Magnificent Mile?
Ho, ho, ho.
The quality of architecture on North Michigan Avenue has sunk to such depths in recent years that it seemed like false advertising for promoters to call Chicago’s showplace shopping street “magnificent.”
But now, there’s finally a good building on the Boul Mich — a building that is not covered with screeching signs, a building that does not have ladies’ lingerie in the windows, a building that does not have garish metal fins sticking out of it.
It is the new Midwest flagship store of the Gap at 555 N. Michigan Ave., where Michigan intersects Ohio Street. Designed by the noted Chicago architect Stanley Tigerman, the store is a fine job, but no world-beater. Yet given what we’ve been getting stuck with lately on the Boul Mich, I’ll take it — especially because the purveyors of tasteless glitz at Planet Hollywood International Inc. once wanted to put an All-Star Cafe in the building.
We all know how that would have turned out; it would have been another sign-plastered monstrosity broadcasting the “brand” identity of its occupant and, in the process, undercutting what’s left of North Michigan’s sense of place.
Fortunately, the deal fell through and the building was occupied by the San Francisco-based Gap, whose stores typically are crisp, clean-lined and trying hard to be hip in an unthreatening sort of way. This one is no exception. It certainly wins the sign modesty prize, with just four relatively small blue “Gap” signs on the front.
While the Gap messed with Tigerman’s original design, sometimes in ways that make the building look ridiculous, the outcome, on the whole, is palatable. Certainly, it defies the trend of architectural rubber-stamping that goes hand in hand with globalization.
Just three stories tall, the new Gap is in some ways a cousin to the equally diminutive, 10-year-old Crate & Barrel flagship at 646 N. Michigan. Both present a welcome relief from the bland gigantism of North Michigan’s vertical malls. Both refrain from sign overkill. And both have clearly defined corners — Crate & Barrel with its trademark glass and steel cylinder, the Gap with a two-story diagonal void that’s cleaved out of the building’s basic block.
Yet there are differences, and they go beyond the fact that the four-story Crate & Barrel extends a good chunk of Michigan while the Gap — which has the three stories, plus a basement — has a relatively narrow Boul Mich front.
With its white metal skin and flowing bands of windows, Crate & Barrel makes an unambiguous modernist statement. The Gap, in contrast, is a stylistic hybrid. It’s modernist (big transparent windows), classical (decorative window mullions and a clearly defined bottom, middle and top), and neo-Gothic (a structurally expressive limestone facade whose flattened columns get less bulky as they rise, reflecting the lesser load they carry).
Crate & Barrel was designed to be a jewel-like exception to the limestone buildings around it. But the Gap simultaneously contrasts with and complements its older neighbors. Its facade looks more transparent and glassy than the handsome old Beaux-Arts building with the mansard roof at 545 N. Michigan. Yet its scale and rhythms nicely echo the old Lake Shore Bank building, with its massive rounded Corinthian columns, just across Ohio at 605 N. Michigan.
At this urban design level, the new Gap is quite good. Just as Tigerman intended, it joins with the neighboring bank to form bookends, framing a gateway for the thousands of drivers who enter downtown each day on Ohio Street. The building also works well for those on foot. It embraces the Chicago tradition of storefront retailing with its wraparound window displays. It’s yet another example of retailers moving away from internalized walls like Water Tower Place, where stores have no relationship to the street.
The building’s architecture also represents a welcome departure from such ill-proportioned design duds as the 600 N. Michigan building — that’s the one where blank-walled movie theaters have been plopped on the roof and resemble shoeboxes. Worse, that building is sheathed in a white terra cotta that suggests bathroom tile.
The Gap is far more suave. Its limestone facade has the old black-tie elegance of Michigan Avenue, even if it is a shade or two lighter than what we’re used to. Its tall proportions give the building a sense of monumentality that is fitting for a grand street while the engaged columns, reentrant corners and other details are impeccably handled. The columns, with their layers of stone, create shade and shadow patterns like those on the Boul Mich’s Beaux-Arts buildings. And the Ohio Street facade, with its repeating window grids, leads the eye eastward like the voids and solids of a modernist building by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.
I’m not entirely persuaded by Tigerman’s mix of modern, classical and gothic. Despite its handsome window mullions, the Gap doesn’t have the richness of detail that you see in the better Michigan Avenue buildings from the 1920s. At worst, the Gap seems a little too Miesian, a little too simplified. Still, the overall impression is quiet. The building makes a statement, but it doesn’t scream “look at me”– at least most of the time.
One of the problems with chains like the Gap is that they have a signature look, which makes them recognizable to consumers but which tends to be stamped out without regard for the sense of place in a given city. Another problem is that chains like their stores to stand out — and if that means futzing with the design of an internationally known architect like Tigerman, well, so be it.
Tigerman called for making the building’s entry just one story tall, which would have been in keeping with its relatively modest size. But in order to dramatize the entrance and draw customers to the front door, the Gap insisted instead on a diagonal slice at the corner of Ohio and Michigan that rises a full two stories.
The result is a bizarre, overscaled entry — appropriate for a skyscraper perhaps, but completely out of keeping for a building this small. Worse, the big notch makes the building look unstable, as if it might fall over.
Further damage was done when the Gap got rid of the small, square-shaped aluminum window frames that Tigerman intended for the upper part of the first-story windows. They would have made the store’s exterior seem more richly articulated than it is. Instead, the Gap substituted its own generic frames. “It’s not so terrible, but it’s terrible,” Tigerman says philosophically. (Fortunately, the frames were in place on the second and third floors before the Gap occupied the building, so they were not trimmed.)
There are some good strokes in the store, whose interior was handled by the Gap’s in-house team and Seattle-based Callison Architecture, the firm responsible for Chicago’s new Nordstrom department store.
In essence, the design is a variation on the Gap’s familiar modern look, but some things have been done to meld the store to Tigerman’s architecture. The window displays, for example, feature brightly colored squares of Plexiglas, which repeat the geometry of the square window frames. And there are other plusses.
In order to improve the flow of traffic, for example, cash registers have been set in the front and back of the floors rather than in the middle, the place they occupy in the Gap’s other Michigan Avenue store. (The fate of that store, at 679 N. Michigan, is unknown, a Gap spokeswoman says.) Another shift from the Gap’s other stores is an atriumlike entry with a big, free-floating stair that leads to all four floors.
The open look does more than endow the interior with a welcome sense of light and airiness. It works well with the modernism of the exterior while, as at Crate & Barrel, the customers inside the store and the products in the windows become “ornaments,” enlivening the spare building with their motion and color.
In the end, Crate & Barrel does a far better job of integrating outside and inside than the new Gap. It is more of a total work of art. Still, the result at the Gap is handsome and high quality, enhancing the cityscape in a way that no building has of late on Michigan Avenue. Considering that this high-profile property could have extended the theme park glitz of River North to the Boul Mich, we definitely have something to be thankful for: North Michigan’s latest is no turkey.
