Chicago now: the state of architecture in Chicago

Art in America, Sept, 1998 by Franz Schulze

The 33 entries in "New Chicago Architecture," recently on view at the city's Athenaeum, evoked comparision -- and sometimes rueful contrast -- with a heroic past.

While Chicago's reputation as a city of illustrious architecture is sure to endure into the next century, it has lately been expressed more often in past than in present tense. The giants, from Daniel Burnham, John Root and Louis Sullivan through Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe, make up a formidable list, but they are all long gone. Since Mies's death in 1969, no architect of his stature has called Chicago home. Some of the responsibility for this is traceable to the recent habit of local developers to award the major downtown commercial commissions to so-called "signature" architects. Nearly all of these invited designers have been out-of-towners with respectable names, yet the work produced by, among others, Ricardo Bofill, Philip Johnson, Kevin Roche, and Kohn, Pedersen and Fox is not only less than their best but noticeably inferior to the caliber of work traditionally done by the cream of Chicago architects or Chicago-based firms. There seem to be more complicated ways of accounting for this than the dubious taste of the developers, but no other factor has more lasting effect.

On the other hand, the architectural ranks of the city itself have served up little in the way of commanding alternatives. The sole Chicago designer to achieve international recognition since the death of Mies is Helmut Jahn, while the latter-day work of great old firms like Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) and Holabird and Root has seldom attracted the national attention their efforts customarily did several decades ago.

This much said, the recent exhibition, "New Chicago Architecture," shown at the Chicago Athenaeum from Mar. 10 through May 31, merited more than a casual look. It was competently organized by the staff of the Athenaeum itself, led by director Christian K. Narkiewicz-Laine, and judiciously chosen by a panel of judges chaired by Larry K. Oltmanns of SOM. In short, its 33 entries provided a fair sense, if not an exhaustive coverage, of the condition of Chicago architecture in the late 1990s.

Generalizations are not easily applied to so broad a survey, but they are tempting to cite. There was much on view that seemed to illustrate a historical tendency among Chicago designers to prefer plain speech over flights of fancy -- that is, over forms derived from theory as distinct from practical necessity. (Chicago, exceptions notwithstanding, was never known for a warm embrace of Art Deco or postmodernist historicism.)

At the same time a number of the most eye-catching exhibits at the Athenaeum bristled with ornamental explosions, as if to show how far Chicago has strayed from, or vaulted past, Miesian minimalism. This latter-day inclination, which, when given the choice between adding or subtracting parts, seems always to favor "more," was especially apparent in big commercial high-rise designs. The most extravagant of those built or scheduled to be built are in the Far East, usually in China. Notable among them are three skyscrapers: two by SOM, the Xiamen Posts and Telecommunication Building and the Jin Mao Building in Shanghai, and one by Loebl, Schlossman & Hackl/Hague Richards, the Luo-Hu Commercial Center, as yet unbuilt but meant for Shenzhen.

There is nothing like them in Chicago, which suggests either that they are typical of the latest movement toward heavy elaboration in high-rise design or -- just as likely -- that Chicago is not, as it traditionally has never been, the kind of city that responds cordially to so glitzy a trend. While all three works were on balance lively and visually arresting, the show's photographs and models did not really convey how well the structures will work in their respective environments. So saying underscores one of the problems of judging buildings in exhibitions like this one, since the entries are necessarily, yet unhelpfully, removed from their intended contexts.

Thus it was far easier to assess structures that have gone up in familiar surroundings. One of the most inventive entries, Division Street Gateways, submitted by DeStefano and Partners, is a steel construction in the form of the Puerto Rican flag that spans Division Street in a Puerto Rican neighborhood on Chicago's northwest side. One could hardly imagine anything more symbolically at home on its site, or more successful in reaching the specific audience it was meant to address.

Significantly different in place and purpose but impressive in its own right is a private house, erected in the wealthy suburb of Bannockburn, by Nagle Hartray Danker Kagan McKay. It is a generously proportioned, economically upscale piece of work masterly enough to justify the classically modernist approach the designers applied to it.

Finally, one of the best structures mounted in the city itself is a water cooling facility, the compact, handsomely fenestrated Unicom Thermal Technologies Building, by Eckenhoff & Saunders, a small but evidently promising local office.