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May 5, 2006

Section One Letters 3ColumnsHot Type 4“The risks in massing so many people onan issue so emotional and so explosiveneed no underscoring.”

The Straight Dope 5What it takes to knock a guy out

The Works 8Growing pains in the South Loop

Chicago Antisocial 10John Waters at Columbia College

The Sports Section 12A team without stars

Our Town 14Home-brewing genius and beer writer RandyMosher; Latino comedy impresario Mikey O

ReviewsTheater 28Brett Neveu’s Heritage atAmerican Theater Company

Music 29Gnarls Barkley, the Drive-by Truckers, and the Fonotone box set

PlusFree Shit 18A day of freebies in Roscoe VillageWhat Are You Wearing? 22Musician Lawrence PetersInk Well 31This week’s crossword: Pitching Artists

A tipping point isn’t somethingyou’d normally want to associatewith a skyscraper, but that may

be what Jeanne Gang’s Aqua, an 82-story residential project at ColumbusDrive and Lake, turns out to be. Foralmost a decade megatowers have beenrising downtown like weeds, and thedevelopers have been using classic sky-line views to market what in everyother respect is mediocrity on agrotesque scale. They’ve clearly decidedthat if you provide popular locationsand floor plans and kitchens that are“works of art,” the quality of the archi-tecture won’t matter to buyers.

One of the biggest contributors tothe plague has been James Loewen-berg, the developer behind such dispir-iting towers as 630 North State Park-way and the Park Millennium, at 222N. Columbus. But at 71, he seems to belooking for an honorable way to endhis career—he’s in the middle of one ofthe most ambitious developments inthe history of Chicago, Lakeshore East.It’s going up on a 28-acre parcel east ofColumbus and south of the river thatwas once supposed to become anotherIllinois Center but most recentlyserved as a makeshift golf course.

Loewenberg began by hiringSkidmore, Owings & Merrill to come upwith a site plan, which wound up win-ning an award from the AmericanInstitute of Architects. He hired twomainstream Chicago firms, DeStefano +Partners and Solomon Cordwell Buenz,to design several of the condo towers,which, while not exactly cutting-edge,make a clean break from the usual con-crete blunders. In the center he created

a handsome six-acre park that gives allthose tall buildings room to breathe.And then he made his boldest move.

At a Harvard alumni dinner last yearhe found himself sitting next to JeanneGang and her life and work partner,Mark Schendel. “We talked about archi-tecture,” says Gang. That seemed theend of it, but six months laterLoewenberg called. “He said he wouldlike to meet us,” says Schendel. Gangsays she arrived for a one-on-onemeeting prepared to present her com-pany’s work, but Loewenberg told her, “Ialready know what your work is like. Ijust wanted to see if you were interestedin doing this building. Let’s get going.”

Gang has a reputation for projectsthat are bold yet pragmatic, such asRock Valley College’s Starlight Theatre,where the roof opens up like petals of aflower to reveal the night sky. But Aquaups the ante big-time. The $300 mil-lion building, scheduled to be com-pleted in 2009, is the largest projectever awarded to an American firmheaded by a woman. What’s more, it’s a

sign that a new generation of Chicagoarchitects is coming into its own.

Gang and members of her firm,Studio/Gang/Architects, started by

rethinking the idea of a tall building.“It must be in every inch a proud andsoaring thing” is how Louis Sullivandescribed the skyscraper in the 1890s.The elegant glass boxes Ludwig Miesvan der Rohe began building in 1949refined that idea as they redefinedmodernism, but they were followed byinnumerable bad imitations. By the80s postmodernist architects seemedalmost ashamed of any hint of soaringpride and tried to conceal the verti-cality of their towers with horizontalbands and neoclassical ornament,which was about as effective asdressing an elephant in a tutu.

Today brash verticality is back. If youneed proof, check out the two new sleekcurtain-walled towers along Wacker oneither side of Monroe—James Goettsch’s111 S. Wacker and Pei Cobb Freed’s Hyattcontinued on page 24

Jeanne Gang and her team map the views from individual units in her Aqua tower.

ON THE COVER: STUDIO/GANG/ARCHITECTS (RENDERING), JON RANDOLPH (BEER)

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Center. These buildings almostseem to be saying, we’re here,we’re tall—get over it. Yet to archi-tect Robert Venturi, who slammedMiesian architecture by saying“Less is a bore,” this new burst ofboldness isn’t progress but aretreat—modernism reduced to arevival style, no different fromGeorgian or Queen Anne.

Gang wanted to celebrate theverticality of her 822-foot build-ing, but she didn’t want it to berevivalist. So she first examinedthe way tall buildings relate totheir surroundings. Most newdesigns, she points out, are pre-sented as idealized drawings thatleave out everything that’s arounda building and place viewers in aspot where they can take in thewhole thing in a single glance,even though the actual streetscapemakes that impossible. (Loewen-berg’s marketers are selling Aquathe same way.) “The real way youexperience buildings in the city,”she says, “is in the oblique view—looking up or looking down at itfrom another tower.”

More important was the per-spective from inside the building.Developers want views, and Gangintended to offer as many com-pelling ones as possible. “Viewsare easy to get from the top,” shesays. “But from the lower andmiddle floors you look between

this dense forest of high-rises.”The Studio/Gang team con-structed a supersize model of thatdense forest, then used lengths ofstring to plot the endpoints of theviews from Aqua’s units. Gangdiscovered that by adding ter-races that swept in and out alongthe perimeter of the tower, shecould create views that wouldn’texist in a rectangular building.Where one terrace bumped out-ward you suddenly could seeMillennium Park’s Bean pop outpast the edge of the Aon Center.Other terraces created views ofMichigan Avenue, the lake, orFrank Gehry’s winding BPbridge. Aqua, says Gang, “startswith these really strong connec-tions to the different points ofview in the city.” And 80 percentof the units—some part of ahotel, the rest rental apartmentsor condos—will have terraces.

After deciding where to put allthe bumps, Gang’s team studiedhow the sun would hit each apart-ment so they could determine thesize and shape the terraces wouldhave to be to also provide adequateshade. So they not only curve inand out along the edges of the floorplates, but each one is slightlysmaller or larger—up to 18 feetdeep—than the ones immediatelyabove and below it, creating swellsand valleys along the facades.

These waves of concrete nei-

ther conceal nor deny the tower’sverticality—they sculpt it. Thereare no Miesian verticals march-ing in lockstep from bottom totop and none of the ornamentalbric-a-brac postmodernistsappropriated to cut their towers’height into so many chunks oflayer cake. Aqua is somethingnew: the facade as terrain, theskyscraper as a soaring outcrop-ping worthy of Monument Valley.

“The first time I showed themodel to the contractors they werelooking at me like I was nuts,” saysGang. “This curvy thing? Theywere just like—Whoa! I thinkJim was the one who made themcalm down. ‘Look, you guys, it’svery simple.’ He rationalized it sothey could understand it.”(Loewenberg remains the archi-tect of record for the project.)

“In some ways it’s easier tobuild because it’s not a continuoussystem on the outside of thestructure,” says Schendel. “It’seasy for the contractor to think ofit as a unitized thing, like a brick.You bring in bay SR1 and put itthere. SR2.1, put it there. Itbecomes a logical thing forthem—check the floor that they’reon, they know that they’ve got toput this series of bays in. And thewindow manufacturers will makethem in packages of four floors ata time. They bring them out, andif it’s in the right order it should

go up effortlessly, flawlessly.”The Studio/Gang team proved

they could be acutely attuned to thescience of creating a high-risemegaproject that fit the budgetsand marketing needs of the devel-opers. “This is how fine-tuned theyare as an apartment-developmentmachine,” says Gang. “They neededtwo more inches so that you couldget that nightstand and that night-stand on this bed wall. We had toincrease our building two inches.”

Aqua has put a spotlight onGang, but other young local

architects are also starting to gettheir due. The work of DouglasGarofalo, whose Hyde Park ArtCenter opened last weekend, willbe the focus of the first exhibitmounted at the Art Institute byits new curator of architectureand design, Joseph Rosa. Alsoopening this month is the SouthShore Drill Team’s Gary ComerYouth Center by John Ronan,who last year beat Pritzker Prize-winning superstar Thom Maynein a competition to design an $84million high school in New Jersey.

Gang, Garofalo, Ronan, andother local rising stars are on theverge of defining a third Chicagoschool of architecture, followingin the footsteps of Sullivan,Burnham, and Root in the 19thcentury and Mies van der Rohein the 20th. This new school

won’t be characterized by thekind of uniform visual style thatmarked the architecture of Miesor Frank Lloyd Wright, but bydiversity, changeability, and anintellectual restlessness that com-pulsively tests accepted wisdom.

Assessing the impact of a schoolof architecture as that architec-ture is evolving isn’t easy. In the30s Henry-Russell Hitchcockand Philip Johnson pulled a setof elements from the vocabularyof contemporary buildings—flatroofs, severe geometry, unorna-mented white walls—to definewhat they claimed was the onetrue architecture of their time,the International Style. Theymanaged to shove the work ofFrank Lloyd Wright to the side-lines, yet it wasn’t the Interna-tional Style that had the deepestinfluence on the 20th century.Rather it was Wright and his fel-low Prairie School architects,whose organic, ground-hugginghomes set the stage for the tri-umph of the American suburb.

That caveat aside, there clearlyis a new global spirit in architec-ture, and its watchwords arefreedom and spontaneity. Ofcourse it’s hubris to think you canmake a building spontaneous—the laws of physics are unfor-giving. But the appearance ofspontaneity is possible. In the

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Jeanne Gang, a model of Aqua, John Ronan’s Gary Comer Youth Center (top), and Douglas Garofalo’s Hyde Park Art Center

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ideal world of Cecil Balmond, theengineering genius behind thework of cutting-edge architectssuch as Rem Koolhaas andAlvaro Siza, everything is in flux.A floor folds to become a wall,twists to form a supportingcolumn, then folds again tobecome a ceiling. Structure is asingle restless organism.

This sensibility has beenembraced by Gang and the otherthird-school architects. Both Gangand Schendel worked withKoolhaas on some of his earlyprojects, and you can see hisinfluence in their work. But a fewthings set the Chicago upstarts

apart. First is their insistence onpragmatism, something that haslong distinguished Chicago archi-tecture. Many of today’s architectsare theorists first, happy just to gettheir renderings published. “Don’ttalk—build,” was Mies’s famousresponse to the theorists of hisday. Our greatest architectsalways seemed to enjoy gettingtheir hands dirty, and the worldof business always gave themplenty of opportunities. Sullivan’sdesigns got built because hispartner, Dankmar Adler, was amember of the city’s corporatesociety. Burnham and Root didsome of their best work for penny-pinching real estate speculators.And by the time of his death Mieswas doing buildings for some ofthe most powerful institutions inthe city, including the federal gov-ernment and IBM. Unfortunately,for over a decade the best of thecity’s young architects were allbut shut out of the segment of themarket that dominated new con-struction—residential building.Now that Gang is working forone of the most powerful devel-opers the city’s ever had, that

market may be opening up.Another thing that sets this

new generation of architectsapart is their profound interest inhow architecture is experienced.Far too often new buildings areseen primarily as abstract forms,and their designers display littlecuriosity about what it’s like toinhabit them. People fell in lovewith the fantastical titaniumswirls of Frank Gehry’s museumin Bilbao but not the galleriesinside. Chicago’s young archi-tects want something more—tobe able to see the stars frominside a theater, to stand on theporch of a nature center sur-rounded by mesh that makes itfeel like a bird’s nest.

Gang sees the swooping ter-races at Aqua not as just anarchitectural statement but as anurban living space residents willmake their own. “What I likeabout Marina City is that people’spersonalities come out in thebuilding,” she says. “When youlook at the building at night yousee different kinds of light. Somepeople have Astroturf on theirbalcony, and it reflects green onto

the underside of the balcony. Ilike people’s life coming out. Ithink that’s what differentiates usfrom older architects, the lastgeneration of architects. They’retrying to make everything per-fect, but we want to see the life ofthe people living in it comingthrough. I’ll be glad if they putChristmas-tree lights on it.”

When reminded that mosthigh-rise balconies, includingthose at Marina City, are chroni-cally underused, Gang says, “Well,this is a different generation. Welike the outdoors. We want to beoutside or closer to the outside.Because of the views that it givesyou and because of the fact thatyou’re outside, you’re really goingto live on this terrace.”

Gang proposed putting cur-tains on the terraces, made of aplasticized material that’s usuallyused to cover scaffolding and isavailable in different bright hues.“The marketing people didn’t likeit,” she says. “They said it blockedthe view. But you could really justminimize it—you can pull ’emback. The inspiration was makingthese terraces more livablethroughout the year. You block thewind, but you also increase pri-vacy. And during bird migrationyou could pull it and protect theglass from bird strikes—or birdsfrom glass strikes.” It’s not hard tounderstand the marketers’ con-cerns—the concept is probably alittle too anarchic for a $300 mil-lion building. But it’s still a kickimagining a bleak winter day res-cued by a Mondrian-like blaze ofcolor across Aqua’s facade.

With or without the curtains,Aqua is going to be one of themost striking buildings in the city.If it’s a commercial success, morearchitects of the new generationmay get big residential and com-mercial projects. And great archi-tecture could return to Chicago’smain economic arena. v

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