My outrage meter is supposed to be going off the charts because of a new, look-alike building in the North Loop. But for a lot of reasons, I’m not outraged. Disappointed a little, yes, but not outraged.
We critics, you see, are supposed to hate clones. And the bright, white 17-story college dormitory that has blossomed on the once-unattractive northwest corner of State and Randolph Streets looks an awful lot like the Reliance Building, the great old skyscraper that sits a block to the south at State and Washington Streets.
Upon witnessing such copycatting, critics are supposed to write nasty things like “No originality!” “Retro!” “A failure of imagination!” “A cartoonlike version of past glories!”
Oh, can it.
There is a time and place for bold, brazen architectural statements and there is a time and place for good, solid workaday buildings that serve the people who live in them as well as the cities of which they are a part. The new dorm, which serves the School of the Art Institute, is the latter.
It is by no means perfect. It is in many ways backward-looking. But it’s good — or, more precisely, good enough.
Cities need civilized “background” buildings like this, just as they need strongly assertive buildings that shatter aesthetic precedents. For the latter, think of the mighty, X-braced John Hancock Center lording it over the old beaux-arts buildings of North Michigan Avenue. It’s hard to imagine Chicago without that riveting clash of old and new.
The issues raised by the new dorm have broad importance in Chicago, where a trove of past masterpieces — some still with us, some demolished, still others never built — provides aesthetic inspiration or fodder for mere copying.
Among the more not-able examples are 190 S. LaSalle Street, the 1987 skyscraper by John Burgee and Philip Johnson, whose twin-gabled crown clearly owes an aesthetic debt to John Wellborn Root’s long-gone Masonic Temple of 1892.
Still another building that strongly echoes the past is the PaineWebber Tower at 181 W. Madison St., Cesar Pelli’s obvious homage to the trim vertical look of Eliel Saarinen’s unbuilt second-place entry in the 1922 design contest for Tribune Tower.
Such allusions were widely associated with the architectural style known as postmodernism, which revolted against the steel and glass boxes of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.
But today, in the age of architects such as Frank Gehry and Peter Eisenman, and raucous buildings that look as if they’ve just been shaken by a violent earthquake, it’s rare to see architects paging through the history books — and even rarer for them to actually admit it.
So there’s something very odd about the School of the Art Institute’s very un-avant garde dorm, particularly because you might expect an art school to commission a building a bit more adventurous than this one.
Instead, Tony Jones, the president of the school, asked the dorm’s designer, Chicago architect Laurence Booth, to engage in a bit of “repartee” with the Reliance Building, the terra cotta-clad 1895 masterpiece designed by D.H. Burnham & Co.
The result: The two stand like bookends on either end of Block 37, the empty city block across State Street from Marshall Field’s — just as was envisioned in a mid-1990s plan for Block 37 that was drawn up by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.
The Reliance is blazingly white. So is the dorm. The Reliance has “Chicago windows,” fixed central panes with operable windows on their flanks. So does the dorm. The Reliance’s facade is divided into three parts, evoking the base, shaft and capital of classical columns. So is the — well, you know where this is going.
Yet there’s more to the dorm than Reliance redux.
For starters, it’s not covered in terra cotta but in a material called glass fiber-reinforced concrete. It’s lightweight, it’s cheap, and it doesn’t fall off buildings and conk innocent bystanders on the head, as terra cotta has a tendency to do. Booth compares the stuff, which is made in big panels and was affixed to the dorm’s steel frame, with the fiberglass hull of a boat.
The other thing that makes the dorm different from the Reliance is that it’s much bigger — not in height, but in floor size.
Just to the west of the dorm, along Randolph, is an adjoining wing of the same building, its concrete facade tinted a light brown to make the wing appear like a separate structure. Booth’s idea is to keep the scale of the block small. A single building that looks like two buildings, in his view, is better than one structure that seems massive and ungainly.
As part of that same urban design strategy, the wing also sets back from the street by roughly 15 feet, leaving room for the Bavarian-style facade of the Old Heidelberg restaurant. The facade, now being renovated in place, eventually will serve as the entrance for a theater housing the Noble Fool comedy troupe.
Finally, northward along State, is the 16-story Butler Building, a 1924 terra cotta-clad structure that has been handsomely rehabbed as part of the project. Booth punched a hole in the south wall of the Butler to form L-shaped hallways that link apartments in all three portions of the 295-unit project.
To understand what a difference the building is making for State Street and the North Loop, you need to remember what used to be on this corner: A glass-walled 1950s-era bank building, just four stories tall, that was too small to mark this important corner — and so tattered that it could be forgiven for scaring visitors away.
In contrast, the new dorm is big enough to match the grand scale of State Street, but not so monolithic that it overpowers the street.
Yet the most important thing about the new dorm is that it forgoes the tendency of many downtown academic buildings to turn inward on themselves and become impenetrable fortresses, all in the name of protecting students.
That was the antisocial pose struck by a 16-story Loyola University academic building that went up along Chicago Avenue in 1994, its opaque glass walls and concrete planters serving as bunkers to drive off the street people who hung out near a nearby subway.
At the new building, in contrast, security is served (there is just one entrance to the dorm, limiting opportunities for intruders), yet architecture’s social obligation is not forgotten, either.
Rather than turning its back to the street, the dorm presents a welcoming face to the pedestrian. It is, in the best sense of the word, permeable, with a glassy street-level Borders bookstore, which lights up like a beacon at night.
The dorm also has a vibrant mix of uses — in addition to the Borders and the planned theater, there is a soon-to-open juice bar and the Gene Siskel Film Center, which will debut next year. This is chock-a-block variety — exactly what State Street and the new theater district need. And it is all part of a much larger story that is seeing an infusion of college students breath new vitality — and funkiness — into the Loop. Nearly 15 years ago, Jones says, there were 7,000 of them; now there are 57,000, given the expanded downtown presence of DePaul University, Robert Morris College and other schools. (Maybe we should rename the Loop “Boston-on-the-Lake.”)
This social dimension also is apparent inside the building, where student rooms are located on floors 5 to 15. The top, or 17th, story, for example, features a big concrete-floored studio where painters can slop paint, look out the building’s porthole windows at Lake Michigan, or just have a wild party.
Architects often claim their buildings are designed from the inside out, but here, it seems to be the case. Besides being equipped with amenities like individual heat and air-conditioning controls, the student rooms benefit from having big bay windows and tall ceilings — perfect digs for artists who want lots of daylight. In fact, the student apartments are far more open to the outside than the pricey condominiums in the new 70-story Park Tower, where the bulky concrete structure makes the size of the windows relatively small.
Jones is fond of saying that this is a building “designed by artists for artists.” But, in the end, it’s no work of art.
The trouble is Booth has fallen into the trap that afflicted many postmodernists: He has borrowed from a variety of historical sources without synthesizing them into a convincing whole.
His sources, it turns out, extend beyond the Reliance. For the top of the new building, he draws on the portholelike windows of the Sante Fe Building at 224 S. Michigan Ave. The bottom is based on the sleek Art Deco columns of the old Palmolive Building at 919 N. Michigan Ave. And the middle is inspired by the austere, but exquisitely gridded facade of the turn-of-the-century McClurg Building at 218 S. Wabash Ave.
What does it all add up to? In essence, a building that doesn’t hold up its end of the conversation with the Reliance.
From afar, it’s a reasonably handsome presence. The proportions are good and so are some of the overall elements. The Chicago windows, for example, continue the rhythm of nearby buildings on State Street while the bays of those that project from the facade give the dorm a strong sculptural presence. But the closer you get, the more the dorm breaks up.
The top and bottom of the building are bland and underdetailed, especially when they are compared with all those colonettes and rosettes that make the Reliance and the Sante Fe so alluring. The blank areas around the topside portholes are particularly weak.
If it were a book, the dormitory would be a second draft in need of polishing. If it were a painting, you’d ask the artist for a few more brushstrokes.
At root, this shortcoming is a matter of economics. The glass fiber-reinforced concrete is half the price — or even cheaper — than terra cotta, yet it is far more difficult to mold into attractive shapes. What we get, then, is a material that speaks in a primitive architectural language, with little more than the corrugated patterns beneath the windows to relieve the overall mass.
As a whole, the building is a copy rather than an act of creative transformation — a knock-off that pales in comparison to the artistry of the building that inspired it.
Still, consider the alternative: The dorm, Booth says, was built in the same price range as those poured-in-place concrete monstrosities that are destroying the urban character of River North. It may not be an original, but in this building boom, heroic individual statements matter less than works of architecture that follow basic norms. There is no surer way to form the building blocks of a living city.
