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19 April 2004, 03:35 PM
CHICAGO'S BOLD REBIRTH
After a dull decade, a new climate for risk-taking has the Windy City roaring back
By Blair Kamin - Tribune architecture critic
Published April 18, 2004
http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/arts/chi-0404180339apr18,1,5347359.story?coll=chi-leisurearts-hed
Ten years ago, when the architectural scene in Chicago was as dead as a post-election night party for a losing candidate, you'd have been hard-pressed to take a visitor on a tour of cutting-edge design here.
There wasn't much to see.
But times have changed.
These days, you could start with the exuberant steel curlicues of Frank Gehry's music pavilion in soon-to-open Millennium Park, race west to the towering cutouts sliced into Ralph Johnson's Skybridge condo high-rise in Greektown, then zip south to the Illinois Institute of Technology and the face-off between Helmut Jahn's sleekly streamlined dorm and Rem Koolhaas' outlandish, orange-walled campus center, which is topped by a 530-foot-long steel tube that muffles the racket of elevated trains.
Those would be the must-sees (along with a certain lakefront stadium that resembles the Starship Enterprise crash-landed atop the Lincoln Memorial), and the message they would telegraph is that, after a decade in the doldrums, Chicago architecture has come roaring back.
The meekness of the recent past is out. Bold modernism is in. And that shift ought to resonate with more than just design fashionistas. Architecture, after all, is the art by which Chicago most visibly and viscerally defines itself. The skyline is equal parts hustler's ambition and dreamer's vision. When architectural arrows point upward, it sends an unmistakable message about the city's collective vitality and creative drive.
Oh, sure, the downtown has too many condo high-rises that resemble overgrown tombstones, ugly three-flat condos are still spreading through the neighborhoods like a bad case of the measles, and Block 37, the long-dormant parcel across State Street from Marshall Field's, is every bit as empty as it was 15 years ago when the Daley administration cleared it for a mega-development that turned out to be a mirage.
But that's Chicago: a restless, ever-changing, Janus-faced town, with plenty of diamonds and just as much rough. Now, at least, we have diamonds that aren't antiques. If you step back -- waaaaaaaaaaaay back -- and look at the big picture, you see that the city is a very different place than it was a decade ago.
Chicago's spruced-up streets and other public spaces look better than ever. The city's architecture schools are clicking with fresh ideas. Bright young designers are making names for themselves, both here and nationwide. And Donald Trump's planned 90-story hotel and condo tower -- much-hyped on "The Apprentice" and designed by Chicago's Adrian Smith -- promises to be far superior to the developer's Trump Tower glitz palace in New York.
Embracing innovation
Even Mayor Richard M. Daley, who for years shied away from daring design, has embraced the cause of innovation, as seen by the city's design competition for a new environmental center in the industrial Calumet area on the Far Southeast Side. A winner for the $7.6 million project, which will house classrooms, laboratories, conference and exhibition space, is to be named Thursday.
The turnaround is perfectly timed for Chicago's proud architecture community, which is expecting company. From June 10 to 12, Chicago will host the national convention of the American Institute of Architects. And the city will have plenty to show off, most notably Millennium Park, the 24-acre, $450-million extravaganza that's scheduled to open to the public on July 16.
All this adds up to something: While Los Angeles has Gehry and New York has the high-profile task of rebuilding the World Trade Center, Chicago holds a trump card its coastal rivals lack -- it is a virtual catalog of the major design movements of 19th and 20th Century design. And now it is extending that catalog into the 21st Century.
Not content to be a mere museum of architecture, a frozen-in-time stage set where you come to witness the past glories of Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Chicago has served notice in the last year or two that it's a living museum with a living tradition, and that its greatest days may not necessarily be behind it.
The results, to be sure, have sometimes been far from perfect, as evidenced by the crude details of Koolhaas' campus center and the renovated Soldier Field's alien invasion of the lakefront. But who ever said the path to glory would be free of bumps?
Everybody knows the story of Chicago's illustrious past -- birthplace of the skyscraper, home of the Prairie House, all that stuff they tell you on the architecture tours.
Here's another way to think about it: From the late 1880s, when the first skyscrapers popped up in the Loop, to 1969, when Mies died, Chicago was the design equivalent of the Sears and Montgomery Ward catalogs. It worked out the prototypes for new kinds of structures and urban spaces, built them in the Loop, merchandised them with ringing aphorisms such as "form ever follows function," then shipped them to Des Moines, Kansas City and other dots on the hinterland map.
But in the late 1980s and 1990s, the city's architectural scene, which had shown signs of weakening in the post-Miesian era, went stale.
Daley and his underlings pushed a conservative aesthetic agenda. The city's two major architecture schools foundered because they had temporary leaders. Imitation, not innovation, characterized big projects such as New Comiskey Park (now U.S. Cellular Field) and the United Center, which weakly echoed the stadiums they replaced. Instead of exporting design archetypes, Chicago began importing so-called "starchitects," out-of-town design stars who were brought in for their signature looks. Unfortunately, many of the visiting stars laid eggs, such as the off-putting Museum of Contemporary Art.
Part of a broad trend
In retrospect, what happened in Chicago was part of a broader trend -- a reaction against the steel-and-glass box modernism of Mies that failed to provide a clear new direction and often resulted in aesthetic timidity. "The boldness gap," my colleague, Robert Campbell of the Boston Globe, astutely called it.
Also, let's not exaggerate: the 1990s weren't a total washout here. There were good buildings, including Carol Ross Barney's boldly colorful public schools in Mexican "port-of-entry" neighborhoods. Daley's beautification program made Chicago a national leader in making the spaces in between buildings -- the so-called "public realm" -- attractive. The mayor also championed heroic acts of urban planning, such as moving the northbound lanes of Lake Shore Drive west of Soldier Field to create the Museum Campus.
Now, though, Millennium Park promises to combine heroic urban planning with heroic architecture.
The park eliminates a longtime eyesore -- an open pit in the northwest corner of elegant Grant Park that offered passersby the incongruous sight of working railroad tracks and a surface parking lot. Gehry's music pavilion is its undisputed focus. Spreading south of the pavilion is a domelike steel trellis that covers an outdoor seating area for 11,000. There's also a bridge, Gehry's first, that snakes across Columbus Drive, joining the pavilion to the lakefront.
"When I came here eight years ago, [Daley] had a narrower frame of architecture. With Millennium Park, he's widening that frame," said Donna Robertson, dean of the College of Architecture at IIT and the adviser to the city's competition for a new environmental center. "It's sort of emblematic of this shift that exciting architecture can actually be good for the city."
That shift, too, is part of a broader trend -- the so-called "Bilbao effect, named for Gehry's 7-year-old Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. This spectacular mountain of metal showed that critically acclaimed, avant-garde architecture could draw tourists by the planeload. That's certainly the brief for Millennium Park, which city officials expect to draw 2 million to 3 million visitors per year.
But to focus simply on the big projects by the visiting stars would be to miss the smaller, subtle shifts that have occurred in the city's architectural community. They bolster the theory that Chicago's resurgence is as much homegrown as it is imported.
At the once-moribund architecture schools, for example, Robertson and her counterparts at the University of Illinois at Chicago have hired new faculty open to new ways of thinking. And these teachers don't just talk; they build -- for example, IIT's John Ronan, who recently beat New York's esteemed Peter Eisenman and two other nationally known firms in the design competition for a new high school in Perth Amboy, N.J.
Encourage forward thinking
Adding more zing to the scene are events, such as the Graham Foundation's recent conceptual design competition for a 21st Century park on Chicago's lakefront, that simultaneously encourage forward thinking and provide a showcase for new talent.
"When you start ticking off the creative young architects, they are, by and large, faculty at UIC and IIT," said Richard Solomon, the director of the Graham Foundation. "It's good that the academic community and the professional community are working together that way."
So dynamic is the city's scene that the tradition-minded Congress for the New Urbanism, the group that made its name advocating the principles for pedestrian-friendly towns such as the Florida resort of Seaside, moved here in January from San Francisco -- and not just because Chicago offers a more convenient transportation hub.
"There's a lot of architectural argument going on in Chicago. That's what we're looking for," said John Norquist, the former Milwaukee mayor who is the group's president.
Indeed, despite the city's resurgence (or perhaps because of it), the arguments will go on, as will the challenges.
Chicago still lacks a first-rate design journal that can disseminate the city's ideas to architects nationwide. It needs to work out better archetypal solutions for the building blocks of today's city -- the high-rise condo and the three-flat condo (maybe the New Urbanists can help). And for all of Daley's efforts to push environmentally friendly "green architecture," the city's developers have yet to build any major examples of it.
Jahn's stunning essays in green design, including his Deutsche Post headquarters in Bonn, show the way, extending the essential qualities -- openness to new technology, elevating construction into art -- that originally made Chicago the nation's architecture capital.
Even if Chicago no longer can lay claim to being the sole, unchallenged center of American architecture -- indeed, in today's global, go-anywhere world, no city holds that role -- there can be no doubt that the city is enjoying a spectacular resurgence.
The evidence is all around us. Just go out for a drive and look.
Copyright © 2004, Chicago Tribune
After a dull decade, a new climate for risk-taking has the Windy City roaring back
By Blair Kamin - Tribune architecture critic
Published April 18, 2004
http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/arts/chi-0404180339apr18,1,5347359.story?coll=chi-leisurearts-hed
Ten years ago, when the architectural scene in Chicago was as dead as a post-election night party for a losing candidate, you'd have been hard-pressed to take a visitor on a tour of cutting-edge design here.
There wasn't much to see.
But times have changed.
These days, you could start with the exuberant steel curlicues of Frank Gehry's music pavilion in soon-to-open Millennium Park, race west to the towering cutouts sliced into Ralph Johnson's Skybridge condo high-rise in Greektown, then zip south to the Illinois Institute of Technology and the face-off between Helmut Jahn's sleekly streamlined dorm and Rem Koolhaas' outlandish, orange-walled campus center, which is topped by a 530-foot-long steel tube that muffles the racket of elevated trains.
Those would be the must-sees (along with a certain lakefront stadium that resembles the Starship Enterprise crash-landed atop the Lincoln Memorial), and the message they would telegraph is that, after a decade in the doldrums, Chicago architecture has come roaring back.
The meekness of the recent past is out. Bold modernism is in. And that shift ought to resonate with more than just design fashionistas. Architecture, after all, is the art by which Chicago most visibly and viscerally defines itself. The skyline is equal parts hustler's ambition and dreamer's vision. When architectural arrows point upward, it sends an unmistakable message about the city's collective vitality and creative drive.
Oh, sure, the downtown has too many condo high-rises that resemble overgrown tombstones, ugly three-flat condos are still spreading through the neighborhoods like a bad case of the measles, and Block 37, the long-dormant parcel across State Street from Marshall Field's, is every bit as empty as it was 15 years ago when the Daley administration cleared it for a mega-development that turned out to be a mirage.
But that's Chicago: a restless, ever-changing, Janus-faced town, with plenty of diamonds and just as much rough. Now, at least, we have diamonds that aren't antiques. If you step back -- waaaaaaaaaaaay back -- and look at the big picture, you see that the city is a very different place than it was a decade ago.
Chicago's spruced-up streets and other public spaces look better than ever. The city's architecture schools are clicking with fresh ideas. Bright young designers are making names for themselves, both here and nationwide. And Donald Trump's planned 90-story hotel and condo tower -- much-hyped on "The Apprentice" and designed by Chicago's Adrian Smith -- promises to be far superior to the developer's Trump Tower glitz palace in New York.
Embracing innovation
Even Mayor Richard M. Daley, who for years shied away from daring design, has embraced the cause of innovation, as seen by the city's design competition for a new environmental center in the industrial Calumet area on the Far Southeast Side. A winner for the $7.6 million project, which will house classrooms, laboratories, conference and exhibition space, is to be named Thursday.
The turnaround is perfectly timed for Chicago's proud architecture community, which is expecting company. From June 10 to 12, Chicago will host the national convention of the American Institute of Architects. And the city will have plenty to show off, most notably Millennium Park, the 24-acre, $450-million extravaganza that's scheduled to open to the public on July 16.
All this adds up to something: While Los Angeles has Gehry and New York has the high-profile task of rebuilding the World Trade Center, Chicago holds a trump card its coastal rivals lack -- it is a virtual catalog of the major design movements of 19th and 20th Century design. And now it is extending that catalog into the 21st Century.
Not content to be a mere museum of architecture, a frozen-in-time stage set where you come to witness the past glories of Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Chicago has served notice in the last year or two that it's a living museum with a living tradition, and that its greatest days may not necessarily be behind it.
The results, to be sure, have sometimes been far from perfect, as evidenced by the crude details of Koolhaas' campus center and the renovated Soldier Field's alien invasion of the lakefront. But who ever said the path to glory would be free of bumps?
Everybody knows the story of Chicago's illustrious past -- birthplace of the skyscraper, home of the Prairie House, all that stuff they tell you on the architecture tours.
Here's another way to think about it: From the late 1880s, when the first skyscrapers popped up in the Loop, to 1969, when Mies died, Chicago was the design equivalent of the Sears and Montgomery Ward catalogs. It worked out the prototypes for new kinds of structures and urban spaces, built them in the Loop, merchandised them with ringing aphorisms such as "form ever follows function," then shipped them to Des Moines, Kansas City and other dots on the hinterland map.
But in the late 1980s and 1990s, the city's architectural scene, which had shown signs of weakening in the post-Miesian era, went stale.
Daley and his underlings pushed a conservative aesthetic agenda. The city's two major architecture schools foundered because they had temporary leaders. Imitation, not innovation, characterized big projects such as New Comiskey Park (now U.S. Cellular Field) and the United Center, which weakly echoed the stadiums they replaced. Instead of exporting design archetypes, Chicago began importing so-called "starchitects," out-of-town design stars who were brought in for their signature looks. Unfortunately, many of the visiting stars laid eggs, such as the off-putting Museum of Contemporary Art.
Part of a broad trend
In retrospect, what happened in Chicago was part of a broader trend -- a reaction against the steel-and-glass box modernism of Mies that failed to provide a clear new direction and often resulted in aesthetic timidity. "The boldness gap," my colleague, Robert Campbell of the Boston Globe, astutely called it.
Also, let's not exaggerate: the 1990s weren't a total washout here. There were good buildings, including Carol Ross Barney's boldly colorful public schools in Mexican "port-of-entry" neighborhoods. Daley's beautification program made Chicago a national leader in making the spaces in between buildings -- the so-called "public realm" -- attractive. The mayor also championed heroic acts of urban planning, such as moving the northbound lanes of Lake Shore Drive west of Soldier Field to create the Museum Campus.
Now, though, Millennium Park promises to combine heroic urban planning with heroic architecture.
The park eliminates a longtime eyesore -- an open pit in the northwest corner of elegant Grant Park that offered passersby the incongruous sight of working railroad tracks and a surface parking lot. Gehry's music pavilion is its undisputed focus. Spreading south of the pavilion is a domelike steel trellis that covers an outdoor seating area for 11,000. There's also a bridge, Gehry's first, that snakes across Columbus Drive, joining the pavilion to the lakefront.
"When I came here eight years ago, [Daley] had a narrower frame of architecture. With Millennium Park, he's widening that frame," said Donna Robertson, dean of the College of Architecture at IIT and the adviser to the city's competition for a new environmental center. "It's sort of emblematic of this shift that exciting architecture can actually be good for the city."
That shift, too, is part of a broader trend -- the so-called "Bilbao effect, named for Gehry's 7-year-old Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. This spectacular mountain of metal showed that critically acclaimed, avant-garde architecture could draw tourists by the planeload. That's certainly the brief for Millennium Park, which city officials expect to draw 2 million to 3 million visitors per year.
But to focus simply on the big projects by the visiting stars would be to miss the smaller, subtle shifts that have occurred in the city's architectural community. They bolster the theory that Chicago's resurgence is as much homegrown as it is imported.
At the once-moribund architecture schools, for example, Robertson and her counterparts at the University of Illinois at Chicago have hired new faculty open to new ways of thinking. And these teachers don't just talk; they build -- for example, IIT's John Ronan, who recently beat New York's esteemed Peter Eisenman and two other nationally known firms in the design competition for a new high school in Perth Amboy, N.J.
Encourage forward thinking
Adding more zing to the scene are events, such as the Graham Foundation's recent conceptual design competition for a 21st Century park on Chicago's lakefront, that simultaneously encourage forward thinking and provide a showcase for new talent.
"When you start ticking off the creative young architects, they are, by and large, faculty at UIC and IIT," said Richard Solomon, the director of the Graham Foundation. "It's good that the academic community and the professional community are working together that way."
So dynamic is the city's scene that the tradition-minded Congress for the New Urbanism, the group that made its name advocating the principles for pedestrian-friendly towns such as the Florida resort of Seaside, moved here in January from San Francisco -- and not just because Chicago offers a more convenient transportation hub.
"There's a lot of architectural argument going on in Chicago. That's what we're looking for," said John Norquist, the former Milwaukee mayor who is the group's president.
Indeed, despite the city's resurgence (or perhaps because of it), the arguments will go on, as will the challenges.
Chicago still lacks a first-rate design journal that can disseminate the city's ideas to architects nationwide. It needs to work out better archetypal solutions for the building blocks of today's city -- the high-rise condo and the three-flat condo (maybe the New Urbanists can help). And for all of Daley's efforts to push environmentally friendly "green architecture," the city's developers have yet to build any major examples of it.
Jahn's stunning essays in green design, including his Deutsche Post headquarters in Bonn, show the way, extending the essential qualities -- openness to new technology, elevating construction into art -- that originally made Chicago the nation's architecture capital.
Even if Chicago no longer can lay claim to being the sole, unchallenged center of American architecture -- indeed, in today's global, go-anywhere world, no city holds that role -- there can be no doubt that the city is enjoying a spectacular resurgence.
The evidence is all around us. Just go out for a drive and look.
Copyright © 2004, Chicago Tribune