The sky’s the limit
Chicago may have shaped the modern skyscraper back in the 1890s, but with a new wave of 21st-century structures currently going up, the city is anything but done building Words | Sally Howard IT’S A TOUGH call designing new architecture for a city that’s essentially a living architectural museum,” says Richard Tomlinson. But when it’s the managing partner of the architecture firm charged [...]
Chicago may have shaped the modern skyscraper back in
the 1890s, but with a new wave of 21st-century structures
currently going up, the city is anything but done building
Words | Sally Howard
IT’S A TOUGH call designing new architecture
for a city that’s essentially a living architectural
museum,” says Richard Tomlinson. But when
it’s the managing partner of the architecture
firm charged with realising Donald Trump’s
strident vision of a “mega-tower for the future”
in Chicago who’s admitting that his work is
difficult, you know that he’ll rise to the challenge.
Presumably it was no easy task pleasing the
infamous property mogul either – after all, it
took Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM)
a remarkable 50 redesigns before Chicago’s
Trump International Hotel and Tower got under
way. In its final incarnation, following in the
long tradition of Chicago engineering firsts,
the project’s broad, reinforced, concrete frame
allows for uniquely unobstructed reaches of
curved glass (and spectacular views from its
hotel rooms and condos), with staggered heights designed
to sympathetically reference its neighbours, the Wrigley
Building, Jewelers’ Building and Tribune Tower.
And yet, groundbreaking as it may be, Trump’s is only one
of several extravagant and super-tall tower projects due to
be pitched high into the sky over Chicago in the next couple
of years. Also making its mark at the shores of Lake Michigan
is the Chicago Spire, the first Chicago project of iconoclastic,
Valencian architect Santiago Calatrava, due for completion
in 2009. The 150-storey condo and hotel tower is typical
of Calatrava’s designs. The Spire is revolutionary – both
geometric and organic, twisting upwards like a mammoth
white drill bit. Or, as the New York Times more poetically put
it: “a blade of grass or perhaps a tall twisting tree.”
Similarly startling to the eye, the Aqua Tower (completion
2009) bears closer resemblance to a quirky civic sculpture
than a condominium building. Located in the Loop,
Chicago’s financial centre, the 82-storey high-rise will be
covered by undulating balconies evoking rippling water
– dubbed “sensuous” architecture by the promotional
blurb. It will also be the tallest building in the world to be
designed by a woman, Chicago’s own Jeanne Gang.
Also under way in the Loop is the redevelopment of 108
North State Street, which will breathe new life into a block
that has been vacant since the late 1980s. It’s hoped that
the Mills Corporation’s angular retail-residential complex
will form the anchor for a buzzing new entertainment
district – a casino development is already planned nearby.
As with many of the city’s new buildings, Chicago’s
forward-thinking mayor, Richard M Daley, has been involved
in the more civic aspects of the 108 North State Street
plan. His contribution has been a transit hub with an express
airport train and a facility that will allow passengers to check
their luggage onto their flight before boarding the train.
In fact, many of the new projects under way in Chicago are
coloured by the vision of its highly respected mayor. “Daley
has issued a challenge to the city’s architects, engineers and
planners,” explains Tomlinson. “He wants to make Chicago
the most environmentally-friendly city in the world.”
The city’s showcase green development of the future is
the Skidmore, Owings and Merrill project. On an unloved
brownfield site, the 700-acre site numbers amongst its
innovations recycled paving materials (with a lifespan
several times that of concrete), wind power, geothermal
cooling and natural drainage to replace piped drainage
systems, with an overall aim of total sustainability.
The new Chicago architecture may be more modest
than the waves of architecture in the late 19th and early
20th centuries, but it’s undeniably in the same spirit.
“Chicago has always been known as a place where you
could innovate,” says Tomlinson. “Part of this is down to
history – the rebuilding of Chicago after the Great Fire
of 1871 provided work for a generation’s most talented
architects. But much is down to an absence of permission
requirements. Unlike in London, Manhattan, Boston or San
Francisco, for example, architects are given carte blanche
to realise their most groundbreaking ideas.”
The Great Chicago Fire, famously sparked by one Mrs
O’Leary’s oil lamp, razed much of old Chicago’s wooden
tenement buildings and barns. O’Leary was run out of town
– but perhaps she should have been thanked. For a largescale,
city rebuilding project, the timing could not have been
better. As the centre of a growing nation’s lumber, grain corn
and iron industries and the hub of its rail network, Chicago’s
economy was booming. The architects of what later became
known as the Chicago School – led by Daniel Burnham
– created a new vocabulary for this newly confident city.
Its talents converged with late 19th-century technical
developments – the invention of the elevator, steel-frame
construction (rather than cast iron, allowing for much
greater height) and, from the 1890s, the use of large areas
of plate glass. The skyscraper was born.
The Chicago School’s gleaming high-rises were tailed by
the Prairie School of Frank Lloyd Wright. Chiefly suburban
(Chicago’s Oak Park is a paean to the style), its extended
low buildings, shallow, sloping roofs, suppressed chimneys,
overhangs and unfinished materials would come to define
20th-century American domestic architectural trends.
Then, in the late 1930s, a movement arrived that was
to become globally symbolic of American commercial
architecture. The Bauhaus school was one of the most
important undercurrents in Modernism long before its
arrival in Chicago. The last of its architect-directors was
the influential Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who reluctantly
emigrated to Chicago in 1937, pushed out of Germany by
the twin forces of the Great Depression and an increasingly
powerful Nazi government. Mies Van der Rohe’s design
principles immediately struck a harmonious note with the
progressive American sub-culture.
height="178" alt="The Chicago Spire">
His gift to the city was the unmistakable ‘glass box’, or
‘skin and bones’ architecture: industrial steel and plate glass,
a minimal framework of structural order balanced against
an implied freedom of open space – austere yet elegant.
You’ll see strong examples of his work in the towering IBM
Plaza (now named for its address at 330 North Wabash), in
the Illinois Institute of Technology (where Mies van der Rohe
held a professorship) and in the muscular glass and steel
apartment buildings of Lake Shore Drive Apartments (1951).
In the 1960s and 1970s this simplicity of style continued
to dominate, seeking bigger and bolder expressions,
culminating in SOM’s Sears Tower (1970), a skyscraper
so huge – 1,450ft (442m) tall, 110 floors and a daytime
population of 16,000 – that it boasted its own postcode.
height="183" alt="Santiago Calatrava">
For Ralph Johnson, of Chicago architecture firm Perkins +
Will, the city’s rich architectural legacy informs the
confidence of its new wave of 21st-century design.
“There’s a keen awareness of architecture and arts’ history
amongst the general public in Chicago, and this sets the
bar very high.” Tomlinson agrees: “The volume of
construction here is not what you would find in Shanghai,
Dubai or Beijing right now, but what we’re designing is
innovative and assumes an important place on the world
architectural stage. Much of this is down to the openended
ambition of Chicago and Chicagoans.”
So next time you’re in the city, however distracting the
surface tumult of street life, with its sizzle of Chicago hotdogs
and breakneck chatter, stop for a moment and look up.
Chicago has, after all, always reached for the stars.
High Times
height="271" alt="The part-Gothic Tribune Tower">
Look for the brightest stars on Chicago’s skyline….
1890
Jewelers’ Building, 35 East Wacker Drive
The dramatic exterior of this Chicago gem
with stylised floral adornment is a good
extant example of Chicago’s post-fire
rebuild. It was also nigh terrifyingly hightech
in its era, when elevators spirited
jewellers’ cars up to the 22nd Floor.
1925
Tribune Tower,
435 North Michigan Avenue
Commissioned by way of
an international design
competition to befit
“the world’s best
newspaper”, the Tribune
Tower is two-parts classic
20th-century skyscraper,
to one-part 13thcentury
Gothic pomp.
1964
Marina City, 300 North State Street
Known locally as ‘Corn Cob Towers’, Marina
City did away with Chicago’s Neo-Classical
waterfront design traditions. The twin
towers are built to appear like stacked
conical shells: “Nature does not know a right
angle,” said architect Bertrand Goldberg.
1983
333 West Wacker Drive
This sweeping arc of shimmering
blue-green glass caught the local
imagination. Watch the setting sun
bathe it in a fiery display.
Chicago Architecture
Foundation runs a variety of
architecture tours, including
a riverboat cruise. Visit
www.architecture.org for
further details.
