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The danger of becoming skin deep
Chicago historic buildings become shells as new rules of preservation are letting city's history slip away
By Blair Kamin
Tribune architecture critic
Published April 8, 2007
Back in the 1960s, the pioneers of historic preservation faced stark choices as they battled to protect such renowned structures as New York's Pennsylvania Station or Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler's Garrick Theater building in Chicago: Either save the building or watch the wrecker's ball smash it to smithereens.
But today, developers and architects have devised a new way of holding onto the past that makes things far more complex: Instead of preserving an entire building, it keeps only the building's facade, grafting that facade onto a new internal structure, as though it were the skin of a stuffed animal.
Better to save something than nothing, goes this theory. And while it's true that such projects typically possess the human scale and eye-pleasing decoration rarely found in massive parking garages or bland condominium towers, they still rankle. The reason: They create a stage-set city that treats buildings like two-dimensional wallpaper, not three-dimensional structures. That destroys a building's essence and, at worst, makes a mockery of the very history these exercises purport to respect.
For a sample of the damage such architectural taxidermy can do, go to the corner of Halsted and Maxwell Streets, where the University of Illinois at Chicago has completed its redevelopment of the old Maxwell Street Market, the once-raucous bazaar where generations of peddlers hawked their wares along the sidewalk.
Historic facades are clipped onto the front of a new parking garage, complete with curtains and blinds in their upper-story windows to mask the cars behind them. With their medallions, fluted columns and ornamental brickwork, the facades, while beautifully restored, form a sanitized stage-set populated by saccharine, life-size sculptures, like one that portrays a peddler selling tomatoes. The old Maxwell Street Market was dirty, messy and suffused with a singular sense of place. It was not, like this facile tribute, clean, ordered and bordering on generic.
"When does [Chicago] cease to be known for broad shoulders, to be seen instead for its paper-thin facades? At what point will Chicago not be Chicago, but merely a commercially based parody of itself?" David Bahlman, president of the non-profit advocacy group Landmarks Illinois, asked at a sparsely attended March 29 hearing of the City Council's Committee on Historical Landmark Preservation.
At the hearing, aldermen unanimously approved the latest architectural skin job, a plan by Chicago-based Prism Development Co. to dismantle, demolish, repair and reconstruct the 11-story Farwell Building, a classical-art deco gem at 664 N. Michigan Ave., as part of a 40-story condominium development. The project seems assured of passage by the full City Council.
Ideally, historic buildings consist of bones (the structure that holds them up) and the interior spaces they shape as well as skin. Think of the Hotel Burnham at the corner of State and Washington Streets. There, in 1999, a team of architects gorgeously transformed the old Reliance Building into a boutique hotel while simultaneously enhancing every aspect of a revolutionary, late 19th Century design that predated by six decades the steel-and-glass modernism of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.
With Chicago in a development boom that has put historic buildings in the path of new ones that generate property and sales tax dollars, however, it is becoming far more difficult to uphold the standard set by such exemplary examples of adaptive re-use.
"Now we're in this great gray zone of preservation. It's not fully saved. It's not fully lost," Jim Peters, Landmarks Illinois' director of planning, said in an interview. "I think that's the slippery slope we've gotten into."
'Facade-ectomy'
To be sure, shaving away everything but the facade of a building has been done before. In 1989, architects Moriyama & Teshima jammed a modern office building at 10 S. LaSalle St. with blue and lime green walls between the templelike base of the 1912 Otis Building by the legendary Chicago firm of Holabird & Roche. The resulting visual mismatch epitomizes the sins inflicted by this type of architectural surgery, which preservationists pejoratively refer to as a "facade-ectomy."
What's different today is that this selective saving of history is far more widespread -- not a last resort, but one that developers and architects turn to frequently. That much is evident on Wabash Avenue, a block behind the cliff of historic, masonry-covered buildings that face Millennium Park.
With the city having granted landmark protection to this cliff, developers have infiltrated Wabash to erect condo towers that seize upon the value the park has created. To make way for them, the parking garages that serve them, and the construction equipment that builds them, all but a sliver of several historic structures have been demolished. Some belonged to the Jewelers Row Historic District, an official city landmark district along Wabash that recognizes the rich history of Chicago's jewelry makers.
At 21 to 29 S. Wabash, for example, a massive steel scaffold holds in place a trio of five- to six-story facades that provide a tangible record of the construction boom that followed the Chicago Fire of 1871: one a Victorian, with huge keystones above its windows; another, neo-classical, with a triangular top and toothlike decoration; the last, a straightforward Chicago School grid of beige brick.
Someday, these facades will camouflage a parking garage that form the back side of the Legacy at Millennium Park, a glass wedge that will soar 72 stories high.But their present state reveals them for what they really are -- a slice of history that differs little from a slice of cheese.
The same ambiguity pervades the restored facades of four historic buildings that line the parking garage and street-level shops of the Heritage at Millennium Park, a 59-story condo tower that rises behind the Chicago Cultural Center at Michigan and Randolph. Two years old, it was designed by the firm responsible for the Legacy at Millennium Park, Chicago architects Solomon Cordwell Buenz, along with their historic preservation consultants at the Evanston firm of McGuire Igleski & Associates.
Walking on the east side of Wabash Avenue, it is hard not to be seduced by the facades, with their green urns, white sea horses and other ornamental grace notes. They perfectly match Wabash's human scale. It is only when you step to the west side of the street and gaze over the elevated tracks that you notice the facades are not real buildings but simply fronts for the parking garage.
A living museum
As much as preservationists denounce such compromises, however, the deals are unlikely to disappear. Too much money is at stake. Chicago has to adapt to new circumstances. The city is a living museum of architecture, not one frozen in time. The question is how to adapt: Are some partial preservation jobs better than others? Yes, it turns out.
At one end of the spectrum, the wrong end, is the Maxwell Street redevelopment, planned by Darien-based Wight & Co. with help from historic preservation consultants Hasbrouck Peterson Zimoch Sirirattumrong of Chicago. The facades papering the parking garage and new buildings across the street were taken off other buildings in the area, restored and reassembled. As handsome as they are, they make this a Maxwell Street that never was.
At the other end of the spectrum, the right end, is the redevelopment of Oliver Building, an official Chicago landmark that graces the city's burgeoning theater district. Located at 159 N. Dearborn St. and originally the headquarters of the Oliver Typewriter Co., the 1907 building was designed by the same firm, Holabird & Roche, that shaped the marred Otis Building at 10 S. LaSalle. Its facade clearly expresses its internal steel frame, a signature feature of the first Chicago School of Architecture. And that facade is adorned by classically-inspired, cast-iron decoration that quietly promotes the company's name and products.
But in the late 1990s, the Oliver stood in the way of the expansion of the Oriental Theatre (now the Ford Center for the Performing Arts), located just to the east at 24 E. Randolph St. To make way for an expanded backstage at the Oriental, Chicago architect Daniel P. Coffey designed a plan that gutted the Oliver but preserved one-third of its original steel structure, along with the building's Dearborn facade and part of its alley facade.
A perfect historic preservation solution? No. But it's far better than a "facade-ectomy."
In the tight quarters of downtown, of course, such a solution cannot be carried out everywhere. There simply isn't enough room. Which raises vexing questions: Would Chicago be better off by simply allowing developers to demolish landmark buildings, such as the Farwell Building, that will be skinned and rebuilt on a new internal structures? How much can you strip from a landmark building until it ceases to be a landmark?
There are no easy answers, but there is a need for standards that recognize the integrity of architecture as well as the necessity of economics. As it stands now, the rise of the "facade-ectomy" is producing beguiling but sliver thin vestiges of the past. They offer the comforting illusion that we're saving the style and the meaning of history when, in fact, we're destroying all but a fraction of it.
----------
bkamin@tribune.com
The danger of becoming skin deep
Chicago historic buildings become shells as new rules of preservation are letting city's history slip away
By Blair Kamin
Tribune architecture critic
Published April 8, 2007
Back in the 1960s, the pioneers of historic preservation faced stark choices as they battled to protect such renowned structures as New York's Pennsylvania Station or Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler's Garrick Theater building in Chicago: Either save the building or watch the wrecker's ball smash it to smithereens.
But today, developers and architects have devised a new way of holding onto the past that makes things far more complex: Instead of preserving an entire building, it keeps only the building's facade, grafting that facade onto a new internal structure, as though it were the skin of a stuffed animal.
Better to save something than nothing, goes this theory. And while it's true that such projects typically possess the human scale and eye-pleasing decoration rarely found in massive parking garages or bland condominium towers, they still rankle. The reason: They create a stage-set city that treats buildings like two-dimensional wallpaper, not three-dimensional structures. That destroys a building's essence and, at worst, makes a mockery of the very history these exercises purport to respect.
For a sample of the damage such architectural taxidermy can do, go to the corner of Halsted and Maxwell Streets, where the University of Illinois at Chicago has completed its redevelopment of the old Maxwell Street Market, the once-raucous bazaar where generations of peddlers hawked their wares along the sidewalk.
Historic facades are clipped onto the front of a new parking garage, complete with curtains and blinds in their upper-story windows to mask the cars behind them. With their medallions, fluted columns and ornamental brickwork, the facades, while beautifully restored, form a sanitized stage-set populated by saccharine, life-size sculptures, like one that portrays a peddler selling tomatoes. The old Maxwell Street Market was dirty, messy and suffused with a singular sense of place. It was not, like this facile tribute, clean, ordered and bordering on generic.
"When does [Chicago] cease to be known for broad shoulders, to be seen instead for its paper-thin facades? At what point will Chicago not be Chicago, but merely a commercially based parody of itself?" David Bahlman, president of the non-profit advocacy group Landmarks Illinois, asked at a sparsely attended March 29 hearing of the City Council's Committee on Historical Landmark Preservation.
At the hearing, aldermen unanimously approved the latest architectural skin job, a plan by Chicago-based Prism Development Co. to dismantle, demolish, repair and reconstruct the 11-story Farwell Building, a classical-art deco gem at 664 N. Michigan Ave., as part of a 40-story condominium development. The project seems assured of passage by the full City Council.
Ideally, historic buildings consist of bones (the structure that holds them up) and the interior spaces they shape as well as skin. Think of the Hotel Burnham at the corner of State and Washington Streets. There, in 1999, a team of architects gorgeously transformed the old Reliance Building into a boutique hotel while simultaneously enhancing every aspect of a revolutionary, late 19th Century design that predated by six decades the steel-and-glass modernism of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.
With Chicago in a development boom that has put historic buildings in the path of new ones that generate property and sales tax dollars, however, it is becoming far more difficult to uphold the standard set by such exemplary examples of adaptive re-use.
"Now we're in this great gray zone of preservation. It's not fully saved. It's not fully lost," Jim Peters, Landmarks Illinois' director of planning, said in an interview. "I think that's the slippery slope we've gotten into."
'Facade-ectomy'
To be sure, shaving away everything but the facade of a building has been done before. In 1989, architects Moriyama & Teshima jammed a modern office building at 10 S. LaSalle St. with blue and lime green walls between the templelike base of the 1912 Otis Building by the legendary Chicago firm of Holabird & Roche. The resulting visual mismatch epitomizes the sins inflicted by this type of architectural surgery, which preservationists pejoratively refer to as a "facade-ectomy."
What's different today is that this selective saving of history is far more widespread -- not a last resort, but one that developers and architects turn to frequently. That much is evident on Wabash Avenue, a block behind the cliff of historic, masonry-covered buildings that face Millennium Park.
With the city having granted landmark protection to this cliff, developers have infiltrated Wabash to erect condo towers that seize upon the value the park has created. To make way for them, the parking garages that serve them, and the construction equipment that builds them, all but a sliver of several historic structures have been demolished. Some belonged to the Jewelers Row Historic District, an official city landmark district along Wabash that recognizes the rich history of Chicago's jewelry makers.
At 21 to 29 S. Wabash, for example, a massive steel scaffold holds in place a trio of five- to six-story facades that provide a tangible record of the construction boom that followed the Chicago Fire of 1871: one a Victorian, with huge keystones above its windows; another, neo-classical, with a triangular top and toothlike decoration; the last, a straightforward Chicago School grid of beige brick.
Someday, these facades will camouflage a parking garage that form the back side of the Legacy at Millennium Park, a glass wedge that will soar 72 stories high.But their present state reveals them for what they really are -- a slice of history that differs little from a slice of cheese.
The same ambiguity pervades the restored facades of four historic buildings that line the parking garage and street-level shops of the Heritage at Millennium Park, a 59-story condo tower that rises behind the Chicago Cultural Center at Michigan and Randolph. Two years old, it was designed by the firm responsible for the Legacy at Millennium Park, Chicago architects Solomon Cordwell Buenz, along with their historic preservation consultants at the Evanston firm of McGuire Igleski & Associates.
Walking on the east side of Wabash Avenue, it is hard not to be seduced by the facades, with their green urns, white sea horses and other ornamental grace notes. They perfectly match Wabash's human scale. It is only when you step to the west side of the street and gaze over the elevated tracks that you notice the facades are not real buildings but simply fronts for the parking garage.
A living museum
As much as preservationists denounce such compromises, however, the deals are unlikely to disappear. Too much money is at stake. Chicago has to adapt to new circumstances. The city is a living museum of architecture, not one frozen in time. The question is how to adapt: Are some partial preservation jobs better than others? Yes, it turns out.
At one end of the spectrum, the wrong end, is the Maxwell Street redevelopment, planned by Darien-based Wight & Co. with help from historic preservation consultants Hasbrouck Peterson Zimoch Sirirattumrong of Chicago. The facades papering the parking garage and new buildings across the street were taken off other buildings in the area, restored and reassembled. As handsome as they are, they make this a Maxwell Street that never was.
At the other end of the spectrum, the right end, is the redevelopment of Oliver Building, an official Chicago landmark that graces the city's burgeoning theater district. Located at 159 N. Dearborn St. and originally the headquarters of the Oliver Typewriter Co., the 1907 building was designed by the same firm, Holabird & Roche, that shaped the marred Otis Building at 10 S. LaSalle. Its facade clearly expresses its internal steel frame, a signature feature of the first Chicago School of Architecture. And that facade is adorned by classically-inspired, cast-iron decoration that quietly promotes the company's name and products.
But in the late 1990s, the Oliver stood in the way of the expansion of the Oriental Theatre (now the Ford Center for the Performing Arts), located just to the east at 24 E. Randolph St. To make way for an expanded backstage at the Oriental, Chicago architect Daniel P. Coffey designed a plan that gutted the Oliver but preserved one-third of its original steel structure, along with the building's Dearborn facade and part of its alley facade.
A perfect historic preservation solution? No. But it's far better than a "facade-ectomy."
In the tight quarters of downtown, of course, such a solution cannot be carried out everywhere. There simply isn't enough room. Which raises vexing questions: Would Chicago be better off by simply allowing developers to demolish landmark buildings, such as the Farwell Building, that will be skinned and rebuilt on a new internal structures? How much can you strip from a landmark building until it ceases to be a landmark?
There are no easy answers, but there is a need for standards that recognize the integrity of architecture as well as the necessity of economics. As it stands now, the rise of the "facade-ectomy" is producing beguiling but sliver thin vestiges of the past. They offer the comforting illusion that we're saving the style and the meaning of history when, in fact, we're destroying all but a fraction of it.
----------
bkamin@tribune.com