If this were a movie, its title would be “Revenge of the Locals.” But it’s a real Chicago story, and it’s flavored with an ironic twist: The highly regarded New York architects who have been grabbing plum jobs here for two decades weren’t just bounced from the big Block 37 job, they were outdone by the unheralded Chicago architects who replaced them.
That is the story within a story on the long-vacant parcel bounded by State, Dearborn, Washington and Randolph Streets. It’s an intriguing tale because it goes against the grain of global superstars–Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas and the like–who have dominated architecture in recent years with their show-stopping designs.
Maybe, this story tells us, Chicago architects can hold their own against the visiting stars. Maybe there is an advantage to knowing the planners who plan things, the developers who finance things, the contractors who build things. Maybe there is really is something to knowing the unwritten rules that give a city its sense of place.
The story has its roots in 1983 when an up-and-coming New York City firm, Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF), made a spectacular Chicago debut and broke the longtime lock of Chicago firms on the town’s top jobs.
KPF’s 333 W. Wacker Drive office building heralded the onset of postmodern “contextual” skyscrapers that strove, above all, to be sensitive to their surroundings. In contrast to a typical modern high-rise, which had four similar and equally monotonous faces, 333 had two distinctive identities: a curving, green glass side that handsomely marked a bend in the Chicago River and another, faceted side that responded nearly as deftly to its chock-a-block site.
How strange it was, then, last April when KPF unveiled a design for Block 37 that was supremely uncontextual. It offered a retail base that resembled a suburban mall and, atop it, a hotel and condominium tower that looked like a mirror-glass office building from the Sunbelt. Given the history of high-quality work turned out worldwide by William Pedersen, the KPF partner on the project, the design seemed bizarre.
What was even stranger, though, was what happened next: As KPF redesigned their much-criticized first offering, the Block 37 developers fired the visiting stars and replaced them with a solid but hardly stellar Chicago firm, Solomon Cordwell Buenz (SCB), best known for the Crate & Barrel flagship store at 646 N. Michigan Ave. SCB proceeded to turn out a work of crisply composed, site-responsive modernism–precisely the kind of thing being done in recent years by Pedersen and KPF.
Along State, SCB’s plan calls for a three-story Lord & Taylor department store topped by a redesigned roof garden and four restaurants. At Dearborn and Washington would be an L-shaped Marriott Suites Hotel. Soaring above the hotel would be a condominium tower that would have a swooping, north-facing curve and would rise to 66 stories.
The project, known as 100 North State, is at its strongest along Dearborn. There, the hotel would form a perfect bookend to the big-columned City Hall-County Building across the plaza. Both would frame the plaza’s outdoor space, much like the walls of a room. An equally good gesture is the supertall bay window that would extend up the corner of the condominium tower. Not only would it distinctly mark the corner of Dearborn and Washington, but it also would make a bold visual statement–precisely what’s needed along a plaza where the surrounding buildings seem larger than life. The big curved window on the north side of the tower would perform the same visual trick. A structurally expressive facade grid, meanwhile, brings the project down to scale and lends it a strong Chicago identity.
Here, density and design quality go hand in hand. Before Block 37 was cleared in 1989 and 1990 to make way for a twin-towered, Helmut Jahn-designed office-retail development that was killed by the collapse of the office market, it had five relatively tall buildings and a handful of smaller ones. But where the new project lacks density, it seems less convincing. Along State, for example, even with all the attractive storefront windows that SCB added, the project may not have enough height to stand up to cliff of stone formed by Field’s flagship store.
Another cause for concern has to do with materials: The buildings will be clad in panels of precast concrete, a material that typically lacks the warmth and texture of limestone. At worst, the panels will look cheap and insubstantial alongside the russet-toned CorTen steel of the Daley Center or the creamy white terra cotta of the Reliance Building across Washington.
But in the end, the design should more than hold its own, provided that a new recession doesn’t sink the project. The chief reason is that it does the basics right–the right massing, the right scale, the right mix of solids and voids. Even the lack of height along State Street may work to the project’s benefit. It means that the rooftop garden, which now seems more inviting because there are two elevator banks leading to it, won’t be too high–and therefore inaccessible.
In other words, SCB hasn’t tried to recreate the old Block 37. It has created something new–less dense, more airy, but still connected with the city around it. This is very good commercial architecture–and that, as much as individual brilliant statements, is what has long made Chicago a renowned center of design. The Chicago Plan Commission acted wisely in approving the project Jan. 25.
Does this mean that a new era is at hand, one in which Chicago architects return to their pre-333 W. Wacker Drive dominance?
I doubt it. There’s no way to roll back globalization. It’s a genie that can’t be put back in the bottle;indeed, even as KPF’s Block 37 design was being replaced, the firm popped up as the architect of a planned Loop office building at 181 N. Clark that would be a twin tower to the KPF-designed Chicago Title & Trust building at 161 N. Clark. Still, what has transpired on Block 37 serves notice that local firms have a significant role to play in the ongoing building boom.
For those who enjoy and endure what the cityscape dishes out, the ultimate question isn’t who does the job, but what they do: Do new buildings accentuate the regional differences that make cities special? Do they add to a city’s sense of place? Even in a time of rampant globalization, architecture remains an art that is defiantly local.
