Butchered Burnham Monday - Will New Owners at the Bankers and Edison Buildings Rescue Massively Botched Facade Repairs?

The short answer would be appear to be �No�, but there's always room for hope.

Two vintage office buildings sit kitty-corner to each other at Clark and Adams.  Both began as elegant, upper-end structures, but neither has been treated kindly by time.

The Edison Building

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On the northeast corner, right across from the Post Office of Mies van der Rohe's Federal Center, is Daniel Burnham's Edison Building.  Completed in 1907 in Burnham's best late classical pompous style, it's anchored along both Clark and Adams by arcades of three-story high Corinthian columns. 

Above the base, the facade becomes very, very busy.  (Think Peoples Gas.) No surface remains unornamented.  It's all a bit over the top, but the Edison still has a kind of grandeur that you don't see much anymore, offering a nice counterpoint both to Mies' austerity and to its more restrained Chicago School neighbor, Holabird and Roche's 1895 Marquette Building, right next door.

The Edison tops out with another three story arcade, this one with arches sitting atop rectangular columns.  Just beneath, there's a base of inset windows set between ornament that alternates between the company logo and the lion heads that D.H. Burnham became so found of.   Lions were an extremely popular motif on Chicago buildings, a clear symbol of power.

In our own time, of course, lions are less a symbol of power than a lesson on how we're killing the animals we prize to the point of extinction.  The Edison Building is not about to become extinct, but it's certainly been battered.  In 1977, former Chicago Public Schools head Paul Vallas announced with great fanfare how much money the CPS was going to save by abandoning their offices in one of the great  Central Manufacturing District warehouses on Pershing Road and purchasing the 20-story building from Commonwealth Edison to serve as their new headquarters.  The purchase price was $8.2 million, with another $20 million was budgeted for renovations.

Little of that renovation budget seems to have been spent on the building's facade,  If the contract didn't actually go to someone's connected brother-in-law, it certainly looks like it did.  The exterior renovations read as shockingly cheap, with damaged textured terra cotta replaced with bare slabs that make the facade look like a fool's motley.

Late last month, Crain's Chicago Business's Ryan Ori reported that the CPS has sold the Edison to Blue Star Properties, for far less than the CPS had wanted.  (CPS will now be renting space in the former Boston Store building at State and Madison recently vacated by Sears.)  Ori says that Blue Star claim to be investing more than $30 million making the interiors more contemporary loft office space, removing drop ceilings to restore the original 11-foot floor heights.  No word if the facade is in line for much-needed TLC.

The Bankers Building - 105 West Adams

As with new residential structures, many developers seem to have taken the tack that people don't really care what their building looks like on the outside, as along as they have good light, a view, and the kind of interior amenities they've come to expect. 

That same principle may be at play at the building across the street from the Edison, which we wrote about last year.  By the time the 476-foot-high Bankers Building - now known by its address, 105 West Adams - was constructed in 1927, Daniel Burnham was long gone, and the design was done by the firm of his sons, Burnham Brothers.  At 41 stories, it was one of Chicago's proudest skyscrapers. Emporis cites it as the tallest Chicago building clad entirely in brick.  In retrospect, that may not have been a great idea, as over time that brick suffered the same fate as the Edison's terra cotta, but at an even greater scale.  On the inside, 105 West Adams remain a highly viable building, said to be 85% leased.  On the outside, it's become a massive billboard of visual blight, a mosaic of filthy original brick and lighter slapdash repairs stippling the facade like cheap makeup applied with a trowel.

Last week, Ryan Ori in Crain's reported that 105 West Adams is being purchased by developer John Murphy, who is also transforming nearby 100 West Monroe into a Hyatt Hotel.  On Sunday, the Trib's Blair Kamin had an article (behind the Digital Plus wall, unfortunately) on how Murphy is also planning to make the long-vacant Art Deco Chicago Motor Club Building into a hotel.  Ori says that at 105 West, Murphy's upgrades will include a new fitness center, and other renovations targeted to mid-size tenants who have seen their rental options shrinking.

It's probably too much to ask to expect something to be done about the facade, but in its present state, the exterior of 105 West Adams is a depressing presence.  Set within the landmark architecture of the South Loop, it's a civic embarrassment of major proportions.

Read More:

Image courtesy the Chuckman Collection

The Bankers Building: Improv of Decrepitude

Inside the Art Deco Chicago Motor Club: Has it Finally Found a Future?

Celebrating Millennium Park's 10th Anniversary - with the bark off

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This Wednesday marks the 10th anniversary of Chicago's Millennium Park.  It's a cause for celebration, and I definitely want to join the party, with multiple posts as the week goes on.  But  while it's considered bad manners to raise touchy subjects on such occasions, I'm going to start by taking up a few of them, as the critics at the Chicago Tribune seem less interested in reasoned assessments than in breathless schoolgirl prose that makes it look like they've taken on a side job writing PR brochures.

In his piece, Millennium Park's impact on summer classical scene, Trib Music critic John Von Rhein  praises (rightly) the acoustics of the Pritzker Pavilion, but can't be bothered to mention the people who designed it.  (For the record, it was Oak Park's Rick Talaske).

Von Rhein also is spot-on in comparing the adventurousness of the Grant Park Music Festival at the Pritzker compared to the increasing marginalization of the CSO presence at Ravinia.  Then, inexplicably, he starts winging off on how �there no longer is a major price differential between a a ticket the CSO at Ravinia and a seat in the reserved section of Pritzker Pavilion�.  He argues that 25 bucks gets you a seat (not very good) in the pavilion at Ravinia, with lawn seats - most of which have a very poor view of the stage - at only $10.00, less than the $100.00 Grant Park charges for the best guaranteed seats for 5 concerts.  Really? 

Von Rhein is willfully blinding himself to the most basic fact of the Grant Park Music Festival.  It's free.  At Ravinia, there are zero free seats, none, zilch, nada. At the Pritzker, the bulk of the seats in the pavilion - and the entire lawn - are free.  It is a free music festival in which some seats are allocated to contributors.  Von Rhein's truly bizarre non-sequiter can only be explained as a sop to Ravinia, a major Trib advertiser.

More egregious is the puffery of Trib architecture critic Blair Kamin.  Despite a seasoning of "and so are they all honourable men" disclaimers, Kamin's piece reads less like as an architectural analysis than a real estate report.  While writers most often don't compose their own headlines, the one attached to Kamin's piece pretty much sums up its perspective: Millennium Park: 10 years old and an economic boom  - Chicago's dazzling urban space also proves a good investment.

Kamin dismisses the massive overruns that took the parks cost to nearly half a billion dollars, comparing the original budget to a Ford Fiesta and the final to a Ferrari.  In fact, the additional costs of the park, many of them traceable to rework of hasty construction rushed along by then Mayor Richard M. Daley's underlings to make the original turn-of-the-century opening date, were a canary-in-the-mine-shaft warning that no one cared to heed, of Daley's burgeoning fiscal mismanagement, which would flower unimpeded in the parking meter fiasco, his corrupt TIF system skimming billions from the city's general tax revenues, the financial sinkhole of destroying the Michael Reese campus in an inept quest for the 2016 Olympics, and the use of gimmicks such as interest-rate swaps that are now threatening to backfire to the tune of $200 million.  The story of Millennium Park shows what made them all possible, but, hey, Millennium Park is great, so we get to stay stupid.  Who wants to look behind the curtain, right?

Kamin quotes one of those risible academic studies (or TIF reports) that starts with a conclusion and then back pedals to assemble data in support, inferring that without Millennium Park, $2.4 billion of development would never have happened, and Chicago itself would have sunk to the bottom of Lake Michigan.  But why stop there?  Shouldn't we also credit Millennium Park for all those new residential towers in River North, Streeterville, and the booming Fulton Market district?

Kamin writes how Millennium Park was �praised as a departure from the 19th century model of parks as nature-inspired refuges from the industrial city's polluted air and packaged streets,� as if that concept were some kind of antiquated relic rather than continuing to be an essential resource for any dense city.

The downside of Millennium Park is the idea that every successful urban park now has to be some sort of manufactured fun factory, which, itself, is a distortion of MP's high level of artistic achievement and sense of balance (see: Lurie Gardens).  Its most immediate influence in Chicago was the way it encouraged Richard M. Daley to follow up MP by trying to ram a new museum into the protected �Open, Clear and Free� park just west of Millennium Park.  If he had not been thwarted, we would be seeing a lot more construction cranes above Grant Park right now, and that wouldn't be a good thing.

Millennium Park sucks in the bodies - nearing 5 million a year - and spins off money, which makes it a media darling, but equally important, I would argue, is the kind of community resource that's to be found in recent neighborhood parks such as Palmisano in Bridgeport or Bartelme on the West side, or the new Maggie Daley Park currently under construction on the site where Daley wanted his museum. Millennium Park had minimal influence on these new parks, and they're all the better for it.

As I wrote just after it opened, the triumph of Millennium Park is founded in �shear consumerist delight�.  Both Anish Kapoor and Jaume Plensa's contributions arose out of strong aesthetic conceptions, and while the strength of their ideas may well filter down subconsciously to visitors, the fundamental payback is how the public has taken to the Crown Fountain as an urban water park, and to Cloud Gate as a funhouse mirror prophetically custom-made for selfies. 

The triumph of Millennium Park is being plotted on an economic scorecard.  That's only fitting in this, our Age of the Supply Chain, where a value that cannot be monetized or reduced to a mathematical construct has no valid existence.  It's the lie that distorts and hollows out our humanity.  I'm as much a sucker for numbers as the next guy, but I think that what's most interesting about Millennium Park is to be found beyond that lazy and accustomed scorecard, in the realm of sensual experience and emotion, and it's what I hope to address - however imperfectly - in subsequent posts. 

OD'ed on Outrage: The Donald's Sign is Very Bad. The Circus of Distraction is Worse.

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Call it the Facebook syndrome.  The noxious flower, originally cultivated on television by Fox News, has exploded, through social media, into a blanketing culture of perpetual outrage.  No topic is too fallacious or inconsequential to inspire a tsunami of angry screeds - Obama's birth certificate, vocal fry in young women, lap dancing squirrels . . .

And what is Chicago really, really mad about right now?  A set of five 20-foot-high letters that Donald Trump is affixing to the riverward side of his elegant 1,170-foot-high telescoping tower, designed by Adrian Smith when he was at SOM.

 And it's true, the sign scars a handsome building.  You normally don't want to bring attention to the continuous strip of metal louvers of a service floor interrupting a sleek glass curtain wall facade but that's exactly what the 141-foot-strip of letters does, drawing your eye to a visual interruption that would otherwise be subsumed into the larger mass of the building.  We still have to see how the sign will be affected by the LED back-lighting that's part of the design.  It might soften the blow.  It might make it worse.

Update:  Get out your sunglasses.  I'm going for worse . . .

What's evident even now, however, is that the actual letters look astoundingly cheap, like those you'd find in a child's magnetic letter set, bleached of color.

Controversy over the sign has been building ever since it was announced this past February,  but once the actual letters appeared in a couple stacks on the lower level of the Trump Tower riverwalk early in May, the topic has built to a viral meme of increasingly hyperventilating outrage.  Everybody has to get their two cents in.   Chicago Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin has taken on a Bob Green-like obsession with the topic, writing column after column and making himself the star in an epic battle with the irascible  developer, who has taken the bait by referring to Kamin as a third-rate architecture critic who he thought had been fired.   The Sun-Times's Neil Steinberg felt compelled to enter the fray with his own lengthy screed, calling the sign �noxious� and comparing Trump to Oxymandias.  You get the idea. 


Although it took several weeks after the sign going up for him to finally notice it, Chicago Mayor Emanuel has �smelled the meat a'cookin� and moved himself to the front of the anti-Trump line, pre-empting the battle into a �faceoff" between billionaire and scrappy mayor that has taken the media carnival national.   It's send-in-the-clowns time, with idiots of all stripe appropriating the Trump sign as a piece of evidence certifying whatever's their personal scandal-du-jour, with a special Looney Tunes award to right wing pundit Jeffrey Lord, who blithely proclaims �This is about zapping Donald Trump the Obama opponent who dares to intrude on the private political preserve that is the President�s hometown.  There�s nothing more to this little if telling episode than that. �

Trump has responded in kind claiming what he's doing is no different than the beloved Hollywood sign, only better.  He compared his sign to the one on the old Chicago Sun-Times building, which Trump Tower replaced, referring it to �the ugliest sign Chicago has ever seen�, echoing a tweet 42nd ward alderman Brendan Reilly issued to defend his own non-action on the sign . . .

They're both banking on everyone's lack of memory.  In fact, the Chicago Sun-Times sign was actually a not-inelegant relief from what was essentially a metal-faced services bunker at the top of a unfairly-maligned structure that was a showcase building of its day . . .

photo courtesy The Chuckman Collection

The unending commentary on Trump's sign has become like one of those amusement park attractions where you poke your head into a hole in a wooden flat imprinted with the images of various celebrities so you can have a picture taken of yourself inserted into the scene.  As important as they may be to those in the frame, there's only so many of those pictures you can see before wanting to shoot yourself.

And what does it all accomplish?  To send Donald Trump into a seventh heaven.  Once again he gets his inane observations and sour visage plastered across media stories throughout the world.  He's the
the idiot-King whose empire is kept flourishing by a capable staff who have mastered how to work around their boss and and extract the random good ideas from the daily mound of egomaniacal manure.

Trump is little different from the street performers you see on Michigan avenue, soliciting spare change from  passersby by dancing, pounding on plastic bucket drums, or painting themselves gray and posing as statues. He just does it on a far larger stage, a trash-talking, cuckoo's nest-crowned living billboard, running on hyperdrive 24/7,  a king-of-all-media busker trolling for attention.  Attacking Donald Trump is like whipping a masochist - the intended victim winds up enjoying it far more than you ever could.

While social media is an infinitely expandable resource, newspaper space and television time are not, and it is a sign of our bread-and-circuses time how so many outrages and problems of much greater import than Trump's stupid sign are thrust into invisibility by our self-gratifying orgy of disapproval.  If you ever wanted a demonstration of how the culture distraction works, this is it.

You want outrage?  Start with this, right beneath that sign.  When Trump Tower opened, it gave the city a superb new riverwalk, featured truly outstanding and unique landscaping by Hoerr Schaudt featuring plants native to our area.  Little more than a year later, Trump ripped it all out for a cheap generic replacement featured large swatches of rocks.

Want more?  Go down two levels and look at all the Trump Riverwalk's storefronts.  None of them have ever had a tenant, nor, does it appear, are they likely to anytime in the future.  In 2012, Trump told Alby Gallun of Crain's Chicago Business that he basically intended to keep everything empty until the kind of upscale retailers who could meet his rent fell into his lap. �I'm in no rush,� he proclaimed, and now, two years later, nothing has changed.  While the Wrigley Building plaza has undergone a stunning restoration that has made it a magnet for new retail, Trump's stores remain empty.  Trump seems willfully blind that his Riverwalk's primary users are not the Portofino crowd he imagines, but normal people like you and me boarding a water taxi or tour boat.  God forbid we have a place where we could sip a cappuccino on the terrace or get a (gasp!) ice cream.

Rahm and Forrest Claypool are pleased as punch that we're exhausting ourselves in a frenzy of disapproval over Trump's sign, so we won't notice how they're about to decimate the Lakeview neighborhood around the Belmont �L� stop with a wide-swatch demolition of buildings for an ill-conceived roller-coast overpass.  Could we slice off just a bit of the Trump outrage for this?

This week's Chicago Reader has a great report by Maya Dukmasova on how the CHA is pushing redevelopment of the landmark-quality Lathrop Homes to push out the poor and make the area safe for affluent developers.  I wrote about it two years ago, and nothing has changed.  If not actual outage, could we at least peel off a modicum of interest amidst our all-consuming obsession with really big letters?

Then there's the way that Rahm, facing potentially bankrupting pension costs, is assiduously emptying out Chicago's TIF accounts for things like sports stadiums, city-owned hotels, and still another $60 million selective-enrollment high school to make sure not a penny is left to help us out on the city's financial crisis.   A little outrage might be in order here, but you can be sure Rahm is more than happy if we prefer, instead, to be watching him and the Donald slug it out.

Or how about the fact that Chicago is on the cusp of a new residential tower construction boom that's awash in architectural mediocrity, with not a single one of the buildings looking to add anything to Chicago's global reputation.  Couldn't we get mad about that?  Just a little?

I'd write more, but I have to stop to check out Facebook and Twitter for the latest on the Trump brouhaha.  I suppose I should be outraged, but mostly it just leaves me a little sad.

Of $300 million pork barrel Roller Coasters and the Sweet Scent of Chocolate in the Chicago Air - why newspapers still matter

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The prognosis for newspapers, especially in Chicago, is deeply problematic.  The Sun-Times continues to throw parts of itself - including a lot of talented people - overboard, just to scrap together enough cash to get through another day, while over at the Tribune, the company is stripping its namesake newspaper of assets and loading it up with debt just before pushing it out as an independent company, a stripped vessel pitched on treacherous seas.

apologies, as always, to Stanley Tigerman.  Related story here.

What makes it more painful is when you see what newspapers, even ones in diminished states, offer what no web-based news aggregator can or ever will.   For the moment at least, both papers still have crack investigative teams that uncover scandals and outrages and campaign - often successfully - for reforms.  For example, this Sunday's edition of the Sun-Times, which wouldn't let the Koschmann case be buried, tells us how corrupt former Cook County President Tod Stroger has again found his way onto the public payroll, while  on the art's beat there's also a great profile on the restoration of historic Thalia Hall and a Hedy Weiss' QandA with Mary Zimmerman.

Thalia Hall

Over at the Trib, there's another Zimmerman interview from Jennifer Weigel, plus David Kidwell's The man who knew everybody, a great profile of John Bills, the machine fixer charged with rigging the bidding for Chicago's Red Camera contract, plus an overview of the life and work of improv master Mick Napier.

We hope to be writing later this week on Rahm Emanuel's plan to slum up Lakeview with a tornado-like path of destruction for a third-of-a-billion dollar roller-coaster Brown Line overpass just north of Belmont, but in today's Trib, Blair Kamin has beaten me to the punch with a detailed analysis on why this is such a bad idea.

Last but not least, I've written about the wonderful Blommer Chocolate plant before, but today Phil Rosenthal has a great piece Inside Blommer Chocolate, giving us a look at the previously off-limits factory, and detailing the history of a 75-year-old Chicago institution that fended off a hardball campaign by mega-conglomerate Cargill to acquire it, remaining a family-run business that handles 45% of all cocoa beans processed in the United States.  An entire new residential neighborhood has grown up around the handsome, light-colored brick plant at 600 West Kinzie, including a new park just across the street.  Blommer remains an unique part of the character of Chicago, wafting the faint aroma of chocolate throughout River North whenever a new batch is being made.

The aroma used to be a lot stronger, and drift a lot wider, before the EPA teamed up with NIMBY's to have it classified as a health hazard, as I wrote about in A Bureaucrat Triumphs and a Little Bit of Chicago Dies.

I also wrote about the new park, which, I argued six years ago, should be officially renamed the Chocolate Park.

Stacked Box Gateway: Pelli Clarke Pelli's new DePaul University Theatre School

 

DePaul University is celebrating the opening of its new Theatre School building by architects Pelli Clarke Pelli. Blair Kamin offers a full-up review in today's Chicago Tribune.

[Inexplicably, although the print version of Blair's review includes three black-and-white photographs, the web version has only a single shot of the black box theater interior.  Apparently, the Trib still hasn't figured out the basic concept that photos draw readers to a website, and once you've gone through the cost of shooting them, posting them is essentially free.  The web version of Kamin's review also carries a different address for the building than the one on the school's own website.]
Update: a gallery of striking photographs from Tribune staff photographer Antonio Perez was added  this afternoon

central staircase

In any event, we thought we'd supplement Kamin's thorough review with some shots we took yesterday.  You can find a lot more interior shots and renderings on the Pelli Clarke Peilli website, and see Jeff Goldberg's shots on the DePaul website here. Through November 24th, the DePaul Art Museum, on Fullerton at the L, has an exhibition, Designing for Performance: Cesar Pelli at DePaul University.

At the corner of Fullerton and Racine, the new $73 million, 165,000-square-foot structure provides a new visual gateway to the campus.  Along with steel exoskeleton of Antunovich Architects' 2006 Loft-Right dorms, now known as 1237 West, the articulated massing and the facades of white Turkish  Limra limestone marks a major break with the university's traditional affection for vaguely Prairie School brick buildings.  Cannon Design, Schuler Shook and Kirkegaard Associates contributed to the design.  Full list of credits here.

 

 

 

 

The Theatre School building finds a visual strong counterpoint in two industrial loft buildings across the street.  One is now the Lincoln Park Library; the other is a U-Haul facility.

The Theatre School's name tastefully inscribed in the limestone of the pristine blank white wall of the black box theater finds its traditional down-and-dirty Chicago doppelganger in the reflection of the painted U-Haul painted signage of the water tower reflected in the DePaul theatre's front glazed facade.