Foul Ball Hotel: the In-Your-Face Mediocrity of the Wrigleyville Sheraton

image: Chicago Cubs 

Tom Ricketts officially revealed renderings for the Wrigley Field and environs rehab at a City Club breakfast Wednesday morning.  Inside Wrigley, the most prominent change is the addition of a 6,000 square foot Jumbotron screen.  The terra cotta along Wrigley Field's roofline is also scheduled to be restored, and there's a large number of adjustments designed to improve basic functionality.

At least for the moment, I'm leaving the critique of changes to the actual stadium to the Trib's Cheryl Kent.  (Although if she thinks the Landmarks Commission will do anything other than roll over for whatever plan Mayor Rahm Emanuel signs on to, I've got a big shiny bean to sell her.) 

I do want to say a couple words about the 175-room Sheraton hotel the Ricketts want to build across the street from the stadium, where a McDonalds currently stands . . .

It sucks.

image: Chicago Cubs - hotel to left

I think that's pretty clear even from the rudimentary renderings released so far.  The office structure to be built to the north isn't much better, but at least it has a couple of doo-dads - a rounded ramp building and a tall clock tower - stuck on to provide at least a pretension of personality.

image: Chicago Cubs - click for larger image (recommended)

The hotel can't even be bothered with such minimal gestures.  It looks like a parking garage with balconies.  The design makes SCB's design for a mega-development south on Clark look like Pritzker-Prize winning work.  At Wednesday's presentation, the spin was how the hotel is in �harmony� with Wrigley across the street.  And if you're looking to memorialize the cheapness of P.K. Wrigley, I guess you've got a point. (A January Tribune article cited Rebel Roberts and VOA as project architects.)

What was originally Wrigley's charm - an old school stadium smack dab inside a working class neighborhood - is evolving, perhaps inevitably, into a supply-chain designed sports complex.  Oozing like The Blob, it absorbs more and more of the surrounding community.  An untidy, diverse but sub-potential economy of multiple businesses finds itself squeezed out by a centrally controlled, precisely engineered profit engine, constructed out of a Disneyfied historicism reeking nostalgia for a time that never existed.

This is the way the world works, and it would be naive to believe Wrigleyville could somehow be exempt.  With 35,000 square feet of new, state-of-the-art advertising, the area west of the stadium will become a little bit of Ginza on Clark.  All the more reason, then, to embrace the reality and reject mediocrity masquerading as contextualism. The current design for the hotel is �like� Wrigley Field in only the laziest, most cynical sense.  This is one of the most visible corners in Chicago.  Can we please get a building that frankly addresses the needs of its program with a honesty that honors rather than mocks Chicago as a place where relevant architecture can still be made?

Read:
Ragged Liberty or Polished Upscaling?  Wrigleyville's Mutant Urbanism.