About 1,000 miles upriver from the devastation of New Orleans, a very different rebuilding story is unfolding in this city on the river. Call it the Chicago-ization of the Mississippi.
Unlike New Orleans, Davenport isn’t recovering from a flood. It’s healing self-inflicted wounds along its once-lively riverfront: eyesore parking lots, brownfields, railroad tracks. “You’ve done such a great job destroying your city,” the British architect David Chipperfield archly told civic leaders after he was hired to design a new art museum here. “Why don’t you finish it off?”
Yet with this month’s gala for the $46.9 million Figge Art Museum and the June debut of a $7.4 million skybridge that joins downtown to the riverfront and was designed by Chicago architects Holabird & Root, Davenport has signaled that it is repenting for past urban planning sins and recovering from the 1980s, when farm-equipment manufacturers here slashed thousands of jobs. And the city is using dramatic insertions of modern architecture to make its point.
Aesthetically, the results are mixed. The museum and the skybridge are appealing in many respects, but neither is a triumph. Still, the larger urban story is encouraging, and it is all about this city’s return to its nine-mile-long riverfront, where steamboats once brought lumber from the North and jazz from New Orleans, announcing the arrival of the latter with shrieking calliopes. Both the museum and the skybridge are among the cultural and business developments of River Renaissance, a $113.5 million public and private sector effort to revitalize the downtown.
The initiative makes Davenport part of a broader trend, one that extends to Chicago’s ongoing transformation of its once-utilitarian riverfront into a lively, pedestrian-friendly corridor. The idea, comparable to the way Chicago turned its industrial lakefront into a glittering greensward of parks and beaches nearly 100 years ago, is to make waterfronts alluring front yards rather than embarrassing back alleys –and to attract residents and business in the process.
Davenport’s Chicago inspiration is no coincidence. Its 42-year-old city manager, Craig Malin, grew up in Rogers Park and is intimately acquainted with the majesty of Chicago’s shoreline. Echoing the words of Daniel Burnham, the back cover of Davenport’s 2005 comprehensive plan touts the document as “no little plan.” To come to Davenport — it is one of the four “Quad Cites,” along with Bettendorf, Iowa, and the Illinois cities of Moline and Rock Island — is to realize afresh that Chicago is not just a museum of architecture, but an urban laboratory, monitored by smaller cities.
“We watch what [Chicago is] doing and try to learn lessons that are applicable to us,” says the mayor, Charlie Brooke.
Keeping the connection
One thing Davenport, with a population of approximately 100,000, already knew was how to engage its most precious natural resource, the river, which snakes from east to west here before dropping south.
While other towns such as Rock Island have cut themselves off from the river with levees and corrugated steel walls built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Davenport has pursued a more enlightened strategy, forgoing such barriers for a variety of less-imposing (but no less effective) defenses, like the berms and movable floodgates that protect its charming riverfront ballpark, the recently renovated John O’Donnell Stadium.
As a result, the downtown retains a strong sense of place, even though it has no major retail stores, just five condominium units and a gaudy riverboat casino, with hideous blue roofs, near the foot of Main Street. With the street grid sloping down toward the river, the blue waters of the Mississippi are clearly visible, as are enormous barges hauling grain, picturesque paddleboats ferrying tourists, and gutsy old bridges linking Davenport and Rock Island. Both the museum and the skybridge seize upon this advantage, offering the equivalent of raised platforms from which to see the waterfront.
“It’s an observation tower on its side,” says the skybridge’s architect, James Baird of Holabird & Root.
The museum, Chipperfield’s first stand-alone building in the U.S., fills the southern half of a former parking lot along the riverfront, with an elegant but chilly plaza set between it and the downtown. Still, the museum’s location speaks volumes about Davenport’s renewed commitment to the riverfront. It used to sit on haughty “Museum Hill,” a bluff overlooking downtown.
The building consists of a black base of stained concrete, from which rises a monolithic block of green glass, including a tower that houses special exhibition spaces. Unlike a conventional curtain wall, with a single layer of glass, the museum’s exterior consists of a so-called “double wall,” with two layers of glass sandwiched around an insulating cavity.
This energy-saving European innovation has arrived in Davenport four years before the planned double wall at Renzo Piano’s Art Institute of Chicago expansion. It is all part of Chipperfield’s minimalism, which is yin to the yang of the sculpted, “spectacle” buildings of Frank Gehry and Santiago Calatrava.
Remain modern
While Chipperfield’s approach may strike critics forever in search of the next “wow building” as timid or conservative, it actually has much to recommend it: It makes a place where before there was only a parking lot. And it promises not to look ridiculously dated a few decades from now.
The tower, a departure from the typical low-slung museum block, endows the building with a vigorous landmark presence on the city’s skyline. It is not hard to imagine motorists pointing to it as they drive into Davenport from the bridges that cross the Mississippi.
As one moves closer, a vivid contrast emerges between the building’s ground-hugging base and the elegant glass floating above it. The museum looks like a steamship cruising atop its plinth. Yet the subtle effect of the double wall trumps such literal interpretations. It is both mirror, reflecting light, and crystal, allowing you to peer through its layers. Its dazzling combination of transparency and translucency makes the museum appear open and inviting, as if it were a giant window.
Trouble is, the exterior promises far more natural light within the museum than Chipperfield delivers.
When I visited a few weeks ago, the galleries, which house the museum’s permanent collection on the second floor and temporary exhibits on the third and fourth floors, had all the zip of hospital operating rooms. The louvers that control the passage of natural light through their skylights were closed because the rooms were far too bright when the sunshades were fully open, museum officials said. Instead, clinical florescent light dominated.
Even if Chipperfield is able to fix the problem, his cool modernist aesthetic and its neutral spaces appear ill-suited to the strengths of the museum’s permanent collection in Haitian and Mexican art. Only when these works are displayed against the few vividly colored walls that Chipperfield has allowed do they seem at home. In its current state, then, the building is better attuned to its site than its art.
The skybridge offers the opposite outcome: It is a joy when you’re inside it, but far less satisfying to look at.
In contrast to Chipperfield’s restrained modernism, the 575-foot-long, city-owned span is very “look at me,” with 99-foot-high canted masts, steel tension rods that support its climate-controlled bridge deck and five-story towers whose elevators lead pedestrians to the deck. There is more than a little Calatrava in all this; the bridge strives to be a civic icon, not just a place to get from Point A to Point B. What’s missing, however, are Calatrava’s elegant proportions and detailing.
Ostensibly, the skybridge exists to get pedestrians to the riverfront from downtown, carrying them over River Drive, this city’s much-smaller version of Lake Shore Drive. But most pedestrians could just as easily walk across River Drive, which makes the bridge an exercise in overkill, a bit like dispatching a fly with a cannon ball.
Its real raison d’etre, as architect Baird acknowledges, is to create a viewing platform, a place to see the river, the bridges, even the eagles that migrate along the Mississippi. At that, it surely succeeds.
Dazzling sights
The bridge’s tension rods are placed above the deck, so they don’t block the view. The glass walls cant outward, like those in an airport control tower, to prevent glare from coming in and to offer better visibility looking out. The view is dazzling, an extraordinary panorama of the river and cityscape. At night, LED fixtures transform the bridge’s tubelike interior into a rainbow of colors that wash over you –red, green, blue, purple. It feels like a rock concert.
Yet the details, which ran into the realities of a tight budget, simply don’t cut it. The canted pylons, for example, are squarish and blocky, far less elegant than the sleek, rounded pylons the architects sketched initially. These faults matter because the bridge is trying to be sculpture as well as structure. While it strikes up a dialogue with the older bridges along the Mississippi, it doesn’t hold up its end of the conversation.
While these shortcomings are disappointing, they are less important than Davenport’s new focus on its riverfront — and the “no little plans” it still is making. Along with Rock Island, for example, the city envisions a new, 21st Century park on both sides of the river by the esteemed landscape architects at Hargreaves Associates. However that project turns out, this much is certain: With urban planning inspiration from Chicago, Davenport’s riverfront is a no man’s land no more.
