At their best, design competitions are a lot like opening your window on a breezy spring day. They let ideas flow, freeing us from concepts that have grown stale. And so it was last Tuesday and Wednesday nights when five design teams from Chicago and around the world presented their plans for redesigning Navy Pier’s public spaces to packed houses in the theater of the Museum of Contemporary Art.
The presentations showcased dramatically different approaches to the task at hand — remaking everything from the pier’s west-end Gateway Park to its east-end plaza overlooking Lake Michigan for a relatively modest $85 million. By the luck of the draw, the presentations broke the teams into two clearly defined camps in their plans to remake Illinois’ most popular tourist attraction.
The three teams that presented Tuesday seek to make major changes in the pier’s overall footprint or silhouette. Call these plans the Big Moves. The two teams that followed Wednesday are largely content to accept the pier’s existing contours, yet they strive to make it a more authentic, less cheesy experience. Call those proposals the Creative Tweaks.
Taken as a whole, the designs are refreshingly contemporary, junking the tired “festival marketplace” concept that in the early 1990s transformed the pier from a rotting municipal dock into a surprisingly popular but pseudo-authentic tourist trap.
The best from each group — a Big Move proposal from a team led by the firms Davis Brody Bond, Aedas and Martha Schwartz Partners and a Creative Tweak from the team headed by James Corner Field Operations, whose credits include New York’s celebrated High Line — could create a public space of real distinction.
But there’s a long way to go from here to there. And the big underlying question, beyond the quality of the plans, is whether officials of Navy Pier Inc., the nonprofit that runs the pier, will have the funds to go beyond cosmetics.
The nonprofit’s $85 million budget is built on the optimistic assumption that corporations and other donors will help shoulder the cost of renovations. Officials say they have just $60 million in hand, and some of that will likely go to separate improvements that are envisioned for the pier’s 2016 centennial, including expansions of the Chicago Shakespeare Theater and the Chicago Children’s Museum.
In other words, the job will almost surely have to be built in phases.
But such pragmatic concerns were temporarily set aside at the MCA last week as celebrated global architects like Denmark’s Bjarke Ingels took the stage and explained Big Move concepts such as a grand staircase that would sweep over the roof of the Shakespeare Theater’s expansion, providing a new platform for viewing the skyline as well as a hill for sledding runs.
“Having returned last night from my ski holiday in Park City, I just tested the technique and it works,” Ingels cracked, drawing laughter from the crowd.
Unfortunately for Ingels and his team, which is co-led by the design firm AECOM, executives of the Chicago Shakespeare Theater are none too keen on having their planned expansion, which they envision as an iconic presence, entombed beneath a man-made mountain. “I can’t endorse that particular idea,” Criss Henderson, the theater’s executive director said.
Still, there is much to like in the Ingels/AECOM plan, from proposals to turn the pier’s Ferris wheel into an interactive sign to the idea of transforming the banal Crystal Gardens pavilion into a “vertical urban farm” with elevated ramps leading to a juice bar.
With its undulating boardwalks and a “lifted corner” with a lakeside restaurant below it, the design would simultaneously give the pier new sizzle and clear up its cluttered array of kiosks, signs and other furnishings. Its projected cost, in the range of $85 million to $150 million, is the lowest of the Big Move plans. But the potential implausibility of the design’s major element, the grand staircase, does not help.
Two other plans are more easily dismissed. The first, a Big Move by the firms !melk, HOK and Chicago’s UrbanLab, relies too heavily on built versions of Midwestern topography as well as an over-the-top, glacierlike structure that would pop out of Lake Michigan off the pier’s end. It is also hurt by its staggering overall price — $300 million.
The second also-ran, a Creative Tweak from a team headed by the Xavier Vendrell Studio of Chicago, is admirable for its subtle, disc-shaped planting clusters and a cantilevered, trapezoid-shaped porch, called the Horizon Walk, which would lure visitors to the pier’s southeast end. Yet a plan can be too subtle, and this one — which would cost an estimated $88 million to $125 million — lacks the dramatic flair needed to draw the masses to Navy Pier.
The best of the Big Moves, by the Davis Brody Bond, Aedas and Martha Schwartz team, is easily the most comprehensive of the five designs, including a proposal for a bus-rapid transit system that would ferry visitors between Michigan Avenue and the pier.
The plan also has strong aesthetic strokes, like a long row of stainless steel light towers along the South Dock promenade that would restore the now-jumbled pier’s once-elegant linear profile. Swirling hills and oversize mushroomlike structures would transform the park around the Ferris wheel and the Crystal Gardens into a “through the looking glass” wonderland.
The boldest move, a series of floating boardwalks extending from the South Dock, would relieve the pier’s congestion, bring people closer to the water and transform the pier from an industrial barge to a new hybrid of pier and park. It also would move the tour boats that block lake views because they dock parallel to the pier to new perpendicular docks.
But this proposal would be expensive, with an estimated price tag of roughly $220 million, excluding a wildly unrealistic aerial gondola between the pier and Michigan Avenue. Its saving grace is a sensible plan to build in phases, including a first phase that would install key features at an estimated construction cost of $60 million to $65 million. It would rely on future fundraising for things like the floating boardwalks, but such efforts aren’t sure things.
That’s why it’s important to consider the best of the Creative Tweaks, from the team led by James Corner Field Operations.
An appealing mix of natural serenity and man-made spectacle, it is particularly strong in the pier’s midsection, where it would turn the Crystal Gardens into a striking display of hanging gardens, jazz up the Ferris wheel with futuristic cabs and link the elevated area around the wheel to the South Dock promenade with an undulating staircase that might double, like Ingel’s grand stair, as a Chicago version of the Spanish Steps.
To the east, the plan has more appealing elements, such as a floating swimming pool that could be converted to an ice skating rink in the winter, plus an amphitheater that would be sliced into Navy Pier’s original deck. The amphitheater would let pier visitors get close to the water, something they can’t do now because the pier’s deck is several feet above Lake Michigan. This plan would leave the tour boats where they are, parallel to the South Dock, based on Corner’s view that their comings and going add to the pier’s sense of theatricality.
Corner insists the plan can be completed for $85 million, though he acknowledges that upgrades to envisioned features, like an exclamatory water feature on the pier’s east end, would drive up the cost. Yet even if his on-budget estimate proves true (designers vying for jobs have been known to lowball), the plan is not as fully fleshed-out as its Davis Brody Bond/Aedas/Martha Schwartz Big Move counterpart and could create new “pinch points” on the already-overcrowded South Dock with its clusters of trees and large pavilions.
So the Navy Pier Inc. board and the architectural experts advising it have some excellent options — and some fundamental differences — to mull over the next few weeks. Do they wish to keep the pier a pier, or do they want to make it a new combination of pier and park? Do they want to shift the tour boats or keep them in place? How much effort will they put into better connecting the pier with the city around it?
In short, Big Moves or Creative Tweaks?
In selecting a team, it should be noted, pier officials won’t obligate themselves to build the team’s design. The plans are suggestions, a way for the teams to reveal their combined talents and conceptual vigor.
Inevitably, then, the designs will be changed. Nevertheless, they offer promising alternatives that would mix mass and class, nature and artifice, and in the process make Navy Pier a civic icon that, like Millennium Park, is treasured as well as popular.
