Along Chicago's New Skyscraper Row: One Rises, One Descends, and One Just Spreads it Around

click images for larger view

Saturday seemed a good day to check out the progress and three large construction projects that have made the bend of the Chicago River big development central.

See the complete photo-essay, after the break . . .

Wolf Point West

At the former service parking lot at Wolf Point, construction crews were hard a work (does everyone get time-and-a-half for Saturdays?). Cranes were in place, and rising from the ground was the concrete service core for Wolf Point West, the river-hugging, 493-foot high, 510 unit residential tower from bKL Architecture that's the first three projected skyscrapers for the site

The concrete structure that's the support a long driveway and entrance to what will eventually be a large below-grade garage looks already to be in place.

Wolf Point West will also include a tight stub of parkland to the east and west, while the far larger park that supposed to separate the three towers will continue to be the truncated remnant of the original surface parking lot until funding is in place for the other two towers.

River Point

On the opposite bank of the river, a bit to the south, the concrete structure that covers the Metra tracks and will provide the surface for the new 1.5 acre park that's being financing by $29 million in Chicago TIF funds.  Nonetheless, that park is not scheduled for another two years, upon the completion of the 52-story River Point office Tower at 444 West Lake Street, designed by Pickard Chilton and scheduled to open early in 2017

Right now, not only is there little visible above ground, but they're digging a deeper hole.  The week's torrential rains had left the site a soggy mess, but that didn't an industrious shovel operator from continuing to excavate soil.

150 North Riverside

Perhaps the most interesting goings-on were at the site for 150 North Riverside, a 1.2 million square-foot, 53 story, Goettsch Partners designed tower that's been competing for tenants with River Point, moving towards a scheduled 4th-quarter 2016 completion.  Last week, Crain's Chicago Business was reporting that developer John O'Donnell has just nailed down almost $300 million to complete financing for the half-billion dollar building, which he claims is already 28% leased.

Like River Point, 150 North is also to be set within a 1.5 acre park, also covering the Metra tracks, but the key difference is this time the city didn't get stuck with the bill - the developer is picking up the costs.  

photograph: Bob Johnson

A new river edge has been put into place to protect the site during construction, and while there's barges (I suspect that at the time of its commercial zenith many decades  ago, the entire Chicago River was of this kind of green sludgy consistency). . .

. . .  but the main activity on Saturday was a power shovel slowly spreading a carpet of rubble across the entire surface of the site.

 

So that's it for now.  It's like what Groucho said in Animal Crackers . . .

We took some pictures of the native girls, but they weren't developed.  But we're going back again in a couple of weeks

Read More:

Hour of the Wolf: The Transformation of the Pivot Point of Chicago

The Park at River Point Makes Train Tracks Disappear

 Giant Punch Stamp on the River? First Renderings for 150 North Riverside

 The Art of the Pitch: Selling 150 North Riverside to the Neighbors

Pretty Ribbons

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Like a Model T Ford, you can generally have architecture in any color you want, as long as it's gray or black (or white, if you're Richard Meier).  A large part of this, of course, is due to the material's natural hue, or to the fact that black paint is often on sale since no one wants to buy it for interiors.  A larger factor, however, is the basic fact that monochrome has a way of seeming to go with anything, and never being in danger of going out of style, which is more than can be said for Victorian polychrome or post-modernist salmon.

The early skyscrapers that rose up, early this century, at the massive Lakeshore East development on the site of the old IC railyards, followed this safe pattern, classic glass boxes, bland as paste.  2007's 340 on the Park, by SCB's Martin Wolf, broke through with a bit of sculpting, and Jeanne Gang's Aqua blew up the place with its undulating balconies, but both building's fed their distinction through form rather than color.

Now the LSE towers are being upstaged by a rambunctious stump, the new ten-story home to the GEMS World Academy Chicago, part of a rapidly expanding international chain of private schools founded in Dubai in 1959.  Designed by bKL architecture, the 82,000 square-foot structure due to open this September, a year later than originally projected, is known as the Lower School, either because its shorter than the second stage building to be constructed on East Wacker, or because it will serve students from Kindergarten through 4th grade.

The exterior is a combination of translucent and clear vision glass set flush within metal panel spandrels and mullions.  What sets it all apart is a crazy-quilt intrusion of colorful mullions in red, yellow, turquoise and robin's egg blue.

The north elevation of the building is basically a continuous flat surface.  Here, yellow is banished from the palette, and the colored stripes seem a bit passive and inert. Meh.

The southern facade, extending below the street down to the lower-level park,  is much taller, but the way the facade is broken up above the fourth floor and along the open air play area on the roof makes it read as a very horizontal building, pulled skyward by those vertical bands of color.  The counterpoint holds the vertical and horizontal in a satisfying visual tension.

Is it too much?  Not for me.  Will it date badly?  I'd put it at a 50-50 shot.  For now, Gems Chicago has the slightly exhausting charm of a hyper-kinetic toddler, running at the knees of the far taller,  boringly behaved adults all around it, laughing with delight in refusing to be ignored.

Color contemplates color at Lake Shore East.

Read More:

Where Chicago Public Schools deign not tread: GEMS descend on Lakeshore East

Sending Pegasus Aflight : Preliminary bKL design revealed for Buck Tower at 200 North Michigan

rendering: bKL Architecture

Chris Bentley of The Architects Newspaper today gave us the first look at a preliminary design by bKL Architecture for the 45-story residential tower John Buck is looking to construct at 200 North Michigan.  There's no full-up view of the building, but the street level rendering published by Bentley has a definite 1950's, almost Lapidusian vibe, the tower set back on at least three sides from a diaphanous, greenish-blue, shifting toward turquoise base.

The site is currently occupied by the six-story Tobey Building, by Holabird and Root, dating from 1927.  Although faded, it was originally a fairly elegant design, as you can see from this photo from 1964, when both this stretch of Michigan and Zenith televisions were prestige brands.

image courtesy The Chuckman Collection

Along the top of the building is a sequence of engaging relief panels . . .

including the aforementioned winged horse . . .

According to a July report by Micah Maidenberg in Crain's Chicago Business, the building was acquired for $20 million in 2006 by an affiliate of Becker Ventures LLC (no relation, alas), which is Buck's partner on this project.  No word on a groundbreaking date.  The development needs to win the approval of local Alderman Brendan Reilly, who Bentley reports has set his first community meeting to consider the development for September 12.

Erasing the Dead: for bKL, Brininstool and Lynch never existed

Wolf Point, West Tower - click images for larger view

 OK, let me be honest.  This blog, as you may have noticed, may not always be the most impeccably researched document on the web, or the most hard-hitting journalism.

Still, I was a bit taken aback by the Chicago Architecture Blog's The Backstory on bKL.  The first thing I noticed was that it was squishy-soft on Wolf Point, the billion-dollar project that in which bKL is a major design partner, parroting the official line it's all wonderful and that anyone who dares raise questions must be an obtuse NIMBY.  As indicated in our own history, Hour of the Wolf: The Transformation of the Pivot Point of Chicago, it's a bit more complicated than that.

More interesting was this exchange on the origins of bKL Architecture:

Editor: What does �B.K.L.� stand for?
Thomas Kerwin, Principal: The �B� stands for �build.� I�m the �K,� and Jim Loewenberg [co-CEO of Magellan Development], who set us up in business is the �L.�
Editor: So the �B� is lower-case because it�s not a person.
Kerwin: Right. The �B� means �build� because we both built a lot of work all over the world. BKL is a new entity, but we felt it important to emphasize the fact that we�ve built many many projects. So, we�re a new firm, but we have a lot of experience.
Editor: How long has bKL been around?
Kerwin: We started in January of 2010.

I can excuse Kerwin the spin, but if he's claiming to go back to 2010, then a little reality might be in order, and it has nothing to do with the charming fairy story Kerwin was peddling.  Just ask Google, which provides the following search result pointing to bKL's current website:

Here's the actual announcement, from the February 2010 issue of Architect Magazine,

David Brininstool and Brad Lynch, partners for 20 years in Brininstool+Lynch, announced on Jan. 26 that they had closed their firm and teamed with Tom Kerwin, previously a managing partner at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill's Chicago office, to form Brininstool, Kerwin and Lynch (BKL).

Somewhere between 2010 and now, the �B� and the �L� of BKL vanished, and we now have the current firm, with the same letters jiggered to create a different backstory.  Maybe they just didn't want to have to buy new stationary.  Brininstool and Lynch are back to having to their own website. There's no trace of any break in continuity there either. What actually happened?  Now there's a story I'd pay good money to read.

There's a lot a talk in the interview about the firm's pack of talented young architects, but the only people we hear from and the only photo portrait is of the usual gang of old geezers (in this case, Kerwin, Carl Moskus and Michael Karlovitz) actually running things.  [Full disclosure:  I myself am 97.]

End of grousing.  (And who can't love a man who has Marina City as his favorite Chicago building?)
Read: The Backstory on bKL - The Young Chicago Firm Leading the Pack on Wolf Point.