’s comeback deserves no less.
