Time out!
There’s a lot to like in the $587 million Soldier Field plan that the Chicago Bears and Mayor Richard M. Daley are trying to ram through the Illinois General Assembly, but there’s also a lot of stuff that makes you want to bring the whole debate to a screeching halt.
Handsome new parkland instead of hideous parking lots? Great!
More events to lure traffic to a stretch of the lakefront that’s already verging on gridlock? Hmmm.
A completely modernized Soldier Field, where every seat, even the cheap ones up in the nosebleed section, have cupholders? Go Bears!
A Soldier Field whose monumental rows of classical columns look teeny because an enormous modern seating bowl is looming over them? Block that play!
Architecture is typically about tradeoffs between form and function, art and business, aesthetics and politics, and that’s exactly what we’re seeing in this project, where the political, financial and design stakes are enormous.
If you expect perfection, you’re bound to be disappointed.
On the other hand, certain things simply cannot and should not survive compromise.
With all that throat-clearing out of the way, I’ll venture the judgment that the pluses seem to outweigh the minuses in the Bears plan, at least if you accept the idea that the team should stay in Soldier Field — rather than move off the lakefront to a place where fans won’t swamp the nearby Museum Campus.
And let me say I’m still not entirely comfortable with the stay-put idea, and neither, judging by my e-mail, are a lot of people, and not just Chicagoans, but suburbanites who care every bit as deeply about the lakefront.
“I worry,” writes Bill Greffin of Oak Park, “about the way a 63,000-seat stadium dams up the manageable stream of traffic along Lake Shore Drive for the occasional convenience of people with little game-day affinity for the Museum Campus. Fans ignore sidewalks, trample grass, bump into things. And how on earth would we ever expect them to include the Field or Adler or Shedd as part of their rambunctious boostering?”
Fair enough, yet it would be foolhardy not to assess a proposal that’s now on the table and may wind up transforming a hugely popular chunk of the lakefront for decades to come.
So what does the future hold?
Certainly something that looks very different from the present. Instead of being surrounded by a sea of parking lots, for example, Soldier Field would be wrapped in a mantle of green: 19 acres of new parkland, stretching from the Field Museum on the north to McCormick Place on the south.
The stadium also would be in for some radical reshaping, its familiar colonnades still in place, but with a strikingly contemporary — and unusually asymmetrical — seating bowl wedged between them.
To reach Soldier Field and the Museum Campus, drivers would exit Lake Shore Drive at 18th Street and travel along a winding, four-lane road that leads to two new parking garages that flank the north and south ends of the stadium. Strung along the road would be a variety of landscape features, from a 40-foot-high sledding hill to an amphitheater-like “memorial lawn” with views of the colonnades and the lake.
The presence of all that parkland offers the chief reason to cheer this plan, which was largely shaped by two architectural firms, Lohan Associates of Chicago and Wood-Zapta of Boston.
Unlike all the other discarded proposals for Soldier Field, they have envisioned what the stadium and its environs could do for the lakefront 365 days a year, not just during the 10 regular season and exhibition games that the Bears play.
That’s a great leap forward in thinking, one that borrows from an unlikely source, Charlotte, N.C., where Ericsson Stadium, home of the NFL’s Carolina Panthers, is surrounded by large expanses of grass where fans can tailgate, picnic or play touch football.
Wisely, the architects have put on their team the same landscape architect who worked wonders in Charlotte, Chicago’s Peter Schaudt.
His design cleverly suggests using the dirt that will be excavated for the parking garages (it includes fill from the Great Chicago Fire) to create the sledding hill and other mounds. The idea is to relieve the prairie-like flatness of the shoreline and to give parkgoers a prospect from which to look out over Lake Michigan.
“The excavation will create 100,000 cubic yards of material,” Schaudt says. “One option is to truck it off at high expense. The other is to use it creatively.”
He also recognizes that Americans typically experience parks both in their cars and on foot, so he proposes a carefully choreographed sequence of views as the driver moves from 18th Street toward Soldier Field. Among them: A glimpse of the sledding hill from the entrance, plus a beautifully framed vista of the Soldier Field colonnades as the four-lane road bends to the west.
True, there is reason to question certain aspects of the design, such as a sunken children’s garden that has been improbably placed near that sure-to-be-busy road. In order to help sell the Soldier Field plan to the public, the Chicago Park District, it seems, wanted to program every square inch of the new parkland. Is there no place for serenity? Equally grating is the continued presence of asphalt parking lots south of 18th Street.
But in the main, the plan would extend the beloved greensward of the Museum Campus to the south. It would transform Soldier Field from a stadium in a parking lot to a stadium in a park, a park geared to today’s active, fitness-oriented lifestyle. What could be more fitting? In his visionary 1909 Plan of Chicago, Daniel Burnham suggested that what is now Soldier Field should be public playing fields.
Yet nothing is ever simple on the lakefront. If you have all these activities, people will drive to them; it’s the American way. Will the new programs and events make the Soldier Field area and the adjoining Museum Campus a southerly version of congested Lincoln Park — a victim of their own success?
Nope, says Richard Kinczyk, Chicago’s acting transportation commissioner and one of the guiding forces behind the 2-year-old Museum Campus.
On both game and non-game days, he predicts, traffic will flow more smoothly. The new four-lane road will greatly increase the roadway capacity around Soldier Field. Further help will come, he says, from shifting the campus’ main entrance to the big diamond interchange at 18th Street from the bottlenecked intersection at McFetridge Drive.
In addition, visitors to the Museum Campus who have struggled to find close-in parking on summer weekends will be cheered by the presence of the new garage directly across McFetridge from the Field Museum. Turning heavily congested McFetridge into a pedestrian plaza, as the plan also calls for, will be likely to ease visitors’ stress.
“I think it’s a good thing,” Kinzcyk says of the Bears proposal.
Perhaps he’ll be proved right, but the lakefront has a way of confounding traffic planners; just look at the clogged roads leading to Navy Pier.
In the meantime, more thought needs to be given to how people are going to get to the lakefront from the parking lots next to Soldier Field. In their way, after all, will be that four-lane road — admittedly not as big a barrier as the old northbound lanes of Lake Shore Drive, but still potentially intimidating. Where will the crosswalks be? How will the city slow the cars down? On such details does the livability of parks rise or fall.
Finally, there is Soldier Field itself — the storied site of boxing matches, track and field meets, religious assemblies and home to the Bears since the early 1970s. Its lakefront site and classical colonnades are equally majestic. City officials love the image of Chicago it projects. Indeed, the booklet created to sell Soldier Field makes a point of showing the view from the stadium’s new pressbox–a stunning vista of the downtown skyline.
But for all the sentimental value associated with Soldier Field, turning it into a modern football stadium is as difficult as kicking a 60-yard field goal. There is simply no way to make a new facility look as if it had been there since 1924. Want to lower the field to make the seating bowl less obtrusive? It’ll cost you $100 million–a budget breaker. So the way to go is not imitating the old, but juxtaposing it with the new. This is the route that Lohan and Wood-Zapta have taken — with mixed results.
On the plus side, the proposed seating bowl features an innovative arrangement that promises to bring many seats remarkably close to the field.
It places all of the luxury suites, or skyboxes, as well as most of the club seats, on the east side of the field. The west side is primarily for grandstand seats.
As a result, the setup avoids the trap of typical football stadiums, as well as Comiskey Park, where a middle layer of skyboxes jacks up the height of the upper deck and forces that deck to be pushed away from the field so structural columns can support it.
The trouble is that Soldier Field’s new seating bowl won’t simply be an internal feature; it will project over the colonnades — by 30 feet on the east, and by 45 feet on the west — and thus become a major part of the stadium’s public image.
To their credit, the architects have worked hard to respect the original geometry of Soldier Field and to make the seating bowl an unobtrusive backdrop.
The glass-sheathed skyboxes are arranged in a gentle ring that seems to float above the lower part of the stadium. The underside of the grandstands will be clad in perforated steel, a far superior choice to clunky concrete.
But there is no getting around the massive scale of the new seating bowl, and the way it seems to hover menacingly over the colonnades. It threatens to “overpower” them, says David Bahlman, executive director of the Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois. Driving past the stadium on Lake Shore Drive, he predicts, you’ll be seeing “this egotistical, look-at-me work of architecture.”
To put it another way, the plan may mark not the preservation of Soldier Field but its emasculation.
This threatens to be Chicago’s biggest facade-ectomy, the pejorative term that historic preservationists use to describe the practice of saving only a building’s facade. What an irony that would be — given that Soldier Field is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and that, in theory, there’s a state body, the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency, that’s supposed to safeguard such properties.
“I don’t think we’re going to get any help from them,” says Bahlman. “They’re political appointees. They report to the governor.” Governor George Ryan, a Daley ally, already has endorsed the deal.
If nothing is done, the renovation of the stadium will entail stuffing too much program into too little building, just as the new parkland around Soldier Field threatens to have too much activity going on in too little space.
Does that mean the plan shouldn’t go forward? No.
Does that mean the plan needs refinement and reexamination? Yes.
The best thing about the Soldier Field proposal is that it looks at the lakefront as a whole, not as a series of isolated pieces. But as legions of Bears fans know, there’s a big difference between drawing up a play and executing it. This stadium strategy still has a way to go before it scores the design equivalent of a touchdown.
