A steam shovel extracts threads of metal from the great ruined globs of demolition debris at 211 E. Grand, an 1887 bullhead of a building that's making way for a new home for the Ronald McDonald house.
Since 1977, it's been housed in a former 1880's mansion at 622 West Deming that is just a few blocks away from the current Children's Memorial Hospital.
In 2012, the hospital is scheduled to move to its new billion-dollar facility at 225 E. Chicago, just blocks away from the Ronald McDonald facility on Grand, which is expected to be completed in 2011, dramatically increasing the number of beds, to 95.The blandness of Antonovich & Associates' design for the house is a long way from the historic charm of the building on Deming.
In a way, it's like the equally uncharming 19th century structure now being demolished, just extruded and updated to our own age's idiom of inoffensive mediocrity.
5 comments:
Actually this was one of my favorite 19th century warehouses...
This is the firm that gave us the Bernardin and Flair Tower. It's an insult to compare that firm's junk with this older building. Sure, the building on Grand is a fairly plain commercial building of the past, certainly not as great as a Sullivan. But if cleaned up I bet you it'd look charming, especially in comparison to all the new glass towers around it.
The proposal is worse than "average"...its flat out poor. When are we ever going to raise the design standards as a whole in this city? We get little gems here and there, but its death by 1000 cuts. That is most certainly not worth losing what is IMO a pretty handsome warehouse building with a quite a bit of character. It also adds a nice variety to the neighborhood, as the above poster pointed out. It could easily have been refurbished into something quite nice and useable.
With all the vacant surface lots in this city, it makes seeing interesting buildings like this come down all the more painful.
wow, look at that, very creative and inspiring, I wish I could design something like that
Thanks for the article. This knowledge fulfill our thirst of learning.
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