There’s a fresh face in Chicago architecture, an outside-the-box thinker who’s turning out utterly unconventional structures even though he designs them inside the box — a computer, that is. They never fail to spark a reaction, especially if your taste runs toward such oh-so-traditional styles as Georgian, Queen Anne or Tudor.
A purple and yellow house in Prospect Heights seems to glide across its front yard like a boat from one vantage point, and to be upside down from another. A church in New York City has a silvery, zinc side that resembles a giant armadillo. An engineer’s office in Chicago flaunts a white, drywall ceiling that undulates up and down, as if it were the underside of a mountain range.
Doug Garofalo, 42, thinks nothing of shaping geometrically off-kilter buildings that are easily labeled “strange.” Even the dean of the prestigious East Coast school where Garofalo teaches suggests that people living beside his outlandish houses are “probably having a meltdown.”
In reality, though, the neighbors seem quite content. Tour requests never stop, reports contractor Andrew Markow, who lives in Garofalo’s Prospect Heights house. A conventional house “would be boring,” says Markow, who likes skydiving and speedboating. “We are adventurous people. Why not build an adventurous house?”
If you want to get a first-hand look at Garofalo’s edgy stuff, there’s no need to venture to shady lanes in the suburbs — especially starting Friday.
That’s when the Museum of Science and Industry will unveil an exhibit called “Time,” a spectacular collection of timepieces that Garofalo set in a series of continuous, curving walls. Alternately light and dark, the walls suggest the merging of time and space.
In March, the Art Institute of Chicago will open another Garofalo-designed exhibit, “2001: Building for Space Travel.” There, visitors will walk through a fabric-wrapped tube that evokes a trip away from Earth.
Martha Thorne, the Art Institute’s associate architecture curator, praises Garofalo’s daring because he works in a town where soaring ideas often are crushed by mindless pragmatism. “I wish Chicago had a lot more people experimenting,” she says. Even so, she adds: “I have enormous optimism in the future of Doug.”
Like a lot of young architects, Garofalo has gotten his start doing suburban houses. But these houses, many occupied by successful, first-generation immigrants (some European, others Asian), belie the Ozzie-and-Harriet stereotype. They not only reflect suburbia’s growing social diversity. They are bringing design diversity to the homogenous land of split-levels, ranches and Colonials.
Garofalo is no fan of the New Urbanist architects who propose old-fashioned houses with front porches and picket fences as an antidote to suburban sprawl. “I don’t think their cliches work for suburbia,” he says. “Even some of the Schaumburgs of the world are just fine.”
What is most remarkable about Garofalo, however, is that he has won an international reputation without finishing a single, start-from-scratch building. To date, every one of his completed works is a renovation and addition. The much-talked about church in New York City, for example, once was a laundry factory. Similarly, his suburban houses are not teardowns, but what might be called “build-ups.” In the simplest terms, they keep the first story of an old house in place and add new construction on top of or around it.
So why are Garofalo’s buildings making the covers of architectural magazines? And why was he tapped last year for a coveted teaching position at the Yale School of Architecture, where he used to be a student?
Perhaps because he stands at a unique juncture between two conflicting worlds: the old world of hand-drawn blueprints and two-by-fours; and the new world of computer software that makes possible a dazzling variety of shapes. Even in his skilled hands, however, these twisting, bending forms sometimes look better on the computer screen than when they get built.
“There’s still hope for Doug because he likes to build things, grappling with physical problems in physical terms,” says Robert A.M. Stern, dean of the Yale School of Architecture, where Garofalo was a visiting professor last fall. “But he’s also intrigued and filled with ideas that relate to this new digital world.”
As a kid growing up on a cul-de-sac in suburban Schenectady, N.Y., the son of an accountant and a housewife, Garofalo would hang out in the basement, messing with woodworking tools. On occasion, though, he would put down his tools and pick up a set of clubs — golf clubs.
“Doug is embarrassed about playing golf. Why? Because the avant-garde don’t play golf,” says Chicago architect Stanley Tigerman, who brought Garofalo onto the faculty when he headed the architecture school at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Garofalo is now a tenured professor at the school.
Garofalo’s six-person firm can be found behind a checkered brown and tan brick facade at the decidedly unchic address of 3752 N. Ashland Ave., about a half-mile west of Wrigley Field. He and his wife, Chris, a sculptor, live in a light-filled, upstairs duplex. They commute downstairs to a boxcar-shaped studio that resembles an old-fashioned atelier. Yet its computer software is cutting edge.
“We still doodle,” Garofalo says, “but we also doodle on the computer.”
The building that most powerfully exemplifies the computer’s influence on his work is the New York Presbyterian Church, a once-blocky laundry factory with an asymmetrical silhouette dominated by an undulating metal roof. The building’s armadillo-like flank shelters a balcony and an exterior staircase. Inside, the mostly Korean congregation worships in a sanctuary with a series of tilting ceiling planes.
Back in the mid-1990s, Garofalo got the job through one of his employees, a Korean, whose brother belonged to the church. Then, aware of his limited resources, he wondered to himself: “How the hell am I going to do a church in New York?”
The answer: He teamed up with two other young architects, Greg Lynn of Los Angeles and Michael McInturf of Cincinnati, and worked out a design process that was revolutionary.
Not only did the three link their computers so they could work on the church simultaneously despite the fact that they were in different cities. They “sketched” the church entirely on the computer, using the machine’s powerful calculating ability to figure out how they actually could build such unorthodox shapes.
That put them a step beyond Santa Monica, Calif., architect Frank Gehry, who has designed such acclaimed structures as the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, with sculptor’s clay, then refined them on the computer. In the hands of Garofalo and his colleagues, the computer was not simply a tool; it was an integral part of designing.
“Amen,” exclaimed the trade journal Architecture, shortly after the church was completed in late 1999. Yet the magazine’s review, written by architecture critic Joseph Giovannini, also faulted the “disturbing dryness” of the church — evident in both bland white interior walls and a glassy exterior that, from some vantage points, resembles an anonymous 1950s office building.
The computer, Giovannini wrote, “tends to produce airless, immaterial visions.”
The seven houses Garofalo has done in Chicago’s suburbs, all additions and renovations, are every bit as startling as the church. Yet in these projects, Garofalo shows strong evidence of maturing. Now he does a better job of striking a balance between computer and craft.
There is, for example, the Winnetka house of Ying Chen, a Korean-born Chinese restaurateur. Once a single-story, red-brick ranch house, it has become a two-story home whose upper floor, depending on one’s perspective, resembles a playful collection of children’s building blocks or an architectural version of a train-wreck.
Chen recalls how his neighbors felt the house was “too strange” when Garofalo redid its top in the mid-1990s. But these days, he says, pointing to a newspaper photograph of Gehry’s explosively sculptural design for the bandshell in Lakefront Millennium Park, “people see more” of these unconventional buildings and like — or, at least, accept — them.
When Gehry wrapped his pink Santa Monica house in corrugated metal, plywood and chain-link in the late 1970s, a neighbor trained his dog to relieve itself on the idiosyncratic collage. So far, the only creatures going after Garofalo’s buildings are the woodpeckers who’ve attacked the blue and gray synthetic stucco facade of the Derman House, a nine-year-old Skokie addition.
“Maybe they like contemporary work,” Garofalo deadpans, as he inspects the patches needed to fix the problem.
For his finest project, the recently completed Markow House in Prospect Heights, Garofalo tore the roof off the 1962 split-level, wrapping the aging structure in a bigger, dramatically sculptural coat of stucco.
The front of the house has a bowing, boatlike shape raised on a pedestal. In the back, a new, somewhat jagged roof echoes the twin gables of an earlier addition to the house and cascades toward the ground in a series of folded planes.
Inside are spatial surprises, the best of which is a light-filled, two-story communal space that cuts through the center of the house. Enormous windows showcase evergreens on the side of the house. A sensuously curving wall, covered in green plaster, reflects the owner’s pride in his trade — he’s a plaster and stucco contractor.
“My children love to run here,” says Markow, who emigrated to the United States from Poland.
While Markow acknowledges that it took his contractor a week to read Garofalo’s unusual construction drawings, he says the house cost less per square foot than a typical teardown. And he has nothing but praise for Garofalo, saying: “If he were on the East and West coasts, he’d be much more successful. The Midwest is very conservative.”
As he looks to the future and the possibility of some bigger projects, Garofalo has reason to hope that Chicago and the Midwest will recall their history of innovation, rather than just emulating it with mock Prairie Style houses and the like.
He’s designing a 36-unit residential complex along the CTA’s elevated tracks in Bucktown, a theater building for Logan Square and a summer home in Burlington, Wis., for the Manilow family of Chicago. Recently completed works include a soaring, visually dynamic lobby in Chicago’s new high-tech center, the old Lytton Buildingat 235 S. State St., and, in the same structure, the offices of Thornton-Tomasetti Engineers.
The engineers’ offices are shaped like a miniature city, suggesting how Garofalo’s ideas might unfold on a larger, urban scale.
Light-filled perimeter areas are democratically reserved for the engineers who do the heavy lifting — and who really need the natural light for their drafting. Managers’ offices can be found in the central spin of the office, where a folded ceiling floats above.
“It’s whimsical. I think engineers more than other people need to have whimsy in their life,” says Joseph Burns, a principal at the firm, who has collaborated with Garofalo on several projects.
Most important, it goes outside the box, applying fresh ideas to the bottom-line world of commercial construction. Chicago has a great tradition of doing that — just look at Sears Tower and the John Hancock Center, which show the impact that Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s disciples had on the skyline.
At a time when it has become commonplace to import architectural superstars here — Gehry, Rem Koolhaas, Renzo Piano and Norman Foster, to name a few –Garofalo is that refreshing thing: a hot, but homegrown, architect. In the coming years, one hopes, hard-boiled Chicago will cultivate this promising young talent and give him the chances he needs to reach full flower.
