If one day you found nothing but vast weed-strewn lots in their place, which of Chicago’s skyscrapers would you miss most? The Sears Tower? The Wrigley Building? The Rookery? The Hancock? How many tall buildings, if they disappeared, would you call a major loss to the city? A dozen? Several dozen? Close to a hundred?
In Chicago, architecture of consequence–Rem Koolhaas’s student center and Helmut Jahn’s massive dorm complex at the Illinois Institute of Technology, or Rafael Vinoly’s Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago–has been relegated to the cloisters of academia, and the city center has become a tepid pot where all the ingredients appear to come from the generics aisle. The most prominent exception is the forthcoming Gehry band shell in Millennium Park, but its genesis points to a key problem. It was brought here not by a committee of bureaucrats or accountants but by the persistent work of one individual, enduring civic booster Cindy Pritzker. It’s a reminder of the fundamental truth of architecture, recently expressed by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, whose new Milwaukee Art Museum has won international praise: “There is not a good project without a good client.”
Lucien Lagrange is arguably the reigning monarch of Chicago architecture, and his success is far from undeserved. A product of McGill University and an alumnus of the pioneering postwar firm Skidmore Owings & Merrill, he’s charming, modest, and gracious. His portfolio includes such important rescues and renovations as Union Station and the old Insurance Exchange Building (175 W. Jackson). He’s behind a number of recent large-scale luxury high-rises, and is currently transforming the Carbon & Carbide Building into a Hard Rock hotel.
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He can be depended on not to challenge or offend: to have his name on a luxury high-rise is an insurance policy that nothing will be seen that hasn’t been seen a thousand times before. He’s a declared anti-Miesian, pronouncing his contempt for those pompous glass boxes that turn their backs to the street and offer nothing but empty lobbies and windswept plazas where restaurants and shops should be. His points about the life of the street are well-taken, and his responses are often imaginative and vital–at 175 W. Jackson, for example, he balances a sensitive restoration of the ravaged terra-cotta of the exterior with a wildly exuberant retooling of the two internal light courts. We should be glad to have him–but for his work to represent the best of the new is to certify the city’s decline.
Magellan started the current assault small, with projects such as the Park Newberry (55 W. Delaware), a 12-story brick-faced condo complex transported from a 1950s suburban subdivision, and 21 W. Chestnut, a four-plus-one stretched to 17 graceless floors, thankfully banished to midblock on a side street. But what was merely unfortunate in these smaller buildings has swollen to the catastrophic in One Superior Place, completed in 1999. Its 52 floors of unrelieved block-wide slab, stretching up without setback like a mesa gone mad, suck up skyline with an obliterating zeal. Tiers of balconies that look like fire escapes alternate with stumpy columns of windows, creating a facade lacking proportion and coherence. A mechanical-services plant on the flat roof gives it all the grace of a Self-Stor warehouse.
In the Auditorium Building (now home to Roosevelt University) Adler & Sullivan built one of the first mixed-use projects, combining an opera house, hotel, and offices all in one structure. The Masonic Temple, from Burnham & Root in 1892, was not only the world’s tallest building at the time but anticipated Water Tower Place with its central light court and nine floors of retail that were not numbered but named like streets, to make it easier for shoppers to remember store locations. (It was demolished in 1939.) Holabird & Roche’s Tacoma Building, torn down in 1929 to make way for One North LaSalle, had so much exterior glass that it could be considered the first use of a curtain wall.
