Tonight at MOCP: the Changing Chicago Project

Tonight at 6:00 p.m. at the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College, 600 South Michigan, Peter Bacon Hales will lead a panel discussion on the Changing Chicago project, a MOCP archive of photographic images from a 1987 project in which 33 photographers fanned out to document Chicago's neighborhoods and suburbs. Some of those photographers are expected to be on tonight's panel, along with Jan Tichy, whose exibition, 1979:1 - 2012:21:Jan - Tichny Works with the MoCP Collection runs through December 23rd., Information on-line.

Also, today at 12:15 p.m., Brian Lee and Ross Wimer of SOM discuss the Lusail Marina on Doha and Infinity Tower in Dubai at today's lunchtime lecture at the Chicago Architecture Foundation. Check out this and all the other great items on the December Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.

I've Got You (1913) Under My Skin - Virtual Restoration at 618 South Michigan

click images for larger view

We last wrote in October about plans for 618 South Michigan, home to the Spertus Institute until that institution moved into the stunning new home next door,  designed Krueck and Sexton.

618 South Michigan, just this past June

618 originally had the standard Burnhamesque terra cotta facade.  You can see it here in a vintage photo from John D. Cramer's HPRES-ist blog.  It was designed by Zimmerman, Saxe and McBride and after its 1913 completion, it went through a series of name:  The Petroleum Building, the Dennehy Building (afters its developer), the Barnheisel (after Frederick R. Barnheisel, President of H.H. Kohlsaat, the company that claimed to have invented the lunch counter) and The Arcade Building.

618 South Michigan, 1950's curtail wall rehab

That facade was replaced in the 1950's when IBM took over the building, with a tight grid of a glass and steel curtain wall that better fit in with it's tenant's ultra-modern branding. 

624 South Michigan Chicago Musical College, 1908, C.A. Eckstrom, architect

Columbia also owns 624 South next door, perhaps best known for the huge, ovoid Torco sign that long stood at its crown. 624 South, acquired by Columbia for $8 million in 1990,  was built in 1908 as the home of the Chicago Musical College for the schools' founder, Florenz Ziegfield, Sr.   The original design included an 800-seat theater, the Ziegfield Picture Palace, which was destroyed when A.S. Alschuler added seven stories to the structure in 1922 for H.H. Blum's expansion of "Blum's Smart Shop." 

Alschuler replaced the remarkably open and graceful first and second floor terra cotta facade with a less porous and far more ponderous stone cladding.  Splices are seldom happy affairs, but Eckstrom's original, for all its fussy detail, actually seems a lot more amiable - and modern.

After 76,000 square-foot 618 was acquired by Columbia under the direction of former Chicago planning director Alica Berg, now Columbia's VP of Campus Environment, the 1950's curtain wall was found to be crumbling.  Gensler was called upon to come up with the replacement, and under Regional Design Leader Elva Rubio the idea was hatched to make the few facade a mediation between Krueck and Sexton's cutting-edge sculpted steel and glass to the north and Eckstrom and Alschuler's classically-styled masonry cladding to the south.

While Gensler's new curtain wall is as structure-spare and glassily sleek as the Spertus, it's also  been designed with a "ghost image" of the building's original terra cotta facade, digitally printed as a ceramic frit placed between the dual pane glass, which Berg, in an interview with the Columbia Chronicle, claims is a first in the U.S.. Not only does the new curtain wall provide a major boost in energy efficiency, the fritting is expected to flatten the transparency of the facade just enough to discourage the usual carnage when migratory birds try to fly through hyper-transparent glass.

In its master plan, Columbus noted that the similar floor levels between 618 and 624 allow it to expand its library across both buildings.  Already, Columbia has created a new gallery space on the 2nd floor overlooking Grant Park and the lake called The Arcade, a nod to one of 618's original names.  (Gallery scheduled to re-opened September 4th.)

Obviously, the appearance of the facade will change depending on the light.  The pictures you see here were taken late afternoon.  It will be interesting to see how it resolves in direct sunlight.

Virtual Facadectomy: On October 26, Grant Park Advisory talks 618 S. Michigan, unveils plans for North Grant Park

What's thinner than a facadectomy, that dubious "preservation" process that strips off the facade of a soon-to-be demolished building and slaps it onto a new structure?  How about a fritectomy?

It's part of the plan for a new facade at 618 South Michigan, a topic on the agenda of the next Grant Park Advisory Council meeting, to be held Wednesday, October 26, 2011 , 6:00 to 8:00 p.m. in the 8th floor meeting room of the Chicago Park District Headquarters, a/k/a Harry Weese's Time-Life Building, 541 North Fairbanks (enter on Ohio).

The major item at the meeting will be Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates' presentation of the revised plans for North Grant Park/Daley Bicentennial Plaza.  In May of 2010, Van Valkenburgh gave a presentation of his views of park planning even as the Park District's Gia Biagi mandated than any plans would have to accommodate a new building for the Chicago Children's Museum, the pet project of movie producer Gigi Pritzker that a flailing and exhausted Mayor Richard M. Daley tried to ram into the park while vilifying as racists and child-haters anyone who dared oppose it.  Flash forward to today: Daley is gone, Pritzker is gone.  The opponents prevailed.  A stake has been driven into the project's heart, and the Museum is negotiating to continue at Navy Pier and expand its presence.  Will this give Valkenburgh more freedom to come up with something spectacular,  like his new Brooklyn Bridge Park, which balances playlots with a salt marsh?

But back to 618 South Michigan.  It looks like the original intrusion of modernist structure into the 600 block of the neo-classical Michigan Avenue streetwall, anchored by Marshall & Fox's Blackstone Hotel at the south, and the Harvester building to the north, with the Blum's Vogue building, constructed by Florence Ziegfeld, Sr., in between.  Actually, however, as related in an excellent post on John D. Cramer's great HPRES-ist blog, 618 South Michigan was actually built in 1913, designed by architects Zimmerman, Saxe, & McBride with a Burnham-esque classical buff terra cotta facade.  That facade survived into the 1950's, but when IBM took over the building, a new Miesian steel-and-glass curtain wall replaced it, designed by Shayman & Salk, a more suitable visual expression for one of the corporate powerhouses of mid-century modernism.

In 1974, the Spertus Institute took over the building, and added that monolithic entrance wall unbeloved by many.  In 2007, the Institute moved again, to a spectacular new building by Krueck & Sexton that has quickly become one of Chicago's architectural icons. Two years before the opening, the Spertus sold 76,000 square-foot 618 South for $8 million to Columbia College, which already owned both the Harvester and Blum's Vogue buildings.

For Columbia, which has a sterling record of purchasing, retrofitting and restoring vintage buildings throughout the South Loop,  Gensler has been engaged in an Urban Campus Repositioning "to rethink the way its 16 buildings fit into this burgeoning South Loop neighborhood."  But what of 618 South? Unlike most of Columbia's other structures, 618 South Michigan's original facade, long gone, couldn't be restored, only recreated, an inauthentic process.  So what is Gensler going to do?  First, they're going to replace the 1950's curtain wall with a new curtain wall, but on the glass they're going to etch a fritting that will evoke the terra cotta original.

That kind of applied imagery is very Venturi, and not unknown.  Cramer cites its use by Herzog & DeMeuron on their 1998 Fachhochschule Eberswalde library, where Thomas Ruff transferred images onto what became a photographic concrete facade.  Looking at the redesign of 618 South in this image from the invaluable skyscrapercity.com website, it's hard to make a judgement of how it'll work out.

The fritting is described as "suggesting" the image of the original facade.  If it's too abstracted, will it be too insubstantial to register?  Still, the idea of this kind of layering, of intimating the past without denying the present, creating a tension of simultaneity, makes me look forward to seeing how it will all turn out.  And it doesn't -well, a future generation gets to take it apart and put it together still again - maybe they'll rename it "The Face Lift Building".