I Love Chicagos Buildings

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KEYSTONES

The Four Deuces 2222 South Wabash Ave. now at The Brooklyn Museum

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Thalia Hall (1893) 1807 Allport St. Architect: Faber & Pagels

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BUFFALOES

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Detail - The Moody Church (1925) North Ave. and Clark St. Architect: Fugard and Knapp

Detail - Walgreens Store (1977) - 1601 N. Wells St. Architect: Stanley Tigerman

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Amazing Archigram 4 (1968) produced by the British architect group Archigram

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CHICAGO SPIRE

Santiago Calatrava qualifies for the term “Starchitect” as the engineer and architect of some absolutely wild bridges, train stations, museums and other futuristically styled buildings. His work in Chicago for the 2007 Chicago Spire project continued with the mathematically distorted forms that he has used elsewhere. For Chicago it was a helical spiral that continued to a tapered point at the top of its 2,000-feet-tall pinnacle. The building qualified as a Megatall Tower by slightly going over the 600 meter (1,968 foot) finish line. The project went through some amazingly disastrous economic problems that led to its cancellation in 2014, which we will not examine (boring!).

To concentrate on the object at hand; the Spire is important to Chicago because there is nothing like it in the city. The obvious rectangular logic might be bent slightly as in the cylinders of Marina City Towers or the irregular curved balconies of the block Aqua, but Calatrava moves form making into another level of complexity. And as a separate point the location of the now dead tower was at the mouth of the Chicago River making it an incredibly important addition to the skyline, relocating the visible center of the city in its northern march. The initial designs show an isolated “drill bit” separated from the city by a small park, river and lakefront; obviously Calatrava failed to consider how to land his alien space ship. The isolation and juxtaposition of dramatic designs is part of the argument in the next section.

THE UNLOVED MONUMENT

Both of the following two unbuilt structures represent an imaginary idealized world that would have nested into a piece of the larger and messier City of Chicago. If built on their original sites they would have been totally alien to their immediate surroundings. But maybe that’s the point.

THE LUCAS MUSEUM OF NARRATIVE ART

George Lucas, the creator of the Star Wars cinematic empire, wanted to establish a museum that would engage one idea: the enduring power of narrative art. The determined Lucas presented his new building for a site in San Francisco (rejected) and then in Chicago (rejected) and was finally accepted and built in Los Angeles (2023). Building renderings for all three cities were designed by Chinese architect Ma Yansong of MAD Architects, who was presented by Lucas as a “futuristic architect … giving us a building of the twenty-first century.” The Chicago building was a sloped, volcano-like form that spread out in a curved flowing lava perimeter with the volcano’s throat as a cylindrical top observation platform. The problem was the existing parking lot site was at the edge of the lakefront on public land. The mantra of the lakefront as free and open forever was too legally compelling for this proposal to advance, but I think the jarring appearance of the white stone-clad anomaly in a city of conservative dark grids was also part of its downfall. It was intentionally meant to stand out as separate to its surroundings. To fight against the accepted opinion of all, I find the building to be unusual and is something that is new

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Historic postcard of Chicago with a surrealistic frisson, distorted one-point perspective of empty underground CTA train platform (1930) - metaphorically lost and hopeless in its emptiness.

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