A Frank Gehry building in Deerfield?
For years, the best-known building in the northern suburb has been the Berto Center, the blank-walled white box where Michael Jordan and the great Chicago Bulls teams practiced.
But that may be about to change.
Gehry, the acclaimed Los Angeles architect who just completed the Jay Pritzker band shell and the BP Bridge in Chicago’s Millennium Park, is “actively exploring” the possibility of designing a library project in the northern suburb, his spokesman Keith Mendenhall said Monday.
On Wednesday, the Deerfield library’s longtime director, Jack Hicks, is expected to brief its board about his meeting with Gehry in Los Angeles last week.
Hicks wants the independently elected board to authorize a referendum on the project, which could be a new library or an addition to the existing building. A public vote on the project, which currently has no price tag, could occur as early as next spring.
“We’ve got to reassure Mr. Gehry that we’re serious and going ahead,” Hicks said.
Gehry has become the world’s best-known living architect after the triumphs of such projects as the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles.
He appears to be less well-known in Deerfield.
“I’ve got to admit that I’m not that familiar with him or his work,” Village Manager Bob Franz said.
Asked if village officials were supportive of the effort to bring Gehry to town, he said: “We see the potential. But we just have to see the specifics.”
Gehry and Deerfield would seem to be the most unlikely of architectural marriages.
The architect’s swooping, at times chaotic, collages of titanium and stainless steel have put him on design’s leading edge. The suburb, in contrast, recently gave its automobile-dominated downtown a traditional makeover with historic streetlights and brick paving.
But the library project offers something to both.
For Gehry, the library presents a chance to respond to Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas’ new Seattle Central Library, which has been called the most important new library to be built in a generation.
With a steel-and-glass exoskeleton that resembles a piece of hard-rock candy draped in fishnet stockings, the Seattle library arranges books in a continuous Dewey Decimal display on gently sloping ramps. The ramps are called the “Books Spiral.”
“Mr. Gehry wants me to go to Seattle with him to critique the Seattle public library,” Hicks said.
For Deerfield–or for Hicks, at least–the project offers a chance to rethink the future of public libraries, which are facing stiff competition from bookstore chains and the Internet.
“What I really want to do is restructure the way public libraries operate,” Hicks said.
Commenting on Koolhaas’ Seattle library, he said, “In that long spiral of Dewey numbers, I’m not sure he didn’t perpetuate the past in a more sophisticated setting.”
A referendum, which the Village Board also would have to approve, could give voters in the northern suburb of 18,400 a hard choice: fund an avant-garde library that would likely increase their property taxes.
Hicks suggested a Gehry-designed library would make property values rise.
“Even if we doubled our taxes, [property owners] wouldn’t know it,” he said. “We tax at one-fifteenth what the combined taxes of the two schools are.”
Though Gehry is best known for spectacular large-scale projects, he occasionally designs smaller buildings, such as an art museum in the works in Biloxi, Miss.
“We’re not hurting for work,” Mendenhall said. “We’ve always accepted both large and small commissions, both in terms of size and budget.”
Hicks began sending letters to Gehry seven months ago and recently received a note from Gehry’s office asking him to come and visit. The Library Board authorized the trip, he said.
Hicks said Gehry promised to be personally involved with the project, including a visit to Deerfield. The architect asked for 25 pictures of the area around the library, Hicks said.
Located at 920 Waukegan Rd., Deerfield’s library is a one-story brick structure, with a lower level, that was done in the early 1970s. Hicks said the library has outgrown the building.
“It’s just a pile,” he said. “It doesn’t look like much on the outside. It’s much better on the inside.”
Even Don Wrobleski, a Bannockburn architect who has twice remodeled the Deerfield library, wants Gehry.
“Frank Gehry has a better reputation than I do,” he quipped. “This is the biggest thing that could ever happen to Deerfield.”
