When bad things happen to good buildings
This title is an overstatement: what has happened to these buildings is not actually bad. Or even unfortunate. Maybe anachronistic and at worst out of stylistic character. Maybe a more accurate title would be When the 21st Century happens to 1970s buildings. Much less jazzy, more accurate.
Similarly it's an overstatement to call these buildings "good." Buildings, in the architect Cass Gilbert's phrase, are "machines to make the land pay." Even if that's not true of all buildings, it's true of these. "Making the land pay" doesn't make a building good or bad per se. We've learned since the 1970s is how to to extract money from visitors to a building and how to attract more visitors to a building. What makes a building appealing is different now than in the 1970s. In these senses, these buildings are better.
So a more honest (but much too long) title would be some renovations to interesting buildings that are different in style from the original building. To be clear: worse fates have met much much better buildings: Prentice Hospital, the Chicago Stock Exchange, and the Schiller Building-buildngs reflecting a noble vision of what people and a city could be-were all torn down, and these acts were deeply lamentable if not outright criminal. (Photos from Wikipedia.)
The Willis Tower (formerly known as the Sears Tower)
(Many people insist they will always call it "Sears Tower". That seems misguided: Sears has shown no loyalty to Chicago or to Illinois; I see no reason why Chicagoans least of all should be loyal to Sears.)
In the 1960s, Sears, Roebuck and Co. had offices mainly in Chicago's East Garfield Park neighborhood, and other offices spread throughout Chicago. Bringing all of its office workers together would increase efficiency, the East Garfield Park neighborhood was scary, and Sears could command, or finagle, a good deal on a large parcel in downtown Chicago. The city awarded them a deal on the blocks between Wacker and Franklin and Jackson to Adams, plus the right right to occupy Quincy: a prime location, and likely below market pricing.
The architects (Skidmore, Owings and Merrill) presented several ideas for the new HQ, of which one was known internally at SOM as "the Monster:" a solid, drab and unimaginative fifty story block from lotline to lotline. To what I imagine was to SOM's horror, this proposal intrigued Sears' senior management, and might have emerged as the final design.
Fortunately, another proposal from SOM was for a tower which might occupy only a fraction of the whole lot, but in order to get the required square footage, would have been taller than any other building. The tower would be aligned with the street-grid, placed somewhat off-center, and with an innovative structural system and an irregular but modern, minimalist profile. One seldom mentioned aspect of the innovative design was substantially reduced material costs. Perhaps the opportunity to build the world's tallest building appealed to the egos of the world's largest retailer, but for whatever reason, it was the building that got built.
The plaza that surrounded the tower was designed to be on a slightly sloping plinth, and open but inhospitable, since public gathering spaces might provide a place for mass protests, and in the 1970s private corporations wanted to avoid that. It seems to me that the tower never met the city in any hospitable way, and the building's entrance was revised soon after the building was opened. Even so, the tower's placement in the open plaza gave it an almost sculptural quality, so that it could be appreciated as an object of art. (Does it even make sense to evaluate skyscrapers as art? Can one consider tall office buildings artistically? Maybe.)
The few retailers inside the ground floor and plinth mostly served the workers in the tower. The building gave no reasons to visit except on business with one of the tenants, and there were no provisions for any other type of visitor.
Sears Roebuck & Co. moved out several decades ago, and naming, ownership and control of the building is now different. The new owners looked at all the space in the open plaza, and the potential visitation that such a tall building could draw, and probably thought of all the revenue that could be generated by leasing out that space and also getting more visitors. These things required a substantial reworking of the public areas, even some rethinking of the building's relationship to the city. Much more is known now than in the 1970s about how people occupy space and about how they spend money, and spaces need to reflect that knowledge.
Originally, there was only one public entrance, on Wacker Drive, facing west. The east side was clearly the back of the building: that is where there were loading docks and access to (apparently very limited) internal parking, with a public parking structure one block to the west. It was soon realized that visitors to the observation deck on the top floors needed a separate entrance, apart from the entrance for business visitors, and this was provided on the south side of the building on Jackson.
But even bigger changes were to come. First, a whole new lobby to the building's Franklin Street side,
and a huge retail area, including a retail space on the Jackson Street side (named, with some 21st attitude, "Catalog".)
Further, the previously open courtyard surrounding the tower was filled in with three or four storey structures devoted to retail, and retail from the general public, not just tower workers. There is (or will be) a "public" park on the fourth floor. (I'm aware of discussions about possible blurring of the line between "public" and "private" space, and perhaps the space around the tower is an instance of this conundrum. Without taking a side I can ask how public will this "public" space be?)
With all of these changes, the Tower has become a destination, a place where one might meet friends for a meal or a drink, or to take in the sights.
In sum, the space around the tower has changed in ways that are different from the original intent of the tower. But those changes are on the whole improvements. The spaces in the tower support activities not in the original program of the building, and require designs different from the building's original.
(I wrote the above before I saw a recent item about the redesign of the Tower and its podium: https://www.architecturalrecord.com/articles/15633-willis-tower-transformation-by-gensler?oly_enc_id=8186C6246656C0S
Apparently I saw the transformations more or less the way they were intended.)
CME Center (sometimes called The Chicago Mercantile Exchange)
Two blocks north of the Tower, the CME Center occupies the entire block between the River, Wacker Drive, Madison Street and Monroe Street. It was built in several phases between 1985 and 1987. There are two identical 40 storey towers, on the north and south of the block, with the trading floors for the Chicago Mercantile Exchange between these towers. It was designed by the firm of Fujikawa, Johnson & Associates. The key design features of each tower are the compound corners. I see these as having an insistent orthogonality. (Photo from Wikipedia)
So CME could well be a Miesian building, with structure expressed in straight lines and hard (and right) angles. There is a clarity and a rationality and (therefore) a beauty in straight lines and right angles. That rationality is what modernism is about, and therefore what the CME Center is about.
The lobby space have needs redesigned several times in the past few years. Possibly these redesigns were motivated by new security technology, new lighting technology and new environmental controls. The CME no longer has trading floors in this building, and that might generate different patterns of foot traffic in the building. But the most recent revisions to the lobby introduced curved glass, curved walls, and curved lights. These curves seemingly contrast with the modernist orthogonality of the building. There is a tension between the rationality and regularity if the original design vs. the flow and naturalness of the revised lobby. (Conceivably, the glass provides greater thermal comfort and the lights provide superior illumination at lower cost.) The revisions provide for some sociable space; not a lot, maybe two or three degrees beyond minimal, but not enough to invite visitors to linger.
Illinois Center and One Illinois Center
When I was training as an architecture docent, we learned that Mies van der Rohe did some great buildings, but One Illinois Center was not one of them. It is often difficult to distinguish between Illinois Center the development, on one hand, and One Illinois Center the tower building and the various other buildings in that development on the other. Difficult but necessary. There may be problems with the design of the development that uncareful critics assign to the design of the buildings.
While I believe there are discussions about Mies' level of involvement: sill, both the Illinois Center development and the building One Illinois Center reflect some Miesian principles in their designs. Some history (as I understand it):
In the 1950s, the Illinois Central Railroad found that they owned a large and valuable tract of land adjacent to downtown Chicago. The development of Prudential Plaza had shown that this land could be developed into highly prestigious office space. Mies van der Rohe was asked to develop a long range site plan, and the first part of his plan required building a podium, over which individual towers would be erected. This podium was designed to contain a variety of retail services for the employees of the tenants, and provides a place for foot-traffic to and from the towers. Mies had a vision for what these towers would look like, but the individual towers would be the responsibility of different architects. Some designers closely follow Miesian principles (e.g. Three Illinois Center, 1979, Fujikawa Conterato Lohan) others adopt a different type of modernism (e.g. Hyatt Regency, 1974 & 1979, Epstein).
Mies' vision has towers therefore raised up on pilotis, the ground floor open space and a lobby. The walls of the ground floor should be pulled back, creating an arcade open to the outside.
Property owners hate this. They have to pay for heating and maintenance on the lobby, maintain the arcade spaces, with all that glass but not rent it out: all that prime high visibility space with no revenue. So property owners are quite open to proposals to change this.
But the arcades, pilotis and public space is not the major problem. So even after extensive and expensive renovations and revisions are made, the problems persist.
(Now, the only thing I know about urban planning is that there're qualified experts in that topic. But my guess is that the root of Illinois Center's issues are a disconnect between its podium and its towers: people don't know where they were or what they were supposed to do: being at the office should be different from meeting friends after work for a bite and a drink, for example.)
The current revision of the entry to One Illinois Center attempts to solve the problem by giving the building a strong street identity, and making it clear what's inside and what's outside.
It does this by enclosing Mies' original arcades and enclosing them in glass, sacrificing and privatizing two thirds of the original lobby (the Chicago Architecture Center now has gallery space and lecture halls on its part of of the floor), and creating a two storey atrium connecting the building lobby to the street with an escalator. Maybe it's an improvement, but it's certainly not Mies.
Is it an improvement over the previous and original design? Maybe. Dies it solve any issues of the previos design? Too soon to tell. Is it in the spirit of the original design? No; absolutely no.
Comments
Post a Comment