After practically disappearing in the 1990s, made irrelevant by a glut of space, new office buildings are making a comeback. So is modernism. But this is a different kind of modernism than the steel-and-glass boxes of the 1960s. And it is certainly very different from the stone-clad postmodern towers of the 1980s.
Much of the action is in Chicago’s West Loop, an area that offers available sites (mostly parking lots) as well as easy access to commuter train stations. Despite the looming threat of recession, a booming financial services sector and a shortage of technologically advanced office space are driving the surge.
In recent weeks, for example, Dutch banking giant ABN Amro announced it would build a twin-tower operations center, at least 30 stories tall, on Clinton Street between Washington and Madison Streets. The architects, Chicago’s DeStefano and Partners, plan a pair of sleek, essentially rectangle-shaped buildings with dramatic, diagonal corners.
That announcement closely followed one by the Pritzker family that it would construct a 60-story office building, to be anchored by the headquarters of the family-owned Hyatt Corp., at the northeast corner of Monroe Street and Wacker Drive. The design, by British modernist Norman Foster, has yet to be released.
These office buildings will join several other high-profile projects already under way, including the 50-story One North Wacker, developed by the John Buck Co. and designed by Chicago’s Lohan Associates, and 191 North Wacker Drive, a 37-story office building developed by Houston-based Hines Interests and designed by New York architects Kohn Pedersen Fox.
Meanwhile, on the half-block site bounded by Dearborn, State and Adams Streets, construction cranes are in place for a 37-story office and retail building designed by Spain’s Ricardo Bofill. The developers are J. Paul Beitler and the Prime Group Realty Trust, which also is co-developing the Pritzker tower.
All this represents the biggest burst of office building since the mid-1980s, the height of postmodernism, when architects paged through the history books, found examples they admired, and clad office buildings in wafer-thin sheets of stone that suggested a sense of permanence. Among the most prominent examples of the trend were the AT&T Corporate Center and the NBC Tower, both by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill of Chicago, who once were the foremost apostles of Miesian modernism.
A lot has changed since then. American companies have down-sized. The economy has globalized. Computers have revolutionized the way people work. Postmodernism has gone out of fashion and the center of architectural gravity has shifted back toward modernism. “It’s like a pendulum, always swinging back and forth,” says James Goettsch, a principal at Lohan Associates and the chief designer of One North Wacker.
In the simplest stylistic terms, the change means more glass and less stone, more abstraction and less ornament. But it also means a type of modernism that rejects endlessly repetitive, less-is-more minimalism and the related urban planning ideal of the freestanding tower on a plaza. “We don’t want to go back to the minimalism of [Mies’] Federal Center,” Goettsch explains. “But we don’t want to go back to AT&T or NBC.”
In that spirit, the lower third of One North Wacker’s western facade bows outward to give it a sense of shape while a bay window extends up the rest of the facade, culminating in a thin rectangular box that covers rooftop mechanical equipment. Spandrels, the opaque areas beneath the windows, are articulated with projecting bands. To be sure, this is no dazzling Frank Gehry piece of architectural sculpture. But it does try to give something back to the city in which it stands.
Developers “can accept the idea of taking basic construction techniques, refining them and making them pleasing if they’re inherently economical,” Goettsch says. The new aesthetic approach, he says, goes hand in hand with internal shifts, like raised office floors, that allow the workplace to better accommodate computers and adjust to future changes. After all, what good is a sense of permanence in a business culture that prizes flexibility and adaptability? Now the ideal is to make buildings that seem weightless rather than weighty.
“Look at the phone — the lighter the phone, the better,” Goettsch says. “People just react to things that are lightweight. Technology has to do with reducing things. We’re trying to use as much glass we can.” New glass technology that shields interiors from solar gain — thus reducing air-conditioning bills — doesn’t hurt.
A building is not as portable as a cell phone, of course. Ideally, it strikes up some relationship with the structures and the sidewalks around it. In that sense, at least if you believe in adventurous architecture, it may be fortuitous that most of the new office buildings are being built on streets, like Wacker, filled with modern buildings as well as postmodern essays in sculpted glass.
The twin-towered ABN Amro complex, for example, will sit just west of Helmut Jahn’s Citicorp Center (the former Northwestern Atrium Center), whose cascading glass facade has been likened to a waterfall. As a result, as ABN Amro’s architect, James DeStefano, points out, there seem to be fewer directives from City Hall about fitting in with old-fashioned, stone-clad buildings.
On the other hand, city planners will be right to insist that the new towers fulfill the social obligation of the skyscraper. That means ensuring that the buildings contribute to the liveliness of their surroundings with ground-floor shops, restaurants and well-used public spaces. This is particularly true of proposals for office towers that would be set atop pedestals more than 100 feet tall; Buck reportedly is considering such a project at the southeast corner of South Wacker Drive and Monroe Street.
It is too early to assess what all the new activity means for the skyline and the streetscape. Yet the shift in design winds — from postmodern to modern — is as clear as a bell. Make that as clear as a freshly cleaned sheet of glass.
