Friday, October 31, 2014

All Hollows' Eve, at the Stroke of Midnight, the Calatrava Spire Vanishes, Forever




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Slowly, the eerie clouds wrap around Santiago Calatrava's twisting phantom tower.  The clock strikes twelve.  The shrieking birds scatter. The dream dies.  The vision melts into air, into thin air.
The Trib's Mary Ellen Podmolik reported Friday that developer Garrett Kelleher has finally conceded that he won't be able to raise the cash to bring the doomed Chicago Spire project out of bankruptcy.  If he doesn't pony up the $22 million by end of day, the site - intended to be a 2,000-foot-high skyscraper but never getting beyond being anything more than a massive hole in the ground - will become the property of Related Midwest, which recently opened another rescued project, the 59-story 111 West Wacker.


This is the end, beautiful friend 
This is the end, my only friend, the end 
Of our elaborate plans, the end 
Of everything that stands, the end 
No safety or surprise, the end 
I'll never look into your eyes, again


Relive the Whole Amazing Story . . .
The Epic Fable of Santiago Calatrava's Chicago Spire





Thursday, October 30, 2014

Boo! Chicago Center for Green Technology closes


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It's an experiment that's apparently run it's course.  The Chicago Center for Green Technology won't quite make it to its twelfth birthday, announcing its closed just in time for Halloween.  An email to presenters in its Green Tech U program, whose fall semester had already been put on the hold,  noted that the Center has been “struggling with funding for the past couple years”, which would dovetail with the retirement of its key supporter, former Mayor Richard M. Daley.  ”While the building tenants will still be here, CCGT will be closed to the public after this Friday, October 31st.”


The 32,000 square-foot office building, originally constructed in 1952 in what is now the Kinzie Industrial Corridor, was converted, in 2003 at at cost of $5,400,000, the Center was built as a showcase for green design, an educational resource offering training courses and public tours, and a home to sustainable-design related companies, including Greencorps Chicago and WRD Environmental, which will remain after the center closes. 

Farr Associates was the architect for the conversion, with Tylk, Gustafson, Reckers, Wilson and Andrews as structural engineers and The Site Design Group handling the landscaping, which emphasized native plans requiring minimal maintenance and a partial green roof.
Cited as the first rehabilitated municipal building in the country to receiving a Platinum LEED rating,  it was part of of former Mayor Richard M. Daley's Chicago Brownfield Initiative.  The 17 acre site at 445 North Sacramento in East Garfield Park had been filled with more than 600,000 cubic yards of illegally dumped waste, piled 70 feet high.  It was cleared and renovated using sustainable materials, and such environment-friendly features as operable windows offering natural ventilation, a ground-source heat pump system with 28 vertical wells up to 200 feet deep providing the cooling an most of the heat, and a self-monitoring building automation system.  Four cisterns could capture up to 12,000 gallons of rainwater.  The elevator ran on canola oil.

Now, with no environmentalist version of George Lucas in sight, the center will soon be only a memory.  But for the time that it had, the Chicago Center for Green Technology served well.



Tuesday, October 21, 2014

Y Crane? Truss Me, Block 37 is Rising Again!

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It's a story a  quarter-century in the making, but could well be the fastest start of any Chicago skyscraper ever.  As soon as west coast developer CIM Group announced that they had obtained all necessary permits for their new tower on September 10th, scaffolding appeared along Randolph Street next to the troubled Block 37 retail mall that will serve as the project's base.  Soon, a y-topped crane was in place, rising far above the roof of the existing four story building.
image courtesy The Chuckman Collection
Once this had been the site, at the corner of State and Randolph, of architect Peter Wight's Springer Block, built in 1872, and modified by Adler and Sullivan in 1884, and, at the corner of Randolph and Dearborn, Holabird and Roches's 1921 United Artists (Apollo) theatre. In 1989, the entire block was demolished for a sugar plum vision of a massive new development that would reinvigorate State Street, but for decades thereafter all that remained was a dirt-covered vacant lot.  Proposal after proposal - including one with towers by by Helmut Jahn  - failed to come to fruition.  Although right across from Marshall Field's Macy's massive flagship, the highest use this prime property achieved was as a temporary art gallery and winter ice skating rink.

Finally, in 2005, ground was broken for the four-story Block 37 shopping mall, which upon its opening promptly became a huge white elephant.  Where Lord and Taylor and Harrods of London had once been mentioned as tenants, there was, instead, a mall without an anchor, its top floors completely empty.

While the angled walkways and central light court give the interior a certain elegance, on the outside,  it's a numbingly generic building.  Shorn of the artwork value-engineered out of the original plan, the exterior finds its only relief from the visual monotony in undulations in the metal facade that, if you're lucky, self-animate when they reflect the light from signs on adjacent buildings such as the Oriental Theater . . .
or, if you're not, make the whole thing looks like slabs of aluminum siding with a case of hiccups.

Eventually the original developer lost control of the project, which was taken back by the lender, Bank of America, for $100 million, and then sold it to CIM Group for $84 million two years ago.  While 64% of the mall's 275,000 square feet remained empty, CIM has recently struck a deal for a new restaurant and earlier this month, another with AMC to bring an 11-screen, 44,000 square foot cinema complex to the tumbleweed-populated fourth floor.
Now the residential tower that was always envisioned for the northwest corner of Block 37 is finally coming into play - and quickly.  Those same hiccups that enliven the mall facades are being used by architects Solomon Cordwell Bunez to break up the monotony of the curtain wall facade of their new skyscraper, with a giant zipper of incised windows running up the full height of the tower about two thirds in on the Randolph Street side..  The roof of the mall structure will become home to an "amenity deck" for the apartment residents, including an outdoor deck, pool, spa and fitness center.  According to the building permit, structural work will include "a 5′-6″ matt transfer slab, steel transfer trusses approximately 30′-0″ tall, post-tensioned concrete slabs, concrete columns and concrete core-shear wall."
At 38 stories and 436 feet high, the Block 37 apartments at 25 West Randolph will tower over its neighbor across the street, Rapp and Rapp's 1926, 300-feet-tall Oriental Theater building, and nip away at the decades-long visual dominance of Jacques Brownson's 648-foot high Daley Center across the street to the west.  With 690 units, it will be the largest apartment building every constructed in the Loop, and the largest addition to date to a city center that has already seen its number of residential units triple - from about 2,000 to over 6,000 by next year.  It will either be culmination of a boom, or the first victim of the next real estate bubble - or perhaps both.
If things proceed as quickly as they began, we can probably expect the first tenants to move in next Friday.


Epic Flail: 
25 years of trials and tribulations at Block 37

What Would You Put under Block 37?  Crain's Opens up the Big Hole, and Wants to Know

Pebbles Go Bam Bam or Broken Glass Boogie Woogie at Block 37's 22 West Washington

Tales from the Crypt: City to Bury $300 Million Mistake under Block 37

Can Signage Save Block 37?


Block 37 Regains a Third Dimension

Hope at Block 37? - Ownership Changes Still Again

Mayor Richard M. Daley: The Emperor of Dirt

Block 37 - The Curse Lives!

The Entombment of the Plug Bug


Planning and its Disconnects: The Cautionary Tale of Block 37

Sunday, October 19, 2014

Three Splendid Churches, One Over-the-Top Movie Palace: My First Day at Open House Chicago 2014

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The first day of the Chicago Architecture Foundation's spectacular Open House Chicago 2014, which gives the architecture-loving access to 150+ sites often closed to the general public, saw us heading out to South Shore and Pilsen - three churches, one movie palace, and a few extras.  Here's a sampling of what we saw, with more complete stories soon to come.
Our Lady of Peace Catholic Church, 79th and Jeffrey in South Shore.  Joseph W. McCarthy, architect.  Dedicated 1935.

The New Regal Theater (originally the Avalon) , 1600 block of west 79th, South Shore, John Eberson, Architect.  Opened 1927
 

 

Bonus: special Open House Chicago ruptured barge sunk in the Chicago River exhibit
St. Paul's Catholic Church, 22nd and Hoyne, Pilsen.  Henry Schlaks, architect. Opened 1899.
 
 
Hector Duarte Studio, Gulliver in Wonderland mural, Pilsen
St. Adalbert Church 1600 block of west 17th, Pilsen.  Henry Schlaks, architect.  1914 - 1914
 
 
 
There's last more tomorrow, Sunday, on Open House Chicago's closing day, with a number of new venues that weren't open on Saturday.  I'm heading out to Union Station's to check out the usually out-of-sight women's lounge, and improv it from there.  Check out the full list of sites and hours here.


Tuesday, October 14, 2014

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