Architect Dan Wheeler thinks bad buildings are worth a closer look. For example, “There’s a building at the corner of Congress and Dearborn that’s just a pure exhibition of commercial gluttony. There’s no ground-floor level. It does nothing to engage with the street; it sprays granite about to make up for its lack of design.” The new Dearborn Center on the northeast corner of Dearborn and Adams is equally dismal. “Its heavily tinted glass appears lifeless,” he says, “making the structure into a deadweight, preventing the transparency [of the] Inland Steel Building nearby, or Mies’s buildings.”
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This Saturday, as part of the city’s “Great Chicago Places and Spaces” event, Wheeler’s giving a walking tour of downtown that will include “some of the disasters as well as things I absolutely love.” Among the latter are the alley sides of some buildings, which he finds are often “far more expressive than the front.” The alley facade of the Plymouth Building at 417 S. Dearborn was “basically built out of pieces from a foundry that did a lot of work for Sullivan. It’s covered with cast metal panels derived from his designs. Pieces like those can be found up and down streets like Wabash.”
“A Penny Walk: Unexpected Thrills” starts at 1:30 PM at the Fisher Building offices of Wheeler Kearns Architects. Some of the 150 other free tours offered this Saturday and Sunday are engineer Stan Kaderbek’s inside view of the operation of the Lake Street bridge, architect Jeff Bone’s tour of his firm’s affordable-housing rehab at 14th and Morgan, and author Heather Becker’s look at murals in the Chicago public schools. Registration is required and begins at 7:30 AM at the Chicago Architecture Foundation, 224 S. Michigan, on the day of the tour. For complete schedule information call 312-744-3315 or see www.cityofchicago.org.
