The jewel-like transformation of the Reliance Building into a boutique hotel and the city-embracing South Building of McCormick Place, which departs from the custom of the fortress-like convention center, are on a select list of design projects winning Honor Awards from the American Institute of Architects.
The awards, announced Friday, are given annually by the AIA, a national association based in Washington, D.C. This year 30 projects were recognized in the categories of architecture, urban design and interiors.
Three designs by Chicago firms won interior awards: the Alliance Francaise and the Herman Miller National Showroom, both in Chicago, and the interior of the Jin Mao Building, an 88-story office and hotel tower in Shanghai.
Designed by Joseph Antunovich of Antunovich Associates and restoration architect Gunny Harboe of McClier, the Reliance Building renovation rescued from neglect a structure long celebrated for the way it anticipated modernism’s steel and glass office buildings.
A jury led by New York City architect John Belle called the renovated Reliance, now known as the Hotel Burnham, “a model example of good design and historic restorationthrough an effective public-private partnership.”
The renovation, completed in 1999, required millions of dollars in city subsidies. Harboe previously won a national Honor Award for McClier’s 1992 restoration of the Rookery Building, which, like the Reliance, was shaped in part by the hotel’s namesake, turn-of-the-century architect Daniel Burnham.
If the selection of the much-praised Reliance Building renovation was not unexpected, the same cannot be said for the honors given to the South Building of McCormick Place, which has caused relatively few design ripples since it opened in late 1996. Still, the project does not lack for size or visual drama.
The grand interior concourse of the 840,000 square foot exhibition hall is sheltered by a cantilevered, quarter-oval roof that strikes up a conversation with the mighty roofs of the first two McCormick Place Buildings — the 1971 East Building, with its cantilevering roof of steel, and the 1987 North Building, where the roof hangs from cables wrapped around concrete pylons.
But unlike its predecessors, the South Building offers an easily navigated interior. And it’s far better at linking with the city around it. Its west side, in particular, is well attuned to its surroundings, with a front door that’s hard to miss, the entrance to the building’s soaring concourse, and a park-like plaza that joins the building to a nearby boulevard, Martin Luther King Drive.
The architects worked out a complex set of formal and functional problems with the “appropriately bold stroke of the grand concourse,” the jury said.
The lead designer for the South Building was Thomas Ventulett of Thompson, Ventulett, Stainback & Associates of Atlanta. A. Epstein & Sons International were the architects of record. The consulting architects were D’Escoto, Inc., Wendell Campbell & Associates, and Ross Barney & Jankowski.
The Chicago interiors winners were DeStefano & Partners, led by Avram Lothan, for the Alliance Francaise of Chicago; Krueck & Sexton Architects, led by Ron Krueck, for the Herman Miller National Showroom; and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, led by Adrian Smith, for the Jin Mao Building. The associate architects on the Jin Mao project were the Shanghai Institute of Architectural Design and Research.
Among the interiors winners were the renovations of Manhattan’s Radio City Music Hall, by Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates of New York City, and the Detroit Opera House, by Albert Kahn Associates of Detroit.
Urban design winners included a redevelopment plan for downtown Racine, Wis., by Crandall Arambula of Portland, Ore. The AIA said the plan “reversed a downtown’s economic, cultural and social decline, to create a vital and attractive city center.”
Architecture awards also went to two energy-conserving buildings of vastly different scale: a swimming pool building at the Cranbrook Educational Community in suburban Detroit, by Tod Williams Billie Tsien and Associates of New York City, and the Conde Nast office tower in Manhattan’s Times Square, by Fox and Fowle Architects of New York City.
Other architecture winners included the College-Conservatory of Music at the University of Cincinnati, by Pei Cobb Freed & Partners of New York City, and a New York Times printing plant by the Polshek Partnership Architects of New York City.
For those keeping score, New York City architects won 10 awards, while those from Chicago and Los Angeles each won five.
