Besides the refined Sixteen restaurant at Trump Tower, Joe Valerio has another new design that’s worth a look: the robust British School of Chicago, whose roller-rink curves of corrugated metal grab your eye as you drive along North Halsted Street.
It’s veddy, veddy un-British, at least if you associate British school architecture with the Gothic quadrangles of Oxford and Cambridge Universities. And it’s veddy, veddy good until you step inside and run into a disappointing lack of integration between interior and exterior.
Located at 814 W. Eastman St., the five-story, blocklong building forms the first phrase of a mixed-use project backed by Structured Development of Chicago. Valerio designed it as a school, with ribbon-like curves that seem to mender through the building. But there was another kind of twist.
Because the for-profit British School has a long-term lease and could leave someday, the building had to be flexible enough to convert into office space. It thus has something of a split identity: inside, a conventional Miesian framework of columns and beams; outside, that wildly unconventional, curvy look, like something out of Frank Gehry’s L.A.
This tension actually enlivens the exterior, which gains visual oomph from the presence of big bay windows that pop out of the curving ends. Despite its “look-at-me,” sculptural presence, the building is a good neighbor, promising to enliven sidewalks with still-to-come street-level shops. It does not turn inward because of its proximity to crime-plagued Cabrini-Green.
For the British School, whose students range from preschoolers to high schoolers, the design communicates a “school for the future,” as headmaster Michael Horton says. The trouble is that the school largely treated Valerio’s architecture as a wrapper, not as part of a greater whole.
Instead, the school brought in the Chicago firm of Interior Space International, and ISI’s design doesn’t relate to the exterior — in part, the firm’s Mark Fischer says, because that’s what the school wanted. The lower floors, for example, are designed with a brightly hued, Crayola innocence that verges on kiddie cliche. Sure, that’s fine for preschoolers. But it would have been preferable to marry their needs with the building’s architecture.
Give ISI credit for some humanistic work — de-institutionalizing the hallways, for instance by putting lockers in little rooms next to classrooms. And Valerio’s architectural framework makes itself felt, to some extent, most notably as the big bay windows draw in natural light, especially to an upper-level gym with primo skyline views.
But the underlying layout generated by spreadsheets — today a school, tomorrow (perhaps) an office building — has the kind of generic regularity that makes it difficult to create warm, quirky spaces that hug you. Give the outside of the British School an A-/B+; the inside, a gentleman’s C.
———-
bkamin@tribune.com
