Is This the End of a great Chicago Industrial Monument?

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Alby Gallun of Crain's Chicago Business was reporting yesterday that the State of Illinois is going to give it another try.  Seven years ago, $17 million was the minimum opening bid at an auction to sell off the south side site that holds the spectacular grain elevator and silos constructed by the Santa Fe Railroad in 1906 and owned by the State of Illinois since 1928. At that price, there were no takers.

Now the state's Department of Central Management Services has contracted again with Rick Levin an Associates to hold a new auction that will be on-line from November 2nd to 7th.  This time, the minimum bid is down to $3.8 million.   And I wouldn't even consider that solid.  I can imagine some developer pulling a Bill Davies - grab the property for the required bid, and then simply refuse to cut a check for anything more than 60% of the winning bid.

Transformers film shoot

The Santa Fe Grain Elevator, inactive since a 1977 explosion, has continued to deteriorate.  In 2013, it was used by director Michael Bay for various pyrotechnics for Transformers: Age of Extinction.  Then, it only appeared to be blown up, but we're edging closer to the time when a new owner may well implode the buildings for real, to clear the site for new development.

Which, of course, is a shame.  The elevator and silos are a south side landmark, a defining urban marker just west of the point where the south branch of the Chicago river becomes the Sanitary and Ship Canal, visible in skyline visible from miles away. It's one of the last - and most imposing - architectural artifacts of the grain trade that built Chicago into a great city.  The city takes great pride in its historic commercial architecture.  It's equally path-breaking industrial architecture? Not so much.

As you can see in my post from 2013 on the future and potential of the Santa Fe elevator, other cities have recognized the importance of historic structures like these, and found ways to preserve and repurpose them.  Illinois - and Chicago - simply want to sell them for scrap and make them disappear.   Standing along the Canalport Riverwalk contemplating the immensity of the Santa Fe Grain Elevator, you think how it looks like it was built to last forever, but it's shockingly vulnerable, a detonator button away from instant oblivion.

Read the full story here:

The Power of Uselessness: The History - and Potential - of Chicago's massive Santa Fe Grain Elevator

Architecture as Tinder: Michael Bay's Transformers4 blows the Santa Fe Grain Elevator

Passengers as Butterflies: Ross Barney spins Clear Cocoon on Cermak

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According to the history on the indispensable Chicago-L.org website, there was a station at Cermak for more than three-quarters of a century.  It was one of ten stations along 1892's South Side Rapid Transit, Chicago's first �L� line.  Cermak was never much more than a utilitarian design.  It reached its peak carrying passengers to the Century of Progress Worlds Fair in 1933 and 1934.  As the neighborhood declines in the 1960's, so did boardings at Cermak.  In 1976, hours of operation were curtailed to, ultimately, being open for little more than rush hours.  In 1977, the station closed for good, and was demolished the following year.

Right now on the Green Line, there's a massive three-mile "no-man's land" gap between the Roosevelt stop, and the next one at 35th.  But things change.  Shortly after the turn-of-the century, Bertrand Goldberg's iconic Hilliard Homes underwent a major rehab.  The former gauntlet of auto parts stores constricted.  For the moment, Blue Star Auto endures as a memorial.  New housing and schools became to pop up, with the coffee shops, hair salons and other signs of gentrification close behind.

As early as 2002, the CTA began planning to resurrect a station at Cermak.  In 2011, incoming Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced plans for a new Cermak-McCormick Place Green Line Station station to serve both a reviving community and two of the sugar plums he has dancing in his head: a Motor Row entertainment district, and the new DePaul basketball arena.

rendering: Ross Barney architects

At a estimated cost of $50 million, which the usual TIF slush fund picking up the tab, the station is   designed by Ross Barney Architects, whose new Green Line station at Morgan Street, became at once a perfectly timed amenity and the visual marker for the booming Fulton Market District. Now, Ross Barney stands to be making the same kind of landmark on Cermak.

Koolhaas tube, IIT

The immediate precedent to the Cermak station is Rem Koolhaas's steel tube, created to isolate train noise from his new IIT McCormick Tribune Campus  Center, but there the station is south of the tube.  At Cermak, the station is the tube.

rendering: Ross Barney architects

 According to Ross Barney architects . . .

rendering: Ross Barney Architects

The station is to be built quickly, with a modest budget, without suspension of service, and of durable, low-maintenance materials. This portion of the Green Line runs within city blocks on a narrow right-of-way. Tracks could also not be moved and, as a result, narrow platforms would have to serve trains in an area with an anticipated growth in population and transit use. In addition, the client, the City of Chicago Department of Transportation, wanted a �gateway� treatment for this station that is anticipated to serve a high number of first-time visitors to Chicago.

rendering: Ross Barney Architects

A resolution of the tension in the demands of the project -- Low-cost, speedy construction, no track relocation, narrow right-of-way, and a memorable gateway � was the development of a tube over Cermak Road. Cermak Road is where the right-of-way is widest and also the spot that is most visible to the public. Locating the primary berthing for trains over Cermak Road allows for views to Chinatown, McCormick Place, and Chicago�s Loop. The perforated stainless steel and polycarbonate tube performs multiple duties: Wind and rain protection and their supports are kept off of the platform, creating more comfortably usable space for customers; materials are moved out of easy reach of vandals; and the station is easy to identify from a distance.

Glass, polycarbonate, and perforated stainless steel are used to maximize visibility, views, and natural light in the station houses and on the platform. Where used alone, the percentage �open area�, the amount of material that has been removed, in the stainless steel panels is never more than 23%. With this amount of open area, stainless steel can both provide views to and from the platform and reduce the discomfort of usual winter winds.

Ground was broken in August of 2013 for what will the 146th CTA station,  will entrances both on either side of Cermak, and at 23rd street. 

By June of this year, construction was moving along nicely . . .

  . . . with a whole lot of concrete being poured.

 Last weekend, things were coming clearly into shape.  This is what the main station house looked on Saturday . .  .

. . . and here's how it looks, completed, in this Magritte inspired rendering in which the entrance leads nowhere - no platforms, stairs or escalators are included in the depiction.  

Rest assured they'll be in the finished product, and the elevator tower is now clearly in evidence.

  The beauty of the structure is already emerging, both in its light and elegant structure . . .

. . . and the way the sunlight glistens through the translucent glass sheathing . . .

 Construction has required ten hour suspensions of Green Line service on a succession of weekends, with the last slated for 1:40 to 11:40 a.m. on both Saturday October 25th and Sunday the 26th.

It must be quite a show to see those great arched steel sections being lifted into place.

The stated completion time for the project is the end of the year.

rendering: Ross Barney Architects

Read More:

Instant Landmark: TranSystems and Ross Barney's Morgan Street Station

Marathon! Runners on the Bridge and Through the Towers

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A field of 45,000 runners begins the 2014 Chicago Marathon wending their wave through the architecture of River North and the Loop.

Not Going Straight: Juan Angel Chavez's Points to Blossom in Pioneer Court

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Much is made in contemporary architecture about liberating itself from the constraints of linear form, but the new sculpture in Pioneer Court by Juan Angel Chavez takes randomness to a new level.

Points to Blossom officially goes on display on Monday and is scheduled to remain, providing its durability remain unchallenged, through November 3rd.  (If Chavez's sculpture is not really improvised, the same can't be said for those paper signs hastily taped on with �CAUTION DO NOT CLIMB� underscored in yellow highlighter.)

Chavez is artist in residence for this year's edition of Chicago Ideas Week, which takes place October 13-19 at various locations.


Chavez is known for constructing his works out of found materials - in this case, recycled plywood, angled, bent and threaded together.  Points to Blossom resembles a ball of rubber bands, if it wasn't really a ball, and if the bands were somehow widely dispersed around a large irregular space.  While a building by Frank Gehry or Zaha Hadid may break the bounds of traditional right-angled design, Chavez's loosely woven structure seems all irregularity, a sequence of components that seems just a moment away from totally unraveling and flying off into space.  Its a structural improv that almost defies you to resolve its many parts into a visually comprehensible whole.

Chavez encourages his audience to interact with his sculptures and, Sunday morning, kids were already bounding past any intellectual questions the work may pose, and simply enjoying the experience of Chavez's loopy construction.

The Morning After of the (Not-Entirely)Great Chicago Fire Festival

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If only 1871 had been so anti-climatic . .  .

The morning after Saturday night's Great Chicago Fire Festival, the three structures representing the city that been floated into the middle of the Chicago River to burn up in dramatic fashion as the event's spectacular grand finale, remained dispiritedly intact, the letters of the messages that were to be revealed still largely secreted inside (Surprisingly, they did not spell out �Brought to you by Rahm�.)

Sunday, a flotilla of techs boarded all three barges for the postmortem . . .

With electricians contemplating the wiring that had failed to set the river ablaze . . .

Tens of thousands of spectators had crammed the sidewalks and bridges to catch a glimpse of the $2 million spectacle, mounted by Chicago's storied Redmoon Theater Company.

Earlier, to be sure, there had been music and food, fiery cauldrons, flaming buoys, and a floating locomotive that breathed fire, and after the bonfire fizzled, the crowd came alive for a final fireworks show. Read Chris Jone's review here.

And the interminable waits for not much of anything to happen gave the spectators time to take in the architecture of Chicago's spectacular riverfront, which was still there in its full glory and without a single singe the following morning.

Another Park of the Forest - Gordon Gill to wreck derelict garage for major redesign of Steppenwolf Theatre complex on Halsted

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all renderings courtesy Steppenwolf Theatre

Farewell, abject parking garage on Halsted just north of the Brown Line tracks that we've come over time to love wearily accept.  Farewell, memories - and remnants - of its original unfinished derelict look, leftover columns, spalling concrete, bits of rotting plywood, and graffiti art.

In place of that garage, there will soon be the forested surface parking lot of a new Steppenwolf Theatre Company "campus", which was part of a series of major announcements on the storied Chicago stage's future. Key among these is Anna D. Shapiro taking over from Martha Lavey as the company's artistic director in the fall of next year. Also announced was a major new architectural initiative, designed by Gordon Gill of Adrian Smith+Gordon Gill Architecture with theater and acoustical consultants Charcoalblue out of London . . .

The vision for Steppenwolf�s future plan will expand and unite its campus, adding two buildings that will complement the intimate 500-seat main theater. A new facility south of the main building will house a 400-seat theater to replace the temporary Upstairs Theatre and a Public Square atrium dedicated exclusively to audience engagement and community building. To the north, the newly renovated building at 1700 North Halsted will serve as the Lab at Steppenwolf, housing a black box theater, a flexible space for community and teen programs and offices for artistic, production and administrative staff. The lobby of the existing main building will also undergo major renovation, allowing the three structures to connect seamlessly on the ground floor

Steppenwolf had bought the then uncompleted parking garage in 1994 after it had been abandoned by its original developer, along with the 36,000 square-foot lot it stands on.

40-year-old Steppenwolf, founded by Jeff Perry, Terry Kinney and Gary Sinise, has come a long way from its origins in a Highland Park church basement. Steppenwolf currently mounts an average of 16 productions a season on three stages with annual attendance exceeding 200,000 people. Last year, the company's acclaimed production of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf won three major Tony awards after its transfer to Broadway.

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Construction will be in phases, as old structures are replaced by two new ones. No price tag or final completion date was announced.  In today's press release, Gill promised "a unified campus that connects with the community and utilizes a palette of materials that are of Chicago, and on a scale appropriate for the neighborhood.�