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

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Slowly, the eerie clouds wrap around Santiago Calatrava's twisting phantom tower.  The clock strikes twelve.  The shrieking birds scatter. The dream dies.  The vision melts into air, into thin air.

The Trib's Mary Ellen Podmolik reported Friday that developer Garrett Kelleher has finally conceded that he won't be able to raise the cash to bring the doomed Chicago Spire project out of bankruptcy.  If he doesn't pony up the $22 million by end of day, the site - intended to be a 2,000-foot-high skyscraper but never getting beyond being anything more than a massive hole in the ground - will become the property of Related Midwest, which recently opened another rescued project, the 59-story 111 West Wacker.

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

Relive the Whole Amazing Story . . .

The Epic Fable of Santiago Calatrava's Chicago Spire

The End of an Epic Dream: Calatrava's Chicago Spire hole on the block - retelling an amazing story

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Crain's Chicago Business is reporting today that the undisclosed owner of what's left of Santiago Calatrava's Chicago Spire has hired Jones Lang LaSalle to find a buyer for the project's nearly $93 million of debt.  The story of the Spire - from how the spectacular design took the world by storm when it was unveiled, to how it all eventually unraveled - would make a great book, but until I write one, here's the tale, as we covered it down through the years . . .

Calatrava's Latest Twist from Spire to Licorice Stick.  A 124-story building with a 400-foot-high antenna becomes a 2,000-foot, 160 story building with no antenna, reducing its twist from 360 degrees to 270

Calatrava Spire Shrouded in Irish Fog.  On a cold January night, Gatsby-like Irish developer Garrett Kelleher, who began his career in Chicago rehabbing industrial lofts into new residential space,  emerges from seclusion to present the Spire to a community meeting and gets into a verbal skirmish with Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin.  My take:

There's no disputing that Kelleher has guts, but the question for the city remains: for a billion dollar project, is it enough to be a faith-based initiative?

Santiago explains it all for you.  Santiago Calatrava is not only a great architect, he's a captivating salesman who could probably sell you your own watch after making a drawing of it that would be a work of art in itself.  In January of 2007, he came to Chicago to help Kelleher launch the Spire and captured the heart of the city - or at least the community group SOAR - for whom he gave a presentation where he talked about his building accompanied by drawing beautiful pictures on an overhead projector to explain the design.  

It's like writing a poem . . . with a magic that if you close a book that you left in a library, 300 years later someone opens it and gets the book, because this language is understandable.  More universal than the words, themselves, because language may change, but the monument remains there.  And when you go and visit a piece of architecture and you see there is a lot of the soul of the people that had been living a thousand years ago, and they are still there.  They are telling you . . . to believe in your time, because the buildings are still there .

The portfolio of art Calatrava created for the Chicago Spire will wind up being the most valuable  and enduring part of the project.

Calatrava Spire goes before Plan Commission Today.  It's official name: Residential-Business Planned Development No. 368.  Kelleher has pledged $500,000 (the promise will eventually grow into the millions) towards the projected $12 million cost of creating DuSable Park, just east of the Spire, which will use it as a staging area for construction.  Santiago Calatrava has presented a design for an elegant new - and unfunded - pedestrian footbridge for the new park.

Chicago Spire Officially Hole in Ground.  By August of 2007, construction had actually begun.

Calatrava's Chicago Spire Looking for Persons of Interest.  Soon, the ads were even appearing on the city's bus shelters.

The Chicago Spire:  You loved the building, now buy the soundtrack.  When a penthouse is going for $40,000,000, money is no object, and composer Thomas Chance is hired to create music for the Spire's promotional video.

Chicago Spire: Planetarily notorious - Garret Kelleher declares the Spire will prove immune to the growing world-wide housing slump. ”Everyone in the world knows about this project,” he says, but declines to say how many of the Spire's 1,200 units have been sold.

photograph: Bob Johnson

Santiago Calatrava to Chicago Spire Developer: “You owe me MONEY!!”.  By the fall of 2008, it was all beginning to unravel, with liens being placed against the project, including one for $11.3 milion from Calatrava.  One reader suggests making Calatrava's images into posters.

At the Calatrava Spire, the hole just keeps getting deeper.  By 2010,  the lender, Anglo Irish Bank, took control of the site, where the only thing left is the hole . . .

. . . and a now you see it, now you don't model as part of the Chicago Architecture Foundation's popular Chicago Model City exhibition. (You can also buy your very own Calatrava Spire as part of the 4D Cityscape Chicago puzzle set.    Calatrava Spire Completed - then Vanishes!

In 2010, the Chicago Architectural Club held a Mine the Gap Competition for ideas of what to do so about the Spire's massive hole in the ground.    The concept presented by a team led by UIC professor Alexander Lehnerer submitted the winning entry.

And this is where we stand today, an empty site with an orange-rimmed hole, no work underway at DuSable Park, and the memories of a dream.

big.dk

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Bjarke Ingels intends to write a thriller built on the unnatural deaths of Antonio Gaudi, Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn, with a climatic chase atop his proposed W57 tower in Manhattan, pictured above.
He is 37 years old.  He is the current pop superstar of global architecture.  His firm is named BIG.  His url is www.big.dk.  His work is confident and unspoiled.  When he thinks of the large projects on his drawing boards, he is haunted by the spectre of Santiago Calatrava's doomed Chicago Spire.  The Lego Towers, the spectacular model for which we wrote about with no small delight when the Graham mounted a great show on Ingels and his firm back in 2008, never got built, but he's found his Herbert Greenwald in Danish developer Per Høpfner.  Ingels is brash and brilliant and he always gets the almond in his rice pudding.  He has many girlfriends.  (And he was always quietly arrayed/And he was always human when he talked/But still he fluttered pulses when he said/"Good-morning"/and he glittered when he walked.)  He loves Charlie Kaufman, particularly the scene in Adaptation where Charlie's supposedly duller twin brother Donald observes, "You are what you love, not what loves you."  All these things and many more I learned in Ian Parker's 14 page, lightly illustrated profile of Ingels in the current New Yorker, which is, unfortunately, not universally available on-line, but worth shelling out the $5.99 if you're not a subscriber.

Holiday Shopping for the Archiphile: Computer Part cities; photography books up to 50% off, 3D Chicago, and something for someone who has everything

Still shopping for the holidays?  (I usually wait to start until the 26th)

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Via Rib Bone Production's Andy Spyrison, we bring you the work of Italian artist Franco Recchia, which scavenges the innards of computers to create abstracted cityscape sculptures, named after New York's Manhattan, Fifth Avenue and Central Park, Tokyo's Pechino District, Boston and Pitsburgh.  No Chicago yet.  It looks like you can actually buy them on-line.  Prices range from  $2400 to $8100.  Maybe there's some Chicago computer geek with a lot of old boxes to tear apart who might want to test the market with their own more popularly priced creations.  If you're out there, let me know.

If your heart is set on Chicago, and you're comfortable with "some assembly required" taken to the max, there's the 4D Cityscape Chicago 831-piece jigsaw puzzle, complete with 127 plastic buildings, now on sale at the shop at the Chicago Architecture Foundation.  To me, the great temptation would be to redesign the city, jamming selected buildings into alternative locations, or just be able to contemplate a Chicago skyline cleansed of its worst structures.  (Maybe you could resell them on eBay as the "Chicago bad buildings collection".)

And if Chicago's not your cup of tea, there are also 4D Cityscape puzzles for London, Toronto, Las Vegas, New York and Washington DC.  No Pittsburgh.  I've already written that for the month of December, the CAF shop is offering free shipping on orders of $50.00 or over, but it gets better.  CAF members get 25% all purchases during Members Month in December.   If you're buying a lot of gifts, getting a membership could pay for itself.  (Which reminds me, I still have to redeem that coupon for membership that I got on Groupon a few weeks back.)

Elsewhere, we've also written on giving the gift of art from the ArchiTech gallery. I'm pretty sure every Chicago area museum has its own array of great gifts, but the book store at the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College is upping the ante with a Holiday Book Sale offering "up to 50% off nearly all books! Some books are just $5! (Exclamation points from the original!) It runs through Friday the 10th, 10 a.m., to 5:00 p.m., at 600 South Michigan. "cash or checks only please."

And one, last Neiman Marcus-sized idea*

You can actually get a little plastic version of Santiago Calatrava's Chicago Spire in CAF's 4D puzzle, but for that special someone for whom only the best will do, how about . . . a hole . . .

photograph:  Bob Johnson

No, we're not talking about sex reassignment surgery for your significant other, but the only surviving trace of Great Gatsby Garrett Kelleher's insanely ambitious dream for an 2,000-foot-high, Santiago Calatrava designed Chicago Spire. As the Trib's Mary Ellen Podmolik reported yesterday, the Irish developer  has now officially lost control of the property, as a Circuit Court judge has allowed the project's lender, Ango Irish Bank, also in deep doo-doo, to appoint CB Richard Ellis to oversee the property as it goes through foreclosure.

What says "I Love You" better than a 76-foot-deep hole at the side of a rushing expressway?  You might even considering licensing one of the winning ideas in the Chicago Architectural Club's Mine the Gap competition from earlier this year to gussy it up.

Alexander Lehnerer and team - The Second Sun

But I'm warning you now: it's going to be a royal pain to wrap.

*taken from an ad placed by Warner Brothers to begin selling tickets to the Palace Theater's 1964 run of the film version of My Fair Lady, nearly a year before the opening.  Image-starved and text heavy, it concluded with the "Neiman Marcus-sized" suggestion of simply buying out the theatre for a personal showing for yourself and your closest friends.

The Rise and Fall of Garrett Kelleher and the Calatrava's Chicago Spire

John Meagher in Britain's Independent has a great story on the Gatsby-like saga of Garrett Kelleher, the ambitious Irish developer who went from rehabbing lofts on Chicago's web site to partnering with architect Santiago Calatrava for the 2,000 foot high Chicago Spire. Faced with multiple liens and foreclosures, the Spire appears to have had a stake driven through its heart, just in time for Halloween. Read Meagher's great piece here. And read ongoing coverage the story of the Spire, as it happened, from what Meagher describes as one of "Chicago's foremost architecture critics" (me) here, and also here, and here.