Foul Ball Hotel: the In-Your-Face Mediocrity of the Wrigleyville Sheraton

image: Chicago Cubs 

Tom Ricketts officially revealed renderings for the Wrigley Field and environs rehab at a City Club breakfast Wednesday morning.  Inside Wrigley, the most prominent change is the addition of a 6,000 square foot Jumbotron screen.  The terra cotta along Wrigley Field's roofline is also scheduled to be restored, and there's a large number of adjustments designed to improve basic functionality.

At least for the moment, I'm leaving the critique of changes to the actual stadium to the Trib's Cheryl Kent.  (Although if she thinks the Landmarks Commission will do anything other than roll over for whatever plan Mayor Rahm Emanuel signs on to, I've got a big shiny bean to sell her.) 

I do want to say a couple words about the 175-room Sheraton hotel the Ricketts want to build across the street from the stadium, where a McDonalds currently stands . . .

It sucks.

image: Chicago Cubs - hotel to left

I think that's pretty clear even from the rudimentary renderings released so far.  The office structure to be built to the north isn't much better, but at least it has a couple of doo-dads - a rounded ramp building and a tall clock tower - stuck on to provide at least a pretension of personality.

image: Chicago Cubs - click for larger image (recommended)

The hotel can't even be bothered with such minimal gestures.  It looks like a parking garage with balconies.  The design makes SCB's design for a mega-development south on Clark look like Pritzker-Prize winning work.  At Wednesday's presentation, the spin was how the hotel is in ‘harmony’ with Wrigley across the street.  And if you're looking to memorialize the cheapness of P.K. Wrigley, I guess you've got a point. (A January Tribune article cited Rebel Roberts and VOA as project architects.)

What was originally Wrigley's charm - an old school stadium smack dab inside a working class neighborhood - is evolving, perhaps inevitably, into a supply-chain designed sports complex.  Oozing like The Blob, it absorbs more and more of the surrounding community.  An untidy, diverse but sub-potential economy of multiple businesses finds itself squeezed out by a centrally controlled, precisely engineered profit engine, constructed out of a Disneyfied historicism reeking nostalgia for a time that never existed.

This is the way the world works, and it would be naive to believe Wrigleyville could somehow be exempt.  With 35,000 square feet of new, state-of-the-art advertising, the area west of the stadium will become a little bit of Ginza on Clark.  All the more reason, then, to embrace the reality and reject mediocrity masquerading as contextualism. The current design for the hotel is ‘like’ Wrigley Field in only the laziest, most cynical sense.  This is one of the most visible corners in Chicago.  Can we please get a building that frankly addresses the needs of its program with a honesty that honors rather than mocks Chicago as a place where relevant architecture can still be made?

Read:
Ragged Liberty or Polished Upscaling?  Wrigleyville's Mutant Urbanism.

Grossman and Kent's Final Word on how Chicago's Good-Old-Boys network rallied to Wreck Prentice

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It's the Chicago Tribune story that the Chicago Tribune would rather you not read.

The paper's Ron Grossman and Cheryl Kent have done a bang-up summary of the clout-ridden process that doomed the landmarking of Bertrand Goldberg's Prentice Hospital.  If you're one of the Trib's pathetic handful of digital subscribers (half that of the Sun-Times), you can read it.   For anyone else, it's carefully stuck behind their paywall.

Even if you don't read the Trib, it's well worth picking up  a copy today. (Try not to be shocked by the fact that the Trib just raised the price a whopping 50%, to $1.50.)  When politics get in the way doesn't really include anything we haven't written before in our own copious coverage of the battle for Prentice, but it fleshes out the details and mechanics of how the good-old-boys-network that runs the city - of which the Trib, which shilled relentlessly for Prentice's destruction, sees itself as a key member -  circles the wagons to support its own, in this case  Northwestern University, who has turned their substantial chunk of Streeterville into a kind of high-tech colonial plantation where the rules that constrain all the rest of us don't apply and truth is whatever they want it to be. 

Grossman and Kent document how Chicago's Department of Housing and Development simply dumped facts and figures they got from Northwestern into their report calling for Prentice's demolition.  Nothing was vetted or substantiated.  The Commission willingly became part of Northwestern's propaganda machine.

from left: Rafael Leon, Ernest Wong, Andrew Mooney, James Houlihan

In its portrait of Landmarks Commission Chairman Rafael Leon, the article is especially damning. ”I personally don't know all the details,” Leon told them, “We believe Northwestern.”  Leon was part of a cynical remaking of the Commission by Mayor Rahm Emanuel that dumped four commissioners and stuffed the body with connected associates, none of whom were architects, in direct violation of the directives of the Landmarks Ordinance.  Among them was former Cook County Assessor James Houlihan.  According to Grossman and Kent, he's also a senior consultant with a firm that brags about lobbying the city on behalf of over 25 clients.  Christopher Reed, the only commissioner to vote against demolishing Prentice, quit. “I was disgusted,” he told Grossman and Kent, “The process was hijacked by City Hall.”

Grossman and Kent underscore the uselessness of these appointed bodies.  As with the Plan Commission - which began as independent entity - the concept is that they provide an essential check on city government, representing the larger public in objectively vetting important city actions.  That role has long since been abrogated.  They have become rubber stamps that never - and I emphasize never - do anything other than follow the scripts they've been handed by the mayor.  At a time when the city is closing schools for lack of money, a Landmarks Commission that is nothing more than an expensive extension of the mayor's PR office is a pointless luxury we can no long afford.  Keep the staff; abolish the Commission.

Read:
Landmarks Commission Unanimously Votes Itself Completely Useless
A Modest Proposal: Abolish the Commission on Chicago Landmarks
An Open Letter to Mayor Emanuel on Bertrand Goldberg's Prentice Hospital

Tartan check-mate: Burberry's Reinvigorates the Mag Mile

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God save us from the tasteful.

In selecting the new Burberry store on Michigan Avenue as her calling-card critique, interim Tribune architecture critic Cheryl Kent has chosen to rechannel Blair Kamin's worst schoolmarm tendencies, slamming it as "a screaming chrome ornament", "a boor", and a "noisy drunk", concluding, "That's sort of a bad joke like the Burberry store is a really not-funny, bad joke."  (Seriously - does that last sentence even qualify as English?)

Chicago Marriott, left; 600 North Michigan, right

To be sure, there's a lot to be offended by on Michigan Avenue, from the ballroom bunker of the Marriott, to the sugar-candy grotesque of John Buck's 600 North Michigan.  To be offended, instead, by Burberry's, however, is an admission of catatonia.

Once upon a time, as can be seen in remnants such as the Jacques Building and Women's Athletic Club, north Michigan Avenue was the chic street of the city, with upper-end shops, galleries and restaurants housed in classically-styled edifices.  That day is long gone.  At some point in the 1970's, the Mag Mile began to usurp State Street as Chicago's great commercial thoroughfare, and it has gradually become a series of malls separated by stretches of architectural glop. And lest we over-sentimentalize the past, remember that the Mag Mile was once home to a Woolworth's Five and Dime, and that the current site of Tiffany's was previously a McDonalds.

Compared to Robert Stern's goofy tin facade for Banana Republic, now replaced with a "tasteful" glass front, the new Burberry is the height of reticence.  If you want to be offended by something, be offended by the growing inequality of our current Gilded Age Redux, not by the highly engaging design of the new Burberry's, which opened late in November.  It replaces a far more modest two-story precessor . . .

. . . with a five-story-tall, 25,000-square foot flagship squeezed onto the same small site at the northeast corner of Michigan and Ontario. 

Against the taller buildings to its north and west, it looks a bit like a stylish handbag placed on a table next to the bookshelves.

Prada Store, Tokyo, Herzog and DeMeuron, architects - photograph Wiiii, Wikipedia

Burberry's is Chicago's late entry in the luxury retail flagship wars that have, until now, passed the city by.  Those wars of conspicuous consumption could said to have started in 2001, when Prada turned Rem Koolhaas loose to create a $50 million New York City flagship.  It was followed in 2003 by an even more spectacular Tokyo store by Herzog and de Meuron that cost  $83 million and was described by Deyan Sudjic as "a new building type, part billboard, part architectural gift wrapping."  New manifestations continue to pop in the world haunts of the super-rich - London, Singapore, Beijing, etc. - including another glittering box by Toyo Ito for shoe emporium Tod's on the Omotesandon in Tokyo.

Prada store, Chicago

Until now, Chicago's pretensions of being a world-class city have still left us short of qualifying for this type of architectural hyper-bling.  Here, Prada set up shop in a simple whitewashed brownstone on Oak Street, while Tod's has contented itself with a small showplace in One Mag Mile.

Crate and Barrel store, Michigan Avenue, Chicago

Michigan Avenue's most spectacular retail structure staked out a far more democratic price point.  Solomon, Cordwell Buenz's Crate and Barrel store remains, even two decades after its opening, a beacon of modernist elegance.  With its gently enceinte swell curving at the corner, it's a worthy successor to Louis Sullivan's Carson Pirie Scott.  An open glass box, visually centered by a sequence of open escalators, its uses the display of goods and movement of shoppers to animate the act of consumerism into a kind of architectural street theater.  It anticipates the clean, minimalist Apple Store designs that would come to define retailing in the new century.

If Crate and Barrel is Michigan Avenue's white princess, Burberry's is its new dark knight.  Its five-story-high facade of dark glass and chrome, articulated into an homage to the brand's distinctive Tartan check, has the look of a fortress drawing you in through the vertical shafts of light above the entrance and alongside the bravura stair against the southern wall.   It's a personification of high-end retail's tricky balance between snob appeal and inclusion.

The hand of Burberry Chief Creative Officer Christopher Bailey, a/k/a the "brand czar", can be seen in the design of every aspect of the Burberry experience, including the new Michigan Avenue store, carried out by Callison Barteluce architects of New York. In a 2009  interview with Lauren Collins in The New Yorker, Bailey talked about his own experience as a middle-class sixteen-year-old going to buy the gift of a watch for his mother at a designer store . . .

The service was so intimidating and so unpleasant . . . And I really wanted to call my dad aferward and say, 'Dad, it was amazing, and there was this and there was that!' But instead I was like, 'Oh, Dad, it was awful.  It was horrible.'

Bailey is clearly looking to create a more inviting scenario for Burberry in general, and Chicago in particular.  According to Crain's Chicago Business's Brigid Sweeney, he designed Burberry Michigan Avenue as total retail theater, with floor-to-ceiling "digital walls" and a hyper-connected environment which may have more Apple product than Apple's actual store up the street - iPhone docks, untethered iPads for salespeople and embedded iPads for customers.  Plus 500 loudspeakers and 100 display panels.

It's that balance between the physical and virtual worlds that Burberry - and every other retailer - is working overtime to figure out.  The pundits keep telling us we've entered a brave new Amazon world where on-line retailing is king and bricks-and-mortar a lingering anachronism.  The unceasing crowds on Michigan Avenue would suggest otherwise.  Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts told Crain's,  "How we use technology was going to be our greatest differentiator," and adds that in the luxury segment, 70 percent of the customers shop on-line but shop in the physical stores.

The photograph that accompanied the Tribune review depicts the new Burberry facade in the highest possible contrast, the chrome elements sticking out like plastic on a cheap radio.  Using a photograph that documents your opinion is always fair game, but the way the inset strip of windows doesn't read at all is an over-the-top misrepresentation.

As with Blanche DuBois, bright daylight may not always create the most flattering view of the Burberry store.  Yet even though the sun illuminates the chrome elements very strongly - you can think of it of a gift box densely wrapped in a shiny weave of metallic ribbon -  I've never really found it, in any of my real world encounters, as harsh as Kent depicts.  That same chrome is highly reflective, in a way that visually breaks up the mass of the facade into a set of variations, cleanly illuminated bands next to reflections of neighboring buildings and elements of shadow.

At night, the building has a certain magic.  The insistent white metal dissolves into gradations of black, as  the building becomes a dark, permeated fortress.  Unlike the usual mass-market backdrop of an almost clinical, foot-candle overload of whiteness, the amber elements of Burberry's interior seep light through the facade in an almost liquid way. Even as the intricate geometric banding of the Tartan check locks down the facade like a chastity belt, the warm shafts of light offer up a "come-hither" look that suggests you might actually be in for erotico-shopping fulfillment.

You want tasteful?  Try Lucien Lagrange.  I'll take Burberry's stew of money-grubbing and elegance, the subtle and the insistent, any day.

Also on ArchitectureChicago Plus:

• Chicago under Construction: Burberry's on Michigan
• Burberry Plaid Facade: Limited Time Only!

Crain's, Chicago Tribune add their voices: Prentice Should be Saved

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The headline in this week's Crain's Chicago Business sums it up succinctly:  Prentice should remain part of Chicago skyline.  The editorial rebuts Northwestern University's current full-press PR campaign to convince the public that, even with a two-block square lot across the street that has been nothing more than a chain-linked gravel pit for over three years, the University has no alternative but to destroy Bertrand Goldberg's spectacular 1975 Prentice Hospital.

"In our view, the university hasn't made the case that the structure can't be preserved," says the editorial, and it notes that "Northwestern hasn't even retained an architect, which creates the prospect that the city could trade this gem for yet another utilitarian edifice on the medical campus."

That point is tellingly reinforced over at the Chicago Tribune by Cheryl Kent, who, with Ron Grossman, is taking over the paper's architecture beat from Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Blair Kamin while he's away on a fellowship.  Kent chose to use her debut piece in her new role to counter the Trib's editorial board's gleeful pandering to Northwestern's lust to trash Prentice into dust.

"Northwestern," writes Kent, "has inadvertently provided proof of Prentice's uniqueness by way of its mediocre replacement, the new Prentice, a boilerplate building that is inhuman in scale and tedious in design."  

Has the Trib buried Kent's piece?  It carries an August 24th dateline, but unless I'm blind - always a possibility - I was unable to find it in the print editions of Friday, Saturday or Sunday. (Maybe it'll be in tomorrow.)  The title of the webpage Why Prentice should be saved, is much less ambiguous than the vague headline. 

Kent lays out the truth that Prentice meets at least three - probably four- of the criteria required for designating a structure an official Chicago landmark, and calls out Northwestern for its power play politics, "If Prentice is demolished, it will be for reasons other than its worthiness as a landmark."

This is a key point often overlooked.  To Northwestern, this is not about a building, it is about power.  Northwestern is at the top of Chicago's power elite.  It does not like to be challenged.
Its public advocacy campaign to destroy Prentice is so sloppy and factually challenged that it seems almost half-hearted.  (The Chicago Sun-Times David Roeder calls it, "an embarrassment for a school of Northwestern's caliber.")  Northwestern wants it gone.  That should be enough.  

More importantly, Northwestern has deliberately subverted having a debate on Prentice in the forum where it would be most appropriate:  The Commission on Chicago Landmarks.  

In June of 2011, the matter of Prentice made its way onto the Commission's agenda. As Kent demonstrated, if any Chicago building meets the criteria, it's Prentice, and any neutral debate would most probably result in Prentice's designation - and protection - as an official Chicago landmark.  Northwestern, of course, can't have that.  So they used their clout to have the matter pulled from the agenda, and have kept it off, month after month, ever since.

According to a report in Skyline, when preservationists who are a part of the Save Prentice coalition tried to  bring up Prentice at the Landmarks Commission  meeting earlier this month, Commission Chairman Rafael Leon cut them off.  "At the appropriate time, then you can make your statement."  And when, actually, would be that time?  "I don't know, to be honest."  Even as Commissioner, Leon apparently has zero control over his own agenda; he just follows orders passed down by the Department of Development.

For 15 months, the administration of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, has enforced an official omerta on the fate of Prentice.  What actually have they been talking about?  Wars have been settled in less time.   Are they really talking at all, or is Northwestern simply deploying its clout to make sure there is no talking? 

In June, the Martin Schnitzius Cottage got the Landmarks Commission nod for official designation.  Now well into the second year, Bertrand Goldberg's Prentice Hospital can't even be discussed.  It may be classic Chicago politics, but that doesn't make the city's subversion of due process to placate clout-heavy Northwestern any less of a scandal.

image: Landmarks Illinois

Bertrand Goldberg's Prentice: Most Endangered?

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The last time we wrote about Bertrand Goldberg's brilliant Prentice Hospital, a security guard was trying to tell me I couldn't take pictures of it without getting prior permission from Northwestern Hospital, the building's current owner.  Northwestern has been silent about the structure's future, which is ominous, and the Commission on Chicago Landmarks MIA.

Now there's an ongoing effort by Landmarks Illinois, Preservation Chicago, and other preservationists to save this irreplaceable modern masterpiece, including setting up a Save Prentice page on Facebook.

Today at 12:15 p.m. at the Chicago Architecture Foundation, 224 South Michigan, Preservation Chicago Executive Director Jonathan Fine will be revealing this year's version of the organizations own Chicago 7, the Seven Most Threatened Places of 2011.  I'm betting Prentice should be near the top of the list, especially since Preservation Chicago's website has just posted this new video, including testimony from people like architectural historian Bob Bruegmann, architect Jack Hartray, writer Cheryl Kent, and the architect's son, Geoffrey Goldberg, doing an excellent job of explaining the building and it's centrality to Chicago's architectural legacy.