Just in case you were wondering, the proposal for a 523-foot-tall condominium tower in Evanston that surfaced last week wouldn’t be the tallest suburban building in the United States, even though it would be the tallest in Chicago’s suburbs.
The “tallest in the ‘burbs” crown is generally assigned to the highest of a pair of office buildings in the Atlanta suburb of Sandy Springs, Ga.
Designed by the Atlanta-based firm of Thompson, Ventulett, Stainback & Associates, who’ve shaped the most recent expansions of Chicago’s McCormick Place, the tower clocks in at 570 feet and was finished in 1988. Known by the official name of Concourse Corporate Center V (as in Roman numeral V), it is nicknamed “The Queen” for its domed crown, just as its sibling, Concourse Corporate Center VI (553 feet, completed in 1991), is called “The King” for its castlelike top.
Issue settled? Not quite. This whole business of ranking tall building outside downtowns is pretty fuzzy.
Just across the Hudson River from the great forest of towers in Manhattan, for example, Jersey City, N.J., sports the 781-foot-tall, glass-sheathed Goldman Sachs Tower, finished in 2004 and designed by New Haven, Conn., architect Cesar Pelli.
But no one would call Jersey City a suburb. A satellite city, perhaps. Emporis, the Web site that tracks building data worldwide, refers to the Goldman Sachs Tower “the tallest building in the United States which is not within its metro area’s largest city.”
Has a nice ring to it.
To further confuse the issue, there’s the 901-foot-tall Williams Tower in Houston’s Galleria district, several miles west of that city’s downtown and now 24 years old. Originally known as Transco Tower and designed by the late Philip Johnson, the black-glass skyscraper rises like an oil gusher above the Texas prairie, far taller than anything in its immediate surroundings.
The superlative that typically gets pinned to it? The tallest building in America outside a central business district.
– The Art Institute of Chicago is planning a retrospective exhibition on the work of the late Chicago architect Bertrand Goldberg, best known for his revolt against the straight-laced geometry of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe as expressed in the twin corncob towers of Marina City.
The exhibition is expected to be mounted in 2010.
The museum’s architecture department simultaneously announced the completion of an illustrated guide to the Goldberg collection. The department’s share of the collection consists of more than 30,000 documents, ranging from sketches to architectural models, documenting Goldberg’s life and work.
Print and CD versions of the guide can be obtained by request through the museum’s Department of Architecture and Design.The other holder of the collection, the museum’s Ryerson and Burnham Libraries, has photographs, slides and other materials.
For more information, call the department at 312-443-3949 or go to www.artic.edu/aic/libraries/goldberg/index.html.
– Donna Robertson, dean of the College of Architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology, has been named the first holder of an endowed chair sponsored by John Rowe, chairman and chief executive office of Exelon Corp. and chair of the IIT board of trustees, and his wife, Jeanne.
A chair, the university said in a news release, creates an endowed fund to support the research, teaching and leadership work of a faculty member or dean. Referring to Mies, who once headed IIT’s architecture school, the release said the chair recognizes how Robertson “has bridged the gap between IIT’s strong Miesian tradition and contemporary architectural ideas.”
———-
bkamin@tribune.com
