Rarely does a single architect design three buildings at a highly visible urban site over a span of 20 years — and do all three well to boot. But that is the feat that William Pederson and his colleagues at the New York firm of Kohn Pederson Fox (KPF) have just accomplished with the completion of 191 N. Wacker Drive, a new 40-story office building that skillfully complements the two KPF towers that already mark the downtown fork of the Chicago River.
The newcomer proclaims itself with hard-edged clarity and, on occasion, stylish sobriety, though it fails to match the high aesthetic standards set by KPF’s 333 W. Wacker Drive (1983) and 225 W. Wacker Drive (1991). Its luster is dimmed by the Darth Vader minimalism of its undistinguished glass walls and a street-level presence that is as frosty as the recent run of subzero weather.
Despite such faults, 191 Wacker succeeds on a broader scale, joining 225 to form a pair of bookends that perfectly set off the jewel-like icon at 333. Chicago can count itself lucky that KPF, which has laid architectural eggs here with ungainly giants like 311 S. Wacker Drive, did not mar its previous triumphs.
Houston-based developer Gerald Hines was the financial force behind the $160 million office building. Kendall/Heaton Associates of Houston served as associate architect. While Pederson played a key conceptual role, the chief designer was KPF’s James von Klemperer. He faced the daunting challenge of relating to 333, where a curving green glass wall is set atop a classically inspired base, and 225, where gray granite walls culminate in four finial-topped aluminum corner towers.
Hanging out on Wacker
There was another challenge: the need to hang a few feet of 191 over the Wacker Drive sidewalk and one lane of the street itself. That cantilever became necessary when, as part of the recently completed Wacker Drive reconstruction project, city officials decided to push the road 15 feet eastward. That created another lane for drivers, but it cut off a portion of the site — right where the structural columns would have come down to the ground.
The solution devised by KPF and Thornton-Tomasetti structural engineers sets concrete columns back from the property line and arranges them in the shape of a wedge within 191’s lobby. The columns rise at the outside edge of the two-story lobby, stretch diagonally through the building’s five-story parking garage, then shift to a conventional steel frame when the office floors begin. In profile, the arrangement looks a little like a man bending at the knees.
Von Klemperer reveals, interestingly, that the first round of designs for the thin, rectangular plot explored the possibility of creased and canted facades. But those were thrown out — and a rectangular building was dictated — when Hines snagged a lead tenant that needed floors as big as the site. That was a fortuitous turn of events. A dramatically sculptural building might have upstaged 333. Instead, 191 became an essay in squeezing elegance out of a simple box.
KPF’s key step was to take the big box and break it into smaller, well-proportioned boxes, the most notable of which is the thin slab that forms the building’s western face.
Notches add grace
Von Klemperer set the slab apart from the rest of 191 by making a notch 2 feet deep and 5 feet wide on the skyscraper’s north and south walls. The notches cost the developer only 20 square feet per floor. They add immeasurably to the building’s grace, creating a soaring volume that seems to float above Wacker and subtly recalls the pronounced verticality of 225.
Von Klemperer was equally effective in composing the west facade as a taut-skinned wall of reflective glass, a clear homage to the equally taut skin of 333. Projecting stainless steel fins continue the horizontal sweep of 333’s curving wall and lend some depth and texture to 191’s otherwise flat exterior.
In the wrong hands, the choice of reflective glass for the western wall could have been an aesthetic disaster, setting up a double-mirror game that would have dulled 333’s panache. But KPF’s selection of silver-blue glass allows 191 to blend into the sky, letting 333 remain the focal point.
The best stroke comes at the building’s summit, where von Klemperer extends the slab upward as a transparent crown that houses mechanical equipment and is stiffened against the wind by steel “X” braces. The crown gives the modestly scaled building a presence beyond its size and glows softly at night, a pleasant shift from the shrieking “White Castle” top of 311 S. Wacker.
In many other respects, however, 191 is a major disappointment.
Seen head on, the western wall presents an unrelieved dark mass, utterly lacking the richness of detailing evident at both 333 and Lohan Caprile Goettsch’s year-old UBS Tower at 1 N. Wacker Drive. The eastern side of the building is no better, with a metal facade grid vainly attempting to create the proportions, rhythms, depth and texture that would modulate the scale of the building’s big hunk of glass.
Worst, 191 meets the ground with an elegant, but chilly, austerity.
The lobby’s wedge of glass is oddly out of kilter with the straight path of the sidewalk. The building’s street-level presence is more off-putting because a pattern of white dots on the lobby’s glass exterior screens out views of its warmly colored interior walls during the day. And with that big slab of glass hanging over the sidewalk, pedestrians can be forgiven for feeling like ants about to be crushed.
Inside, the prospect is somewhat more welcoming. The lobby, which has walls clad in rose-colored stone and Western cedar, is well-proportioned and handsomely crafted. Like nearly all office building lobbies, it would benefit from the presence of benches, where the weary might sit, but maybe that is no longer possible in today’s security-conscious climate.
All buildings are expressions of their time, and 191 N. Wacker is no exception. Conceived during the late 1990s, when real estate money was tight, it rejects the lavishness of the postmodern buildings of the 1980s and is, in that sense, a pre-9/11 building that anticipates the new sobriety of the post-9/11 era.
While 191 is the least distinguished of the trio at the bend in the Chicago River, it is still a worthy effort, illustrating Lewis Mumford’s dictum that architecture is time made visible. At KPF’s Wacker triumvirate, time looks very good indeed.
