At first glance, they seem as different as a 747 and a John Deere tractor.
The renovated “G” concourse at O’Hare International Airport flaunts a high-tech aesthetic of sculpted steel columns and transparent glass. The visitors center at the Kline Creek Farm in Winfield resembles an old livestock barn, with cedar walls that look as if they were hammered into place by carpenters.
But for all that separates them, these two buildings actually have much in common, and their similarity extends beyond the way they raise simple, economical construction to the level of art. Both emerged from the same talented hand — 42-year-old Tom Hoepf, the principal design architect at the big Chicago architecture and engineering firm of Teng & Associates.
Hoepf (pronounced “Hepf”) is one of several emerging talents who are worth watching as Chicago tries to rev up a once-innovative architectural scene that, in recent years, has been running out of gas, with backward-looking buildings like the stolid Harold Washington Library Center.
Hoepf’s portfolio lacks the conceptual punch and formal inventiveness of another up-and-comer, Doug Garofalo, who has won widespread attention for using computers to design geometrically off-kilter buildings including a Korean church in New York City. Yet Hoepf’s designs are still strong enough to merit a serious look. For unlike Garofalo, who works out of a tiny storefront office on North Ashland Avenue, Hoepf earns his keep in a firm that has roughly 400 people in a downtown Chicago high-rise, and has played a key role in such major projects as the relocation of Lake Shore Drive and the creation of the Museum Campus.
This privileged position has allowed Hoepf to lend his talents to a wide range of high-profile projects, from a crisply modern CTA Blue Line station at Lake and Wells Streets to the renovated Central Street Metra station in Evanston to the “G” concourse at O’Hare, which is, to date, his largest completed work. He moves freely between buildings, bridges and just about anything else. Speaking of the diversity of his portfolio, Hoepf says, with a grin, “I’m like this pretzel crumb floating in a beer.”
He grew up near Toledo, Ohio, and began his career at the highly regarded Chicago firm of Holabird & Root. He moved to Teng nearly seven years ago when no one thought much its architectural abilities. But projects like the “G” concourse and the Kline Creek Farm visitors center, both of them completed this year, are helping to dispel that image.
“I was very disappointed when he left,” says James Baird, a Holabird & Root principal. “[His work] makes sense on a basic level. But he develops it in a way that’s artistic.”
Hoepf’s O’Hare job — done for American Airlines and its American Eagle commuter affiliate, as well as Chicago’s Department of Aviation — transforms what used to be a purely utilitarian facility, with square concrete columns and low ceilings, into an airy, light-filled gateway that recalls a greenhouse as much as it does an airport.
The architect’s key step was to get rid of the seven mechanical penthouses that sat like boxes on the concourse’s flat roof. Replacing them with three new (and far more efficient) units opened up roof area for six arching ceiling vaults that provide a welcome spaciousness to the concourse and also draw in plenty of natural light. The arching roofs also relate well to the curving contours of the United Airlines Terminal and the International Terminal at O’Hare.
The original structure that undergirds the concourse is still there. Yet such is the skillful handling of details that travelers will be hard-pressed to tell old from new. The old square concrete columns, for example, are now sheathed in round steel cases that harmonize with new V-shaped steel columns that support the new ceiling vaults and help give the concourse its sleek, aeronautical look.
Hoepf “worked those things out,” says Holabird & Root’s Baird. “He didn’t just have a bright idea and say to the other guys, You work out the details.”
The most important feature of the concourse, however, is its softly diffusenatural light. To create that effect, Hoepf turned to new glass technology — highly transparent windows that sheathe the side of the vaults and are held in place by silicone joints and structural glass fins. As a result, the concourse seems far more spacious and light-filled than if conventional window frames had been used. It also marks a pleasant departure from the harsh, spotlight effect that illuminates other O’Hare concourses.
Light and more light
“You’re not distracted by a thousand points of light,” Hoepf says as he tours the “G” concourse.
The pleasing light extends into passenger waiting areas that flank the concourse’s main aisle. There, Hoepf made once-uniform ceilings rise in cove-like tiers, opening room for air ducts and bringing even more light into the space.
Veteran travelers I spoke with said these features have turned a dreary, depressing facility into that one that helps to take some of the stress out of flying. Improved ventilation helps too.
The concourse’s lone visual weakness is a series of steel ceiling panels that conceal the underside of the soaring vaults, then swoop down in a wave-like pattern to cover ductwork that is located immediately beneath the concourse’s three mechanical penthouses. At their lowest point, just nine feet tall, these undulating ceilings feel claustrophobic. Worse, they try too hard to endow the concourse with the sense of movement that has become an architectural cliche.
Still, this is an impressive job. Cleverly planned and handsomely crafted, it at once serves travelers well and freshens the modernist tradition at O’Hare with a design that is well-suited to its setting, both inside and out.
Deceptively simple
The same can be said of the Kline Creek Farm visitors center, though it is a far smaller building than the “G” concourse and seems to belong more to the horse-and-buggy era than the jet age. But like the concourse, which serves as the gateway to Chicago, the visitors center is a portal, opening the door to a living history farm that shows what rural life was like in 1890s Du Page County.
It would have been easy to make such a building mawkishly nostalgic, as if it were Ye Olde Farm. Yet Hoepf has avoided that trap in a design that is at once sensitive to its surroundings and clearly contemporary.
Deceptively simple-looking
Located along County Farm Road and built for the Du Page County Forest Preserve District, the visitors center is deceptively simple-looking, with an exposed steel frame and corrugated metal siding. But this simplicity is intentional, evoking barns and livestock pavilions at county fairs. The way the building is laid out, with a tall, peaked-roof central area flanked by wings, also recalls the floor plans of early Christian basilicas, making the visitors center something of a temple to the farm.
There’s nothing officious or intimidating about this building, though. You park in the lot along County Farm Road and approach it on a diagonal, rather than entering it head-on, as you would a church. An arcade on the building’s north side and a covered porch on its east side offer shady spots to rest. Hoepf made space for them by pulling back restrooms and a storage area from the building’s perimeter.
This result is pleasing enough, a subtly asymmetrical composition that is handsomely proportioned. Yet the real power lies within, especially in the tall, thin gallery that runs down the building’s center.
With its exposed steel frame and cedar slats filling the areas between the columns and beams, the gallery succeeds on several counts. For such a small building, the space is surprisingly monumental. Upper level windows fill it with natural light. But the key move is the cedar slats, which have a rich warmth and evoke the corn cribs where farmers once stored their crops. Had drywall been used instead of the cedar, the gallery would have been prosaic rather than poetic.
Finishing touch
It helps that spiders are spinning webs in the upper part of the gallery, making it resemble the interior of a barn. “We included those for authenticity,” jokes a staff member at the farm. Hoepf himself likes how the webwork makes the light seeping into the building seem tangible, like a wisp of cigarette smoke rising up from an ashtray at a bar. “It models the light,” he says.
The rugged but refined look continues in the exhibition area, where windows frame vistas of fences and pasture, and the handsomely arranged displays include a scale model of the living history farm.
The lone fault comes in a series of moving wood and metal panels with which Hoepf tried to frame picturesque openings between the gallery and the exhibition area. The panels spun around, which they weren’t supposed to do, so they had to be fixed in place, lessening the building’s spatial richness.
This is nonetheless a project that shows great promise because of the clarity of its structure, the careful crafting of its details, and its ability to make a sense of place amid the anonymity of suburban sprawl.
Here and in the “G” concourse, Hoepf tweaks the universal formula of mid-century modernism in a way that ennobles construction and enriches human activity.
Or, as he matter-of-factly puts it, “Every little opportunity we had — we made a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.”
It will be interesting to see the yield from his next architectural crop.
