[Chicago Skyscrapers, 1934-1986, published by University of Illinois Press, is out now–available on Bookshop.org and Amazon.com, among other outlets.

Richardson’s long, slender blocks were featured in the Museum of Modern Art’s 1950-51 exhibition of SOM’s work, drawing praise from critic Aline Louchheim, among others.[i]  Richardson left the firm in 1951 to take up a teaching career.  When Owings also departed for California, in the wake of his Plan Commission resignation, the scheme lost its champions.  Nervous about the galleries’ maintenance in winter and releasing so many units onto the market at once, New York Life asked SOM to break Richardson’s scheme into four smaller, 21-story blocks that could be built in phases.[ii]  While the office redesigned these, the local investment groups backed out of their agreements on the site’s southeastern parcels.  New York Life also agreed to develop those, asking SOM to design five new blocks and prioritizing these while the north blocks were redesigned.[iii]  The southern blocks were straightforward, planned around central corridors with workmanlike facades rendered in steel-framed curtain walls, asbestos-cement spandrel panels, and metal-framed windows, broken up by occasional balconies with solid concrete end walls faced in plain gray brick.  Two blocks, at 533 and 555 E. 33rd Place, were started in early 1952 and opened to tenants in June 1953, a “major milestone” but an architectural disappointment—the Architect and Building News noted that these were “kept as simple as possible.”[iv]  At $74 to $143 per month ($735 to $1418), the units met New York Life’s middle-class targets, however, and they offered amenities not available to most South Side residents: gas kitchen ranges and electric refrigerators as well as master television antennas and outlets for tenant-supplied electric air conditioners.[v]  If not the dramatic “skyscrapers on their sides” that Richardson’s scheme had promised, these simple blocks were attractive to prospective renters; leasing agents Draper and Kramer received 1300 inquiries for their 238 apartments.[vi]  Only about 10% of the first year’s leases went to white residents, though, and critics argued that Lake Meadows was—intentionally or not—concentrating Black residents in areas that, while no longer slums, were still ghettoes.[vii]

Two more of these simpler blocks were built in 1953-54, but after five years, the original northern site still sat vacant.  New York Life faced bureaucratic delays and faced the daunting prospect of turning its rubble-strewn expanse into an attractive neighborhood.  Critics remained skeptical about Lake Meadows’ prospects and—in the words of Architectural Forum—whether the “Negro market can pay.”[viii]  “It has taken New York Life six years to get its idea to where it stands today,” Forum reported, “still barely 25% complete.”  Now “controversial and beleaguered,” the project had fewer than 500 occupied units and over a hundred acres of empty land, still surrounded by “the toughest, most criminal slums in Chicago,” discouraging interest in the ‘pioneering’ project.[ix]  New York Life adjusted its strategy, first building the 17-acre shopping center in the site’s southwest corner.  The center—a slice of the “suburbs in the city”—opened in 1954.  Downtown retailer Goldblatt’s established an anchor store there, which boosted the project’s reputation.  Reassured, in April 1955, New York Life announced it would finally, start construction on two of the north site’s 21-story blocks. 

Mayor Daley, then in office for just over a year, helped break ground for the first two northern blocks in May 1956.  Nelson announced that New York Life would begin construction on the second pair in late 1956, along with 40 low-rise duplexes and a final, higher-end 12-story block on the development’s eastern side.  While not as striking or innovative as Richardson’s giant slabs, the taller blocks made extensive use of curtain walls, improving on the first phase’s solid end walls to provide wrap-around views of the lake and city.  Each apartment had a balcony, and the blocks’ arrangement allowed for the large, open space between them that Richardson had envisioned.  Encouraged, by 1957, the Daley administration authorized half a dozen more land clearance projects on the Lake Meadows model and began considering another eight.  As the taller blocks opened, Draper and Kramer launched a more balanced publicity campaign; 30% of its new leases went to white tenants, making the new buildings “outstanding exceptions” to Chicago’s segregated market.[x] 

A clubhouse and business center opened in 1959 and 1960, and after twelve years, Lake Meadows was complete.[xi]  “Elevator apartment buildings stand where teeming, unsanitary, and unsafe stone front walkups once stood,” wrote the Tribune’s Sheila Wolfe in 1959.  Ebony praised the project’s opening in 1960: 

“Some 7000 Chicagoans enjoy the spaciousness of suburban living, though only three miles from the teeming Loop.  Active participants in the nation’s biggest and most successful venture in high-grade interracial housing, they are the envied residents of Lake Meadows—Chicago’s futuristic South Side development near Lake Michigan’s shores.”[xii]

But the project’s long saga drew critics who contrasted its extraordinary costs with its limited achievement.  Even the Land Clearance Commission’s chairman, Phil Doyle, admitted that the ultimate cost to the city in clearance, infrastructure, and tax losses while the land sat fallow had been between $55 and $60 million, or $30,000 per unit, making Lake Meadows more heavily subsidized than the city’s public housing.[xiii]  The Defender’s Doc Young lamented that while “the rich and middle class” lived “side by side,” there “were no poor” in Lake Meadows; its “country-like spaciousness” was possible only because the city moved more than 7000 residents out and replaced them with just 4000.  On the other hand, Architectural Forum thought that Lake Meadows had not done enough.  At the project’s outset, New York Life estimated 19,000 families on the South side could afford its rents; as massive as it was, Lake Meadows accommodated just 10% of them.[xiv]

Efforts to house more prospective middle-class residents were repeated in the five diagonally sited blocks of Prairie Shores, north of Lake Meadows and adjacent to Michael Reese Hospital, which financed the project.  Intended as a buffer for the hospital and housing for its doctors and staff, Prairie Shores was more compact and marketed more broadly than Lake Meadows.  Designed by Loebl, Schlossman, and Bennett and built between 1957 and 1961, its 20-story blocks featured floor-to-ceiling windows that opened every one of its 1700 apartments to skyline or lake views.  Demand was fierce; the first two blocks were rented immediately when they opened in 1960, and the last three buildings were rushed to completion.  Draper and Kramer, the project’s rental agents, again made a concerted effort at racial balance, advertising the “New South Side” to northside whites as Chicago’s “original Gold Coast.”  With “unbelievably low rentals” of $112 for one-bedroom units ($1000 in 2020) and priority for Michael Reese’s doctors and staff, Prairie Shores opened with 80% white and 20% Black residents–within a few percent of the city’s demographic split at the time.[xv]  HOMES, Inc., a non-profit group advocating against housing segregation, praised Lake Meadows and Prairie Shores for “harmonious housing integration” in 1961.[xvi]

---

[i] “Big South Side Area is Getting Her Face Lifted [Lake Meadows].”  Chicago Daily Tribune, Sept. 23, 1951.  W_A7 and Aline B. Louchheim, “Architecture of and for Our Day.”  New York Times, Sept. 24, 1950.  X9.

[ii] “Lake Meadows Rises as Negro Market Proves Worrisome.”  Architectural Forum, November, 1954.  35. 

[iii] “Big South Side Area is Getting Her Face Lifted.”  Chicago Daily Tribune, Sept. 23, 1951.  N_A7.

[iv] “Lake Meadows Development, Chicago.”  The Architect and Building News, vol. 209.  January, 1956.  40-46.

[v] “Lake Meadows to Open Up Tax Paying Housing.”  Chicago Daily Tribune, June 21, 1953.  41.

[vi] “Lake Meadows Project Draws 1300 Queries.”  Chicago Daily Tribune, Nov. 9, 1952.  S_A1.

[vii] Thomas Buck, “90% Of N. Y. Life Housing Tract Under Contract.” Chicago Daily Tribune, May 12, 1952, pp. 2-a2.

[viii] “Lake Meadows Rises as Negro Market Proves Worrisome.”  Architectural Forum, November, 1954.  35. 

[ix] “Lake Meadows Rises as Negro Market Proves Worrisome.”  Architectural Forum, November, 1954.  35. 

[x] Homer Smith, “Chicago’s is Black Belt Expands, but Never Cracks.” Chicago Daily Defender, May 20, 1963. 9.

[xi] Thomas Buck, “Chicago Spirit Meets a Challenge.”  Chicago Daily Tribune, Nov. 9, 1958.  12.

[xii] “Lake Meadows: Suburb Within a City.”  Ebony, vol. 16, no. 2, Dec. 1960. 27–37. 

[xiii] Sheila Wolfe, “Vast Project Changes Face of South Side: Millions Spent to Clear, Rebuild 732 Acres.” Chicago Daily Tribune, Jun 4, 1959. 1-s6.

[xiv] “Chicago Redevelops [Lake Meadows].”  Architectural Forum, Vol., 93, no. 2.  August, 1950.  98-105.

[xv] See, for instance, “Chicago’s New Near South Side [Display Ad].”  Chicago Daily Tribune, June 8, 1958.  20.

[xvi] Sheila Wolfe, “Vast Project Changes Face Of South Side.” Chicago Daily Tribune, June 4, 1959. 1-s6and “More Interracial Dwellings is Summertime Project of Home, Inc.” Chicago Daily Defender, June 26, 1961. 5.

[Chicago Skyscrapers, 1934-1986, published by University of Illinois Press, is out now–available on Bookshop.org and Amazon.com, among other outlets.

Lake Meadows (1950-61), SOM

“A frequent and false contention of public housing advocates,” wrote the Tribune’s editorial board in 1944, “is that government has to undertake the job of slum clearance, with all the waste, tax evasion, political favoritism, and social worker interference in the lives of tenants that public housing seems unable to escape.”[i]  The conservative Tribune saw red in any large government project, but its editorial board found public housing particularly suspect, arguing for free market solutions to Chicago’s housing problems.  The paper strongly supported Illinois’ Neighborhood Redevelopment Act, passed in 1941 but tied up in lawsuits until 1948, which allowed municipalities to condemn and clear so-called ‘blighted land’ and convey it to private developers.[ii]  Using eminent domain, a housing authority could condemn a ‘slum’ and purchase its land at market rates.  It could then sell this land at a loss to private developers who would, at their risk, build housing that they would then rent at agreed-upon, below-market rates.  The city’s initial expense would be recouped by taxes from improved properties, while the developers’ profit would be assured by the land’s low purchase price.  Combining condemnation with private investment in the service of affordable housing seemed to square the circle of Chicago’s housing problem, promising much-needed modern accommodation without requiring the city to construct it. 

Equitable and New York Life expressed interest in Chicago housing as early as 1945 but remained sidelined until the Act’s legal status was resolved.[iii]  New York Life, then completing the Fresh Meadows development in Queens, announced in July 1948 that they would invest $18,000,000 on a 100-acre redevelopment project for 1400 new, high-rise apartments.  Between 31st and 25th streets, the Illinois Central’s tracks, and South Park Way (now Martin Luther King Boulevard), the site was home to more than 3500 families in some of the city’s most dilapidated housing.  Chicago and the state of Illinois agreed to split the $3,000,000 cost of purchasing and razing the existing neighborhood, which New York Life would purchase for just $500,000.[iv]  Two smaller parcels in the site’s southeast corner were sold at similar discounts to Black insurance firms and South Side families who planned to build single-family homes.[v]  The Kennelly administration announced a federal grant to support the land purchase in July 1949.  That August, New York Life announced that Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, designing their block-long Manhattan House in New York’s Lenox Hill, would also design the Chicago development.[vi]  Honoring their pioneering—though, as the Defender pointed out, segregated—project in Queens, New York Life announced that the Chicago project would be called “Lake Meadows.”[vii]

However, New York Life would not commit until two obstacles were removed.  The first was the ongoing building code controversy. The company’s vice president for development, Otto L. Nelson, Jr., told the Tribune in July 1948 that plans wouldn’t be drawn up until material questions—especially regarding drywall—were resolved, “dangling,” as one reporter put it, “an attractive bait before house-hungry Chicagoans.”[viii]  A year and a half would pass before the new code was adopted.  More specific to Lake Meadows, however, was Cottage Grove Avenue, a diagonal traffic artery that sliced across the project site.  Closing minor east-west streets passed the city council without issue but Cottage Grove was one of the South Side’s major traffic routes.  The Chicago Plan Commission, led by Nathaniel Owings, reviewed New York Life’s request to vacate the street in late 1950.  Opponents latched on to Owings’ clear conflict of interest in approving condemnation for a project his company was designing.  He resigned from the Commission in frustration, though the Cottage Grove closure passed.[ix] 

The Cottage Grove controversy stirred other objections.  Land acquisition costs mounted as the city purchased and razed the neighborhood piecemeal, ballooning to $11 million.  Other aspects of the plan drew fire from housing activists.  Lake Meadows, they pointed out, would house just half the neighborhood’s former population and the units’ projected rents, between $77 and $150 a month ($840 and $1650 in 2020 figures), were on par with the extortionate rates charged for ‘kitchenette’ apartments.[x]  Only a quarter of the existing residents would qualify for public housing elsewhere—and they would face long waits for replacement units in projects like Dearborn Homes.  Those ineligible for public housing would be relocated to “equivalent dwellings” in ‘blighted’ neighborhoods no better than those they had left. 

These critiques smoldered as SOM’s initial designs made a more favorable public impression.  Their “suburb in the city” grew from a tour of European housing developments by SOM architect Ambrose Richardson (1917-1995) and New York Life manager Jack Gurney.  The resulting masterplan and building plans, revealed in July 1950, reflected their research, with ten long, low bars of two-story row houses surrounding two massive, 23-story Corbusier-inspired slabs, each a third of a mile long and just 40’ deep. These bracketed a vast central garden, raised above an underground parking garage and complemented by a suburban-scale shopping mall in the site’s southwestern corner.  The slabs accommodated 1288 apartments along 9’-8” deep exterior corridors, called “sidewalks in the sky” by SOM, that would double as outdoor play spaces.  The narrow plan allowed unit plans one room deep, allowing natural ventilation, with kitchens adjacent to the units’ entries, putting parents in direct line of sight to children playing on the galleries.  Their elevations were repetitive along their entire façades, with continuous, shaded ribbon windows taking full advantage of southern sunlight.[xi]  “These will be some of the best apartments in Chicago,” noted Architectural Forum, praising the replacement of “dismal” enclosed hallways by outdoor galleries.[xii]  The Defender noted another advance over Lake Meadows’ New York counterparts; “Lake Meadows,” it reassured readers, “will know ‘no discrimination or segregation based upon race, creed, color or national origin.”[xiii]  (cont.)

---

[i] “Slum Clearance by Private Enterprise.”  Chicago Daily Tribune, May 29, 1944.  6.

[ii] “Chicago Housing Plan Cleared by Supreme Court.”  Chicago Daily Tribune, Mar. 19, 1948.  24.

[iii] Edward Schreiber, “Two Insurance Firms May Ask Housing Sites: Consider Investing in Chicago.” Chicago Daily Tribune, Dec 7, 1945. 39.

[iv] “1,800 Flats Will Be Built On South Side.” Chicago Daily Tribune, Jul 22, 1948. 1-b6.

[v] “Redevelopment Project No. 1.”  Chicago Daily Tribune, July 30, 1949.  8.

[vi] “Pick Architects for 1,400 Unit Apartment Job.”  Chicago Daily Tribune, Aug. 16, 1949.  17 and “Big South Side Area is Getting Her Face Lifted [Lake Meadows].”  Chicago Daily Tribune, Sept. 23, 1951.  W_A7.

[vii] “New York Life’s Lake Meadows to be Last Word in Modern Living.” The Chicago Defender, July 22, 1950. 14.

[viii] Clayton Kirkpatrick, “4 Years Drag By and No Building Codes in Sight.”  Chicago Daily Tribune, Aug. 29, 1948.  5.

[ix] “Owings Quits Plan Board as Probe Impends.”  Chicago Daily Tribune, Jan. 11, 1951 and “Mr. Owings and the Plan Commission.”  Chicago Daily Tribune, Oct. 10, 1950.  18. 

[x] “Chicago Redevelops.”  Architectural Forum, Vol. 93, no. 2.  August, 1950.  100 and “Eight Chicago Apartments.”  Architectural Forum, vol. 103, no. 5.  November, 1955.  143.

[xi] Thomas Buck, “Mammoth Slum Building Plan Given Council.”  Chicago Daily Tribune, July 13, 1950.  12 and “New York Life’s Lake Meadows to be Last Word in Modern Living.”  Chicago Defender (National Edition), July 22, 1950.  14.

[xii] “Chicago Redevelops [Lake Meadows].”  Architectural Forum, Vol., 93, no. 2.  August, 1950.  98.

[xiii] New York Life’s Lake Meadows to be Last Word in Modern Living.”  Chicago Defender (National Edition), July 22, 1950.  14.

[Chicago Skyscrapers, 1934-1986, published by University of Illinois Press, is out now–available on Bookshop.org and Amazon.com, among other outlets.

1000 N. Lake Shore Dr. (1953), Sidney Morris

Mies’ apartments took center stage in coverage of Chicago’s apartment building, but other developments were influential locally, in architectural and financial terms.  The 23-story slab that replaced the 1900 Edith Rockefeller McCormick mansion was the earliest among these.  Harold Perlman, a lawyer and philanthropist who had established a reputation for fighting insidious banking practices, purchased the mansion and the entire block on which it sat in 1953.  The site was among the most prestigious in the city, at the corner of Michigan Avenue, Oak Street, and Lake Shore Drive, with views over Oak Street Beach and along the ‘millionaire’s row” of East Lake Shore Drive that wrapped around the northern edge of Streeterville.  Perlman had invested in a shopping center at Lincoln and McCormick designed by architect Sidney Morris, who had a small but growing practice that had focused entirely on single-family homes and low-rise retail development, in particular for some of the CHA’s outlying projects, and he hired Morris to design a scheme for the site.  After an initial effort of 200 units in a 24-story block, published in the Tribune in December 1952, Perlman retreated slightly, announcing plans for a building one story shorter and with seventeen fewer units, developed by Morris with in collaboration with Shaw, Metz, and Dolio in May 1953.[i]  Morris described the project’s massing as a response to the site’s unparalleled views, its open southern exposure and the desire to take advantage of lake breezes in summer, and the relative privacy of Bellevue Place. This residential street intersected the Drive at the north edge of the site.  The result was a tall slab oriented perpendicular to the Lake—seemingly contradicting the desire for views—but arranged around two elevator cores so that most units either had corner exposure or, in the center of the block, were open to both the north and south facades.  This took advantage of the relatively low construction around the block—which would change quickly in the ensuing boom years—while orienting most units away from the traffic noise on the busy Drive to the east.  Morris’ facades borrowed from contemporary curtain wall practice, with aluminum, porcelain enameled steel [???] and glass curtain walls on the north and south facades, the latter expanded with long, horizontal sunshades that offered protection from the summer sun while allowing low winter sun to penetrate the living, dining, and sleeping rooms organized along this edge.[ii]  The 187 apartments ranged from one to three bedrooms, arranged around wet cores that clustered around the two pairs of elevator shafts and fire stairs at roughly quarter points of the plan and pushed to the outer, east and west walls of the slab in the western corner units, where views were least impressive.  Units on the east lake end tucked their kitchens and baths inward so that dining and living rooms could take advantage of the lake views—the end wall here was rendered in long strip windows that “framed a shore view that rivals the Riviera or Rio’s Copacabana Beach,” an optimistic pitch, but one that reflected the appeal of the site.  However, the building’s signature features were two dozen randomly placed balconies on the north façade that cantilevered out from various bedrooms and living rooms.  Capped with sheltering roofs, these replicated on a smaller scale the elaborate roof terraces of neighboring 1920s co-op towers on the Drive. They marked the first true balconies in Chicago apartment construction.  While climatically questionable, the provision of a small outdoor space to sit or to grill would become a standard feature of the city’s private high rises, offering architectural variety and richness that would form a counterpoint to the flat curtain wall—but at the same time presenting environmental issues that required careful detailing and insulation to prevent excessive heat loss in winter. 

Frank Kornacker engineered the building’s structure, which featured a composite column design for the lower half of the structure and simply reinforced concrete for the remainder.  The floor slabs included copper coils for radiant heating, controlled by individual units’ thermostats, which were a new enough feature that Honeywell used the building for its local advertising.[iii]  Cooling presented Morris and Perlman with a conundrum.  While the technology to cool apartments with centrally-chilled water was becoming more affordable, it was not yet a full-on expectation of even luxury apartment tenants—only 40 tenants in Mies’ 860-880 building had opted for installing either room or unit machines.[iv]  Individual units protruding from building elevations were unsightly (Mies had these specially designed to be fully inside the units, taking up valuable space but saving the buildings’ crisp facades from random intrusions of the inevitable metal boxes), but options for central chilling proved untenable; Morris considered using the copper heating coils embedded in each slab for chilling as well but recognized that there would be inevitable problems with condensation on the resulting cold slabs.  Providing ducted chilled air, as in a typical air-conditioned office building, proved similarly uneconomical, as it would have required significant sectional space over corridors and interior rooms that would have pushed floor-to-floor heights up; the combined cost of extra exterior walls, fire stairs, and shafts would not, Perlman felt, be reflected in higher rents.  Ultimately the building was provided with no central air conditioning; additional high-voltage outlets were provided near windows to allow individual tenants to install their own self-contained units, but Morris bemoaned the effect they would have on the building’s elevations, trying unsuccessfully to design specialized interior units similar to those developed for 860-880.[v]  1000 N. Lake Shore would, however, be one of the last tall developer buildings in Chicago to forego air conditioning. There were projects under construction even as it opened that found ways to handle the budgetary and architectural issues that frustrated Morris here.

Construction began in May 1953 and was complete by August 1954.[vi]  Its rapid construction was matched by enthusiastic rentals; aimed squarely at the expanding luxury market, tenants were required to advance six months’ rent and to sign five-year leases.  But even with these high financial bars and commitments, two-thirds of the project’s units were rented in March 1954, nearly five months before tenants could move in.  The building’s demographics reflected Perlman’s predictions, with professional singles and couples forming the majority and only six children among the 183 apartments.[vii]  Those tenants found a wealth of high-end finishes and amenities in the finished building, which was marketed as a cosmopolitan counterpoint to the stodgier 1920s co-ops that it joined on the Drive.  A marketing brochure managed to mention “the beauty of Parisian boulevards” and the “sophistication of New York’s E. 50s” alongside references to the French Riviera and the building’s Niemeyer-esque “Brazilian Brises-Soleil” on its south façade.  Alongside this were mentions of the design’s combination of traditional materials, such as sidewalks of Vermont slate and column covers of Norwegian granite, with technically-advanced elements, such as heat-absorbing glass and “fine handsome aluminum” that formed the curtain wall and its operable windows.[viii]  At its base, a stepped entrance along Lake Shore Drive was highlighted by a cast bronze relief. At the same time, an asymmetrical entry on Bellevue Place provided access, through a wood-paneled lobby, to the two elevator cores.

Architectural Forum’s apartment panel found faults with Morris’ design, from its massing that addressed Bellevue Place instead of the lakefront to its “dinky balconies” that made for “timid decoration.”  Its end walls, despite the broad strip windows along the eastern, lake-facing facade, were for Yamasaki symptomatic of an ‘indecision as to whether to go to a masonry or glass building,’ a quandary that would continue to define architects’ approaches to apartment blocks—should they emulate the “glass houses” that had proven popular but that illustrated the inherent privacy and environmental problems in pure curtain walls?  Or should they adopt the other Chicago paradigm, the Promontory block with its more limited windows and the frank acceptance of blank walls covering service areas?  Morris, to his credit, distinguished between the panoramic east end and the western arrangement of bedrooms and bathrooms; Yamasaki’s critique was only applicable, really, to the decision not to carry the curtain wall all the way around the building’s eastern end.  Yet the random balconies and the asymmetries of the ground floor, while “laudable” in their “attempt to provide some fun in the design,” were, for the panel, “not very well carried through.”[ix]  Whatever its architectural faults, Perlman found the combination of the Lake Shore Drive site and of Morris’ planning successful enough that he would develop the 55-story 1000 Lake Shore Plaza on the same block in 1964, selling both of them in 1969 as he abandoned his development career to focus on his law practice.

---

[i] Al Chase, “Plan Flats on Famed Gold Coast Block.” Chicago Daily Tribune, Dec 3, 1952. 1.

[ii] Sidney H. Morris & Associates.  1000 Lake Shore Drive [Building Brochure].  McNally and Quinn Records, Series I, Box.FF 2.35, Ryerson and Burnham Libraries, The Art Institute of Chicago.  1953?

[iii] Al Chase, “Successor to Lake Front Mansion.”  Chicago Daily Tribune, May 12, 1953.  B7; see, too, “Honeywell Thermostats [Display Ad].” Chicago Daily Tribune, Oct 20, 1953. 1-a7.

[iv] “Mies van der Rohe’s New Buildings.”  Architectural Forum, Vol. 97, no. 5.  November, 1952.  101.

[v] Joseph Egelhof, “Scan Central vs. Unit Air Conditioning.”  Chicago Daily Tribune, Sept. 18, 1953.  C9.

[vi] Al Chase, “Successor to Lake Front Mansion.”  Chicago Daily Tribune, May 12, 1953.  B7 and Al Chase, “ ‘1000 Building’ Rising, Filling at Rapid Pace.”  Chicago Daily Tribune, Mar. 27, 1954.  A5.

[vii] Al Chase, “ ‘1000 Building’ Rising, Filling at Rapid Pace.”  Chicago Daily Tribune, Mar. 27, 1954.  A5.

[viii] Sidney H. Morris & Associates.  1000 Lake Shore Drive [Building Brochure].  McNally and Quinn Records, Series I, Box.FF 2.35, Ryerson and Burnham Libraries, The Art Institute of Chicago.  1953?

[ix] “Eight Chicago Apartments.”  Op. cit., 142, 147.

[Chicago Skyscrapers, 1934-1986, published by University of Illinois Press, is out now–available on Bookshop.org and Amazon.com, among other outlets.

Borg-Warner (A. Epstein & Sons/William Lescaze, 1955-1958)

Inland Steel and Prudential were new headquarters buildings funded by large corporations.  A more serious indication of faith in the Loop would be a purely speculative investment—developers constructing skyscrapers in anticipation of future tenants.  This had formed the bulk of the downtown real estate market before the depression, but the lack of demand throughout the 1940s and early 1950s discouraged such optimism.  It was notable, therefore, when Robert McCormick, Jr., representing the New York investment firm Collins Tuttle & Company, presented plans for a 20-story tall office building on the corner of Michigan and Adams in October 1955.  The Pullman Company, which had occupied a 10-story headquarters building on the site designed by Solon Spencer Beman since 1884, would sell the site and would take 35,000 square feet of space in the new building, but the remainder of the proposed 362,000 square feet would be speculative.  The Pullman Building was obsolete, the company’s spokesman emphasized, “erected…before the day of steel skeleton construction…its brick and granite walls are several feet thick.”[i] 

The proposed replacement could not have differed more from the doomed structure’s masonry bearing walls and narrow arched windows.  Collins and Tuttle hired New York architect William Lescaze (1896-1969), best known for his PSFS building in Philadelphia, who responded with a horizontally striated curtain wall block with continuous spandrels of gold anodized aluminum, light inset strip windows, and a glazed lobby with black granite interiors.  Office space would wrap around a central core containing “air conditioning and high speed electronically controlled elevators,” all for an estimated $12.5 million.[ii]

Automotive machinery manufacturer Borg-Warner signed a lease for the top five floors in January 1956, ensuring the project’s viability and lending it a new name.[iii]  The project also gained local backing from Samuel Banowit, a Chicago attorney who had launched his downtown efforts in 1952 by purchasing the Boston Store at Madison and Dearborn (Holabird and Roche, 1905).  Banowit retained Lescaze as a “consulting architect” but hired A. Epstein & Sons to lead the project.[iv]  Epstein produced a more restrained design, published in May 1956, that abandoned Lescaze’s gold anodized skin for “either aluminum or stainless steel vertical fins and window sash with spandrels…of navy blue porcelain enamel.”  The lobby evolved, too.  It would contain a showroom for Borg-Warner’s heavy machinery set against black and pink marble walls with more durable terrazzo floors.[v]  Architectural Record published the project in March 1957. By that time, Epstein and Lescaze had settled on aluminum mullions in a natural finish and blue porcelain-enameled steel for spandrel panels.[vi]  The blue spandrels would contrast with the Loop’s stone-and-brick surroundings, but Epstein thought it was less ‘faddish’ than the original gold and black and better aligned with Borg-Warner’s image.[vii]  The contrast between the new building’s construction and the Pullman’s drew as much interest.  The curtain wall, still a novelty at “only 1-1/2 inches thick,” compared with Pullman’s “massive stone walls, some of them 9 feet thick,” in the words of the Tribune’s Ernest Fuller.  This wall’s spandrel panels were still backed up with masonry fireproofing— “to comply with Chicago building regulations”—though these knee walls were no longer required.  Like the Prudential, Borg-Warner backed these spandrel walls with perimeter air conditioning cabinets that blanketed the curtain walls with seasonal hot or cold air and automatic elevators—still noteworthy in the building’s opening press for eschewing human operators—including a dedicated cab to Borg-Warner’s 21st-floor penthouse executive offices. 

Sumner Sollitt began construction on Borg-Warner in the summer of 1957.  Inland had proven that steel bearing piles were effective and economical for a structure of its size, but the noise and vibration of pile drivers on-site threatened to disrupt Orchestra Hall next door.  Steel remained scarce, too, with wait times of a year or more.  As a result, Epstein’s engineers specified concrete caissons, but efforts to keep groundwater out of these undermined Orchestra Hall’s north wall, leading its pile foundations to settle.  Caisson techniques in the city would evolve to deal with the constant threats of flooding and adjacent settlement.[viii]  As the building’s steelwork topped out in November 1957, Banowit reported that the building was fully leased, with some of the city’s major industrial firms—American Can and food company Libby, McNeil & Libby in particular—taking full floors.[ix]  Tenants moved in during the summer of 1958, and the building formally opened that August, with Borg-Warner’s chairman, R.C. Ingersoll, predicting that the “colorful new building” would be just the first of many “facelifts” along Michigan Avenue.  (Figure 4.15)  Banowit echoed this in his opening remarks.  He was, in fact, already at work on Borg-Warner’s sequel with his renamed company, National Properties, telling the press in January 1957 that he had purchased the site of Northwestern’s abortive 1935 skyscraper proposal at LaSalle and Jackson, adjacent to the Board of Trade.  “The city still needs more central area office space,” he told the Tribune, pointing to Borg-Warner’s rapid leasing. 

---

[i] Ernest Fuller, “Announce Plan to Replace Historic Pullman Building.”  Chicago Daily Tribune, Oct. 5, 1955.  1.  .

[ii]  Ibid. 

[iii] “Skyscraper’s Main Tenant Will be Borg.”  Chicago Daily Tribune, Jan. 26, 1956.  D7.

[iv] “Borg-Warner Building, 200 South Michigan Ave., Chicago.”  Architectural Record, Vol. 121, no. 3.  March, 1957.  236.

[v] “Replacement for Pullman Building.”  Chicago Daily Tribune, May 23, 1956.  C7.

[vi] “Borg-Warner Building, 200 South Michigan Ave., Chicago,” op. cit.  236.

[vii] Ernest Fuller, “Choose a Color Plan—For a New Skyscraper.”  Chicago Daily Tribune, Aug. 10, 1958.  A9 and “New and Old Materials Give Life to Skyscrapers.”  Chicago Tribune, Feb. 20, 1966.  3-K1.

[viii] Clyde N. Baker, Charles W. Pfingsten, and John P. Gnaedinger, Task Force Report No. 13: History of Chicago High Rise Building Foundations, 1948-1998.  (Chicago: Chicago Committee on High-Rise Buildings, 1998).  41.

[ix] Ernest Fuller, “Borg-Warner Building is 95% leased.”  Chicago Daily Tribune, Aug. 25, 1957.  A7; “Borg-Warner Unit is Topped Out, Dedicated.”  Chicago Daily Tribune, Nov. 12, 1957.  C6.

[Chicago Skyscrapers, 1934-1986, published by University of Illinois Press, is out now–available on Bookshop.org and Amazon.com, among other outlets.

Continued from last week:

Brunswick’s tightly spaced columns around its perimeter presented a ground-level architectural problem. Generous dimensions for office windows would be restrictive enclosing a lobby looking out onto a large civic plaza.  SOM thus faced a conundrum: how to open the building’s base in a structural system that relied on closely spaced columns.  Pei and Komendant’s walls at Kips Bay set narrowly spaced columns sit on deep girders, transferring loads over wider bays at ground level.  This made even more sense with Chicago’s difficult clay soil.  Fewer columns meant fewer caissons, saving excavation costs.  Other tall buildings in the Loop had used transfer girders below grade to spread loads from normally spaced columns above onto more widely spaced caissons below.  Graham and Goldsmith moved this element out of the ground to the lobby’s ceiling level.[i]  Kips Bay was just 20 stories tall, and its ground-level lobbies and entries were scaled to residential standards.  Carrying a building nearly twice as tall and with larger spans at ground level, Brunswick’s transfer structure had to be exponentially larger.  SOM’s preliminary designs showed a Vierendeel truss supported by nine tapering columns—like their New York office’s Beinecke Library at Yale.  However, as Brunswick’s scheme developed, its lobby grew taller and the Vierendeel truss deeper.  The expressive, tapering pin supports were simplified and enlarged into simple square columns.  In the final design, 24’ tall transfer trusses enclosed a double-height mechanical floor. They spanned 57’ from column to column—a colossal structural element articulated with expressed vertical chords matching the mullion-columns above.[ii]  To resist the enormous shear loads imposed by 36 floors above, the transfer truss also needed to be thick—7’-6”—leaving a large setback on its top surface.  Goldsmith resolved this with a curved taper to the mullion-columns, pronounced in the story above the transfer girder and smoothed into a gradual slope that matches each mullion-column’s cross-section to the diminishing loads it carries as it ascends.  To many, this geometry mimicked the Monadnock’s curved, tapering bearing walls, four blocks south.  Goldsmith denied a direct inspiration, but Graham suggested at least a philosophical continuity between the two.  “The Monadnock building could be called a tube too,” he argued, as its famous brick exterior carries gravity and wind loads, assisted by a lighter steel structure within.[iii]

Brunswick’s exterior tube and interior shear walls are connected by stiff floor diaphragms.  One-way pan joists handle the 37’ spans from perimeter to core, supplemented by two-way waffle slabs at the corners.  This allowed the exterior frame to handle most of the lateral loads in the top portion of the tower and the core walls to take up shear loads as they increased toward the building base, a synergetic behavior Khan and Iyengar termed “frame-shear wall interaction.”[iv]  To accommodate up to 1-1/4 inches of thermal expansion in the outer tube, Khan developed hinge details at the junctions between floor and perimeter walls, restraining them horizontally while allowing them to expand and shrink during extreme weather.[v]

Brunswick opened to mixed reviews in April 1965.  Budget concerns eliminated travertine that Graham had intended to clad the entire structure, like the granite veneer at Hartford.  The exposed concrete structure had its own clarity. Still, it remained on the giant, seven-foot square piers at the lobby level, creating a material discontinuity that makes the base appear fragile compared with the solid structure above.  Architectural Forum compared the Brunswick to Eero Saarinen’s headquarters for CBS a year after its opening, noting that the two structures revived bearing wall structures for tall buildings, transforming their structural perimeters from “punctured walls” to “light columns” of reinforced concrete.  While Forum felt that Brunswick’s structural expression was purer than CBS’, which paired columns with vertical risers like the Equitable’s, Forum found the “enormous unity” of Saarinen’s stark, granite-clad shaft more satisfying.[vi] Brunswick’s structural innovations made Khan rethink tall building structures, turning conventional frames inside out.  The tube structure would become an SOM trademark. The challenging transition from a perforated bearing wall to a broad, open lobby would evolve through the firm’s work in Chicago and elsewhere.  The Brunswick was also a powerful re-interpretation of Chicago traditions, a concrete rejoinder to the fine steel grains of the Harris and Continental.  Carl Condit thought its concrete frame showed a “combination of the traditional masonry bearing wall and the articulated or cellular wall developed by the Chicago school for steel-framed construction” that brought back—in a new dialect— “the texture, depth, and mass that we miss in the featureless and brittle curtain of enameled steel and glass.”[vii]

---

[i] “A Tale of Two Towers.”  Architectural Forum, April, 1966.  29-30.

[ii] Promotional Brochure, “Materialite® Lightweight Concrete Aggregate.”  General Dynamics Corporation, Chicago.  N.d.

[iii] Betty Blum [????], “Oral History of Bruce J. Graham.” Art Institute of Chicago Architects’ Oral History Project.  89.

[iv] “Brunswick Building, Chicago, Illinois (USA).”  IABSE Structures.  Vol. 6, 1982.

[v] “Brunswick Building, Chicago, Illinois (USA).”  IABSE Structures.  Vol. 6, 1982.

[vi] “A Tale of Two Towers.”  Architectural Forum, April, 1966.  28-37.

[vii] Carl W. Condit, “The New Architecture of Chicago.”  Chicago Review, 17:2/3, special issue on New Chicago Writing and Art.  1964.  115-116.

[Chicago Skyscrapers, 1934-1986, published by University of Illinois Press, is out now–available on Bookshop.org and Amazon.com, among other outlets.

Brunswick (SOM, 1961-1964)

Planning for Chicago’s new Civic Center (see Chapter 7) gained renewed attention when Arthur Rubloff announced a project to transform Washington Street into Chicago’s “answer to Rockefeller Center” in October 1961.[i]  Rubloff’s client, Brunswick, had begun as a billiard table manufacturer in Cincinnati in 1845, moving to Chicago in the 1870s, expanding into factories on the River’s north bank in the 1880s, and opening corporate offices in the city in 1907.  In 1913, Brunswick moved into the former Studebaker Building on South Wabash, diversifying into real estate, small marine craft, and recreation and becoming a Fortune 500 company in 1957.[ii]  As part of its re-branding, Rubloff convinced Brunswick to become the principal tenant in his Washington Street project.

The project would replace the Chicago Title and Trust building, an 1892 building by Henry Cobb at the corner of Washington and Dearborn.  The quarter-block site was at the “crossroads of Chicago’s business and financial centers,” overlooking the site of the planned Civic Center.  Rubloff planned a huge development—800,000 square feet, with an estimated cost of 35 million dollars, pitching it as “the largest and tallest to be constructed in the heart of the Loop since the early 1930s,” carefully excluding the million-square-foot Prudential.  Rubloff signed Brunswick to a fifth of the building’s planned space, with the remainder of the structure to be rented out.[iii] 

Rubloff hired SOM, whose design would be influential, providing open, unobstructed floor plates while advancing the office’s interest in new structural strategies for building taller.  SOM’s team was led by Bill Hartmann, who paired Bruce Graham and Myron Goldsmith as design partners—one of the few times the two were credited on the same project—with Fazlur Khan leading the structural design.[iv]  Rubloff asked for column-free floors and a modular approach to services allowing flexibility in office layouts.  At the building’s base, Rubloff planned a subterranean retail mall connecting to the Civic Center’s concourse, linked by escalators to a ground-level lobby that would look out to its plaza.  The office floors were arranged in a single rectangular shaft with a ‘bustle’ on the lower nine levels providing large floor plates of 27,000 square feet toward the base and 19,400 square feet in the main shaft.^[v]

Supporting the building without interior columns led to its pivotal structural design.  Hartmann had been intrigued by I.M. Pei’s Kips Bay Plaza in New York City, which carried its floor loads on an exposed concrete exoskeleton that also enclosed the building.[vi]  Distilling the structure onto the exterior wall eliminated columns, making more efficient and flexible planning inside, but it also suggested re-considering the then-ascendant curtain wall.  SOM had completed the Hartford Building’s exposed concrete frame in 1961, as Pei’s designs were being published and his University Apartments in Hyde Park, engineered by August Komendant, were being completed—Khan and his family took an apartment in them after they opened.  The New York Times had noted that the exoskeletal approach revived the traditional idea of the exterior bearing wall—a seemingly reactionary structural development.  Steel reinforcing now allowed engineers to avoid the thick, heavy masses plaguing traditional masonry wall buildings like the Monadnock.  Kips Bay’s “honeycomb” structure, the Times reported, performed like a bearing wall structurally, but its stiffness and strength were so concentrated in its joints and structural mullions that it maintained the transparency of a glazed curtain wall.[vii] 

This integration provided more design freedom than what Pei called the “straitjacket of punching holes in a brick wall.” Still, SOM discovered structural potential beyond what Komendant and Pei had achieved.[viii]  Recalling the Equitable design that had found efficiencies in its stiffer exterior connections, SOM engineer Hal Iyengar realized that Pei’s “honeycomb bearing wall” could be combined with Equitable’s concentration on the exterior structure to suggest a new structural species.  Instead of designing the Brunswick as a “system of bays,” it would evolve as a “tubular building,” its structure condensed entirely onto the perimeter and core, creating two concentric tubes linked by stiff floor plates.  Shear walls enclosing plumbing, elevators, and fire stairs formed the inner core tube, while the outer tube would be made of four giant perimeter shear walls, each perforated, or “honeycombed,” as Pei had termed it, by large glass windows.  Replacing Equitable’s massive, widely spaced columns with a network of much smaller, closely spaced elements, Iyengar and Fazlur Khan balanced shear walls’ stiffness with a glass wall’s transparency.[ix]  The resulting tube structure provided the column-free interior space desired by Rubloff, with clear spans of 38 feet between the core and exterior wall, while deploying structural material where it best resisted wind loads.  Its exterior columns are located at 9’-4” centers, framing over 1,900 windows, each eight feet wide and nine feet tall.  The concentric tubes created impressive spatial efficiencies in plan and section; its floor plates have an 81 percent net to gross floor area ratio, and its exterior ‘bearing wall’ is 70% glass.[x]

(to be continued)

---

[i] James M. Gavin, “How Brunswick Corp. was Sold on Building.”  Chicago Tribune, Nov. 3, 1961.  4-C6.

[ii] Promotional Brochure, “69 West Washington, Chicago.”  (Chicago: Brunswick Corporation, 1966). 

[iii] “New Office Skyscraper Set for Loop.”  Chicago Daily Tribune, Oct. 29, 1961.  A9, and “Beauty, Success Blended in Tower.”  Chicago Tribune, Dec. 5, 1965.  3A-H1.

[iv] “A Tale of Two Towers.”  Architectural Forum, April, 1966.  31.

[v] Promotional Brochure, “69 West Washington, Chicago.”  (Chicago: Brunswick Corporation, 1966) and Donald D. Hanson, “Structuring the Loop.”  Progressive Architecture, vol. 47, no. 8.  August, 1966.  104. 

[vi] Betty Blum [????], “Oral History of Bruce J. Graham.” Art Institute of Chicago Architects’ Oral History Project.  89.  Carl Condit also noted the connection to Pei’s work.  See Carl W. Condit, “The New Architecture of Chicago.”  Chicago Review, 17:2/3, special issue on New Chicago Writing and Art.  1964.  115.

[vii] Glenn Fowler, “Facade of Building Forms Structural Support for High-Rise Apartments.”  The New York Times, Apr 23, 1961. 449.

[viii] Glenn Fowler, “Facade of Building Forms Structural Support for High-Rise Apartments.”  The New York Times, Apr 23, 1961. 449.

[ix] Betty Blum [????], “Oral History of Hal Iyengar.” Art Institute of Chicago Architects’ Oral History Project.  36-37.

[x] Donald D. Hanson, “Structuring the Loop.”  Progressive Architecture, vol. 47, no. 8.  August, 1966.  104 and Promotional Brochure, “69 West Washington, Chicago.”  (Chicago: Brunswick Corporation, 1966). 

[Chicago Skyscrapers, 1934-1986, published by University of Illinois Press, is out now–available on Bookshop.org and Amazon.com, among other outlets.

IBM (Office of Mies van der Rohe, 1968-71)

Mies’ ongoing influence had its paradigm cases in projects carried on by his office after his death.  By the mid-1960s, the incomplete Federal Center was his sole building in the Loop proper and his only Chicago high-rise besides the Metropolitan Structures’ apartments.  IBM, meanwhile, was building regional and national office buildings that reflected its successful mainframe computer business.  From Marcel Breuer’s research laboratory at La Gaude, France, to SOM’s “heavyweight compound” in Armonk, IBM saw architecture as marketing— “we were trying to look like what we produced,” Chairman Thomas Watson recalled.[i]  The company first looked at the irregular site on the Chicago River between State and Wabash in November 1966, taking an option to buy it from the Field Estate, which also owned the Sun-Times newspaper headquartered across Wabash.  They approached Mies’ office to design a 1.8 million square foot tower, planning to occupy half as its regional headquarters and to lease the rest.[ii] 

Conterato recalled driving past the squib-shaped block and Mies asking incredulously, “where’s the site?”[iii]  Placing a large building on such a minuscule, oddly-shaped site—just 1.6 acres and boomerang-shaped—was made even more challenging by its neighbors.  To the west, Marina City was now an iconic riverfront presence.  Conterato and Fujikawa were sensitive to its presence and contemplated how such a large building would affect its views from and toward the lake.  To the east, the low-rise, Naess and Murphy-designed Sun-Times building (1955-58) presented no issues above ground. Still, the newspaper had an easement extending underneath the Wabash Drive viaduct into the IBM’s site’s basement story.  Early schemes contorted the tower into a U-shape following Wabash’s curve, avoiding the south end of the site altogether—akin to the arced façade of Mies’ Cullinan Hall in Houston.[iv]  IBM bought a thin slice of Wabash from the City to straighten its site, and the Field Estate pressured the Sun-Times to abandon their basement storage, freeing up a 125’ x 275’ building footprint.  With Mies’ declining health keeping him away from the office, Fujikawa and Conterato sited the building close to the site’s northern edge, leaving a narrow, raised plaza next to Kinzie Street where a lingering railroad right-of-way made foundation work impossible and opening the riverfront to a larger plaza across from Heald Plaza, a park on the south bank that negotiated the River’s turn northward.  Satisfied that its program could be wedged onto the site, IBM exercised its option in September 1967.[v]

Knowing that the office would need expert assistance on such a large project, Mies asked to associate with C.F. Murphy to handle engineering and drawing production.  IBM’s Watson, accompanied by Daley but not the ailing Mies, presented the final, rectilinear massing of 30’ x 40’ structural bays, extended 52 stories and wrapped in familiar dark glass with vertical articulation in June 1968.[vi]  This sat atop a tall lobby and a dead-flat plaza that met the river and Kinzie Street with stark granite walls.  Watson pointed out that, at $40 million, this would be IBM’s most extensive and most expensive building yet.  Daley noted that it would be the third tallest building in the city—but only for the moment—and he paid tribute to Mies, acknowledging his now-universal influence: “Anywhere one goes in this country,” Daley noted, “one finds architecture in the Miesian style.”[vii] 

IBM’s familiar massing and articulation belied genuine developments that hinted at innovation within the office’s strict language.  “Each curtain wall should be a further development of the art,” Conterato told the Tribune, reflecting the office’s intention to address curtain walls’ thermal issues within the office’s tectonic system.  IBM was keen to address these, too.  The era’s computers were sensitive to minute changes in temperature and humidity.  Tinted glass and perimeter air conditioning helped, but IBM’s precise environmental standards led Conterato to three significant changes.  First, he dismissed the office’s long-standing allergy to insulated glazing, specifying double-glazed panes throughout and repeating the bronze-tinted solar glass of the Federal Center.  Second, working with Flour City Architectural Metals in Minneapolis, he developed one of the earliest thermally broken curtain wall systems, with continuous polyvinyl chloride gaskets insulating interior elements from the exterior.  Finally, the curtain wall performed as a rain screen, with two layers of water protection.  The outer layer in this system sheds most wind-driven water but incorporates small openings that pressurize voids behind it and thus halt the wind’s ability to drive water in further.  At the rear of these voids, a sealed layer arrests any remaining water, eliminating leaks from differential pressure.[viii]  The complex shapes and seals required were only possible in aluminum, not steel. Mies long-standing objection to aluminum’s application on a steel frame, in favor of material continuity between signifying I-beams outside and signified columns within, here met its technical match.  IBM was the first of Mies’ steel-framed buildings to be aluminum clad, in a system that cost 50% more than a typical curtain wall but that the company estimated would pay for itself in lower operating and repair costs.[ix]  IBM’s need for tight environmental control and its machines’ enormous electrical consumption led Murphy’s office to innovative mechanical system design, too.  The building’s system, developed with Carrier, captured waste heat from lights and computers, returning it to heat exchangers that produced hot water.  More than 1200 internal sensors and a dozen external ones fed an energy management system—run on an IBM 1800 mainframe—that engaged heat pumps to balance temperatures in sunny and shady areas, switched off lights in daylit sections, and turned boilers on or off depending on the outside temperature.[x]  The system reduced energy consumption by nearly 40%, an annual savings of over $600,000.[xi]

Paschen Construction began work on the site in late 1969, weeks after Mies’ death, hand-digging caissons to avoid disturbing the basement presses of the Sun-Times.  American Bridge set 25,000 tons of steel through October 1970, and the company began moving its employees in a year later.  The building was dedicated by new IBM Chairman T. Vincent Learson, who succeeded Watson in June 1971, and Mayor Daley in a September 1972 ceremony that also unveiled Italian sculptor Marino Marini’s memorial bust of Mies.[xii]  The newly created Federal Energy Administration gave IBM one of its first Energy Excellence Awards in 1975.[xiii] 

---

[i] Benjamin Forgey, “In the IBM Image: Honoring the Corporation’s Buildings.” The Washington Post, Mar. 24, 1990. 2.

[ii] “I.B.M. May Buy River Tract for Office Building.”  Chicago Tribune, Apr. 20, 1967.  E8.

[iii] Rob Cuscaden, “The IBM Tower.”  Inland Architect, Vol. 16, no. 6.  July, 1972.  10.

[iv] Franz Schulze, Oral History of Carter Manny. (rev. ed., Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2001).  346.

[v] “I.B.M. Buys 1-1/2 Acres on River Front.”  Chicago Tribune, Sept. 28, 1967.  C7.

[vi] Robert Sharoff, Last is More: Mies, IBM, and the Transformation of Chicago.  (Mulgrave, Victoria: Images Publishing, 2014).

[vii] Robert Sharoff, Last is More: Mies, IBM, and the Transformation of Chicago.  (Mulgrave, Victoria: Images Publishing, 2014). 67.

[viii] “I.B.M. Design Innovations Told.”  Chicago Tribune, Jul. 20, 1969.  D1.  The claim for IBM’s primacy in these areas is made by Cuscaden, op. cit.

[ix] “IBM Building Designed for Comfort AND Beauty.”  Chicago Tribune, Oct. 18, 1970.  E1. 

[x] “IBM Building Nears Completion on River.”  Chicago Tribune, Aug. 29, 1971.  D1.

[xi] Cuscaden, op. cit. 12.  

[xii] “IBM Building Nears Completion on River.”  Chicago Tribune, Aug. 29, 1971.  D1; Alvin Nagelberg, “IBM Starts Office Move.”  Chicago Tribune, Oct. 23, 1971.  B7; and “IBM Building’s Architect is Honored.” Chicago Tribune, Sept. 21, 1972. 1-c9.

[xiii] Michele Gaspar, “IBM Plaza Boasts Energy Brain.”  Chicago Tribune, Apr. 3, 1977.  W_B2C.

[Chicago Skyscrapers, 1934-1986, published by University of Illinois Press, is out now–available on Bookshop.org and Amazon.com, among other outlets.

Time-Life, Harry Weese Associates (1968-70)

Weese’s most remarkable commercial skyscraper balanced Chicago traditions of ordered planning, plain-spoken façade grids, and robust materiality with sumptuous public spaces and articulated façades.  Time-Life’s subscription services and Chicago bureau had outgrown space it had occupied for two decades, at 540 N. Michigan.  Arthur Rubloff encouraged the company to pioneer development of the decaying industrial district between Michigan Avenue and the lake.  Lake Point Tower, rising to the east, was encouraging.  Rubloff recognized the potential gains in traffic for his interests on North Michigan if Streeterville saw parallel commercial investment.[i]  Time-Life settled on a 40,000 square foot site on Fairbanks Court between Ohio and Grand.  They estimated the company would need a half million square feet, much of it for a subscription department that had to be available at their desks precisely at 9:00 when telephone lines opened and was finished at exactly 5:00.  This precision exacerbated rush-hour elevator congestion, requiring many more cabs than would be in use throughout the day.

Time-Life’s Books editor (and Architectural Forum’s publisher) Joseph Hazen argued that the new building had to be of exceptional architectural quality: “because our site is in the midst of an industrial slum, our building must set the right tone for the future redevelopment of the entire area.”  Rather than a “steel and glass stereotype,” he suggested that the new building should have a “richer, more textured façade, rendered in warmer materials.”  The company contacted nine local firms, interviewing four and selecting Weese for his “imaginative, resourceful, creative” approach to architectural problems—a decision, Hazen recalled, “of the heart as well as the mind.”[ii]  Weese prepared seven schemes ranging from low, 14-story blocks that required fewer elevators but stranded operators far from windows to 27 story designs that faced efficiency problems, requiring 18 elevators to handle rush hour peaks.[iii]  Time-Life wanted column-free space and windows for its employees, eliminating the lower schemes.  Instead, working with mechanical engineers Cosentini and Otis Elevators, Weese revived a tandem-cab solution that had been tried in a New York tower in 1932 to make the taller scheme feasible.  By stacking two cabs on top of one another in the same shaft—one serving even floors and one odd—this system did more than double capacity.  Because elevator speed depends on the time spent discharging passengers, double-deck cabs cut ‘on-station’ time in half, speeding overall travel times.  This arrangement required a double-floor lobby so that arriving employees could sort themselves into even and odd floors, but it provided off-peak flexibility, when the system could be switched to more typical operation with one cab per shaft serving all floors.  While the system required more expensive, larger motors to hoist dual cabs, it reduced core sizes by a third, in Weese’s estimate.[iv]

Time-Life’s exterior, meanwhile, developed from the company’s desire for richer materials.  Ben Weese and project manager Jack Hartray took advantage of concrete’s malleability to combine structure and skin into a unique, expressive curtain wall.  Weese had admired the Civic Center’s Cor-Ten exterior as it rose in the Loop, experimenting with the alloy on a cantilevered house near Green Bay while Time-Life was being designed.  The office developed prefabricated, bay-width panels that could be quickly erected, allowing crews to insulate and glaze the facades from inside.  While more expensive than aluminum, Time-Life’s managers appreciated its warm tones and sturdy appearance.  The project’s contractor, Turner Construction, thought the additional material expense would be offset by the panels’ rapid on-site assembly.  To stiffen each element during transportation and lifting, Weese’s office designed folded spandrel panels that, once in place, gave the façade a rhythmic pattern of shadowed recesses, complemented by gold-filmed insulated glass produced by PPG and New Jersey-based Kinney Vacuum Coatings that complemented the ruddy hue of the Cor-Ten cladding.  Weese and Hartray further addressed glare issues on these elevations by limiting window sizes with upstand induction units at sill level and sloping ceilings that followed the folded spandrels above.  The columns, on the other hand, taper toward the façade, so that the windows expand horizontally while contracting vertically.[v]

The building’s entrance lobby expanded the delicate jewel-boxes of Mies’ towers to “massive, Piranesian” scale.  Its double-height space drops away from the street into a split-level arrangement that provides stair and escalator access to the elevator boarding levels, its subterranean floor and shaft walls rendered in beige granite that also forms the exterior pavement.  Giant, Cor-Ten clad columns rise past this glass lobby and three floors of mechanical and warehouse space before engaging the façade panels of the main tower block.  The resulting mass recalls Mies—but by way of Brownson’s Civic Center and the layered structural façades of Saarinen’s Deere Headquarters in Moline (1964).  The lobby space was—at Weese’s urging—the site of the ‘Chicago Seven’ counter-exhibition to 100 Years of Chicago Architecture in 1976, highlighting his role between mainstream modernism and the ‘mavericks’ whose work was on display—including his own.[vi]  Time-Life won a 1973 national AIA honor award, recognized for its ‘pleasing proportions’ and ‘great sophistication in the use of materials.”[vii] 

Images from Architectural Forum, Sept., 1970.

---

[i] Alvin Nagelberg, “Time & Life to Build on Near North Side.”  Chicago Tribune, Mar. 7, 1967.  E5.

[ii] Kathleen Murphy Skolnik in Robert Bruegmann, ed., The Architecture of Harry Weese.  (New York: Norton, 2010).  150-151.

[iii] “News of Realty: Building Planned.” New York Times, Mar. 8, 1967.  71.

[iv] “Time-Life Building Elevators to Serve Two Floors at Once During Rush Hours.”  Chicago Tribune, Dec. 22, 1968.  D1 and John Morris Dixon, “Thirty-Story Slab of Ingenuity.”  Architectural Forum, Vol. 133, no. 2.  Sept., 1970.  20-27.

[v] John Morris Dixon, “Thirty-Story Slab of Ingenuity.”  Architectural Forum, Vol. 133, no. 2.  Sept., 1970.  22 and “Time-Life Buildng is Special.”  Chicago Tribune, June 8, 1969.  D1.  See, too, Process Architecture, no. 11 [“Harry Weese: Humanism and Tradition.”]  1979.  68-75.

[vi] “Show 1: ‘Mavericks’ on View at Time-Life Building.” Chicago Tribune, May 3, 1976. 1-e16.

[vii]  “Architects Honor Time-Life Building, St. Procopius Abbey.” Chicago Tribune, Apr. 30, 1973. 16. 

[viii] Elizabeth Brenner, “200 S. Wacker is Planned for Eye Appeal.” Chicago Tribune, Apr. 15, 1979. 1-s_b1 and Gary Washburn, “Big Office Building to Rise: His Determination Towers Over Chicago.” Chicago Tribune, Aug. 13, 1978. 1-n_b1.

[ix] Kathleen Murphy Skolnik in Robert Bruegmann, ed., The Architecture of Harry Weese.  (New York: Norton, 2010).  176-179.

[x] Paul Gapp, “City’s Magnificent Mile Gets a Touch of Crass.” Chicago Tribune, May 28, 1978. 1-e3. 

[xi] Paul Gapp, “New High-Rise Towers Over Chicago River–and Sinks.” Chicago Tribune, Apr 2, 1978. 1-e2. 

[xii] “Newberry Plaza a Supersized Project.”  Chicago Tribune, Oct. 8, 1972.  D1; “40-Story Condo to Rise on Lake Shore Dr.” Chicago Tribune, July 29, 1967. 1-n_a6 and “Plan 28-Story Apartments at Belmont and Sheridan.” Chicago Tribune, Feb 14, 1964. 1-c5.

[Chicago Skyscrapers, 1934-1986, published by University of Illinois Press, is out now–available on Bookshop.org and Amazon.com, among other outlets.

333 W. Wacker Dr. (KPF/Perkins & Will, 1979-83)

An early postmodern marriage of glass technology to “romantic” skyscraper form was the sweeping glass arc developed by Urban Investment and Development for the triangular lot between Wacker Drive, Franklin, and Lake Streets.  After the success of Water Tower Place, Philip Klutznick and his son, Thomas, pursued an aggressive downtown development program to match their long suburban track record.  Even with the late-1970s market lull, the younger Klutznick saw continued potential in the Loop, “the development area” in Chicago, he thought, “for maybe the next decade.”[i]  The Wacker Drive site was laden with local history and held great promise for its river views and city-wide visibility. Still, its awkward, triangular geometry had left it occupied only by small warehouses and parking lots. 

In June 1980, UIDC purchased the block and hired an upstart New York firm to design a 36-story “high-rise similar in shape to New York’s Pan Am Building,” wedging 900,000 square feet of lettable space into its confines.  The design and management core of John Carl Warnecke’s New York office—Eugene Kohn, William Pedersen, and Sheldon Fox—had started their own firm in the 1976 economic downturn.  By 1980 their portfolio contained just two high-rises: a 15-story building in Upper Manhattan for ABC and a 23-story office tower in Lexington, KY.  Their pedigree with Warnecke was convincing, however, and UIDC asked them to team with Perkins & Will.  UIDC senior vice president George Goldman previewed the project in 1980, hinting at a green glass tower that would be “an extremely interesting, dramatic building, very slick, wrapping around the site.”[ii]  Cupples won the contract for the six acres of curtain wall, including insulated glass panes of Sunglas, a Ford automotive product that used a reflective metallic oxide film to reduce solar gain by 2/3.[iii]  KPF specified a deep emerald green in two different shades for spandrel and vision panels, emphasizing the horizontal sweep of the riverfront facade rather than its vertical proportions—or its division into structural or cladding bays.  The building’s form, published for the first time in November 1981, was “slick” but compelling.  Ford’s glass would wrap around an arcing elevation along Wacker, framed by slender, flat returns at its corners and an angular, sawtooth volume on the southwest. At its base, KPF further emphasized this combination of rich materiality with sculptural form, with generous stairs at the Lake/Franklin corner and two stories of granite and round, stainless steel louvers, far from the minimal entries that marked modern Loop skyscrapers.  This was the “romantic” approach championed by critic Paul Gapp—an abstract, technically-fluent vocabulary responding to its site in a singular, legible form.[iv]  “Exhilarating and rational,” in the words of New York Times’ critic Paul Goldberger, 333 became an iconic presence on the skyline.[v]  While its floor plans made it “one of the most challenging configurations of any of the new downtown office buildings,” according to one space planner, 333 W. Wacker gained prestige clients, including American Bell.  UIDC moved its offices into the building when it was completed in 1983, and the next year it was recognized with a national AIA Honor Award .[vi]

---

[i] Gary Washburn, “Firm Planning Projects Here, in 5 Other Cities.”  Chicago Tribune, July 15, 1979.  E1.

[ii] Gary Washburn, “Developer May Build Wacker Dr. High-Rise.”  Chicago Tribune, June 20, 1980.  C7.

[iii] “6 Acres of Glass by Ford to Cover High-Rise Here.”  Chicago Tribune, Nov. 1, 1981.  S_B2.

[iv] “6 Acres of Glass by Ford to Cover High-Rise Here.”  Chicago Tribune, Nov. 1, 1981.  S_B2 and “Glass Curtain Wall Rigorously Tested.”  Chicago Trinune, Aug. 23, 1981.  N_B2C.

[v] Paul Goldberger, “A New York Firm Sets the Style in Chicago: Architecture View Given the Plethora of Kohn Pedersen Fox Buildings, it is Hard Not to Feel that a Different Sensibility has Taken Over the Town.” New York Times, Sep 30, 1990. 1 and Paul Gapp, “Architecture: A Gusty New Yorker and his Taut Green Giant on the River.”  Chicago Tribune, Oct. 23, 1983.  See, too, Jim Murphy, “Cornering the Loop: 333 Wacker Drive, Chicago.” Progressive Architecture, no. 10, Oct. 1983, p. 78.

[vi] “Tower Brings Out the Best in Space Planners, Designers.”  Chicago Tribune, July 8, 1984.  W_B1B; “Realty Briefs: Bell Finds a Home.”  Chicago Tribune, Aug. 14, 1983.  W_B2 and Paul Gapp, “3 Chicago Buildings Win Design Excellence Award.”  Chicago Tribune, May 3, 1984.  D_A11.

[Chicago Skyscrapers, 1934-1986, published by University of Illinois Press, is out now–available on Bookshop.org and Amazon.com, among other outlets.

Blue Cross/Blue Shield (C.F. Murphy, 1966-68).

If SOM’s Gateway projects seemed repetitive or formulaic, no such critique could be applied to C.F. Murphy’s riverfront statement Blue Cross/Blue Shield.  The 15-story concrete tower then being built at Wacker and Dearborn, wrote the Tribune, in December, 1967, “may not be the biggest building around, but it has enough interesting facets to keep it from being lost in the crowd.”[i]  Otto Stark, its designer, described it as a “piece of sculpture to be a focal point for the view along the Chicago River,” and with massive, solid concrete shafts exposed around its perimeter it was, on its opening a year later, a striking exception to Chicago’s Miesian rule, joining the U.S. Gypsum building in its stubby massing and distinctive approach.  Stark, a University of Illinois graduate, had worked with Walter Netsch on the Air Force Academy at SOM, moving to C.F. Murphy with Stan Gladych to work on O’Hare Airport in 1960.  In 1962, he had been on a team with Murphy colleagues Gertrude Kerbis, W.C. Wong, T.C. Chang, and Chan Sit that produced a steel-and-glass competition entry for Boston City Hall that had been one of eight finalists.[ii]  Their scheme’s long, frontal plaza and dark bronze curtain walls bore comparisons to the Seagram’s Building but Stark was a self-proclaimed Paul Rudolph devotee, an influence that showed in his designs for student unions at DePaul and the University of Illinois’ Medical School.[iii]

Rudolph’s approach of turning a typical central core building inside out, expressing vertical services in concrete shafts on the exterior, suited Blue Cross/Blue Shield’s desire for open floor plates.  Pressed to the exterior of the quarter-block site, eight shafts accommodated the buildings mechanical chases.  Stark left the building’s elevators, fire stairs, and toilet rooms in a smaller central core, but a compact one that maximized floor depths around it.  Symmetrically arranged, the exterior shafts also provided the building’s main structure, eliminating interior columns providing ducted air and chilled or hot water near perimeter induction units, eliminating horizontal duct and pipe runs.  Upstand concrete sill beams spanning 60’ on the long, east and west facades and 35’ on the north and south accommodated induction units in cabinets under the windows, and the giant hollow piers allowed 20’ cantilevered corners that offered dramatic views up and down the River.  The lobby was highlighted by a dramatic, rectilinear scissor stair, an exposed waffle slab ceiling, and sculpture by Louise Nevelson, all against a backdrop of dark teak furnishings, deep brown brick flooring, and lush plantings.[iv]

Stark sought help from I.M. Pei’s office in establishing mixtures and finishes for the building’s exposed concrete throughout; Pei had a global reputation for concrete expertise and Murphy’s office was coordinating with them on O’Hare’s control tower at the time.[v]  Stark specified a bush-hammered finish for the building’s vertical elements, exposing aggregate and providing a deeply textured surface, while leaving girders and soffits with a softer, sandblasted surface.  This delineated bearing and spanning elements, combining Murphy’s reputation for crisp, precise detail with a tactile sense and some of the Loop’s finest concrete.  Its “muscular, positive architectural statement,” softened with overstuffed lounge furniture and a colorful palette of office furnishings, was unlike the “massive square glass structures of many new office buildings,” in the words of the Defender, but it was not entirely alien.[vi]  Other concrete structures in Chicago expressed the plastic nature of this material—the haunched slabs of SOM’s first Hartford Building, for instance, or the voluptuous curves of Marina City (see Chapter 6) across the River.  Blue Cross’ giant-order concrete shafts and story-and-a-half cornice had a Chicago pedigree, too.  Frank Lloyd Wright’s Larkin Building in Buffalo (1904) owed its exterior massing to its vertical service cores, which wrapped a deeply articulated brick skin around air shafts and staircases.  Inland Steel’s external service core was also a precedent; Louis Kahn acknowledged its diagrammatic power in his influential ‘servant/served’ parti of Richards Medical Laboratories (1957-1960), which in turn influenced Rudolph’s sculptural Art and Architecture Building at Yale (1963), Stark’s clear precedent.

---

[i] “New Blue Cross Building Promises to Stand Out.”  Chicago Tribune, Dec. 24, 1967.  B7.

[ii] in “Designs of the Other Seven Finalists.” Boston Globe, May 4, 1962. 17and Brian M. Sirman,  Concrete Dreams: Architecture, Politics, and Boston’s New City Hall, (Dissertation, Boston University.  Ann Arbor; UMI, 2014). 

[iii] Otto Stark.  Architect Otto Stark: Standing by Design.  (Chicago: Stark Associates Architects, 2017).

[iv] “Strength and Cohesiveness for a Crowded Block in Chicago: Blue Cross-Blue Shield.”  Architectural Record, Vol. 148, no. 1.  July, 1970.122-125.

[v] Franz Schulze, Oral History of Carter Manny (rev. ed., Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2001).  380.

[vi] “15-Story Building Opened by Blue Cross, Blue Shield.”  Chicago Daily Defender, Dec. 4, 1968.  4 and “New Blue Cross Building Promises to Stand Out.”  Chicago Tribune, Dec. 24, 1967.  B7.