Mies van der Rohe's IBM Building going condo

When it was first opened, Chicago's IBM Building, a tower designed by the firm of Mies van der Rohe, and completed in 1973, four years after the architect's death, was one of the city's most prestigious addresses. Things change, however, and the building's present owner, Prime Realty Group, is seeking approval to convert an increasing portion of the structure to residential use.

In some ways, the tower is even more classically Mies than the iconic Seagram Building in New York. There's no bustle at the back, just a pure rectangle almost 700 feet tall, sited on a raised plinth that maintains its uniform height even as State Street to its west inclines steeply as it flows down from the level of the bascule bridge crossing the Chicago River.

For years, along with the twin cylindrical towers of Bertrand Goldberg's Marina City, just across the street, the IBM dominated the north bank of the river, placed in gentle perspective against the low Chicago Sun-Times building to the east. That building is gone now, however, replaced with an under-construction Donald Trump behemoth, a 1,100 foot high tower that is casting the IBM into its shadow. (It was reported that when Trump's project still had an office component, it was being marketed to current IBM tenants with the argument that the Trump would block all of their views.)

Earlier this year, IBM left for other quarters, and the iconic, cubic IBM sign was changed to the property's new, prosaic name of 330 North Wabash. The Chicago Tribune reported earlier this month that 36% of the building's space is currently vacant. Its current signature tenant, the powerhouse law firm of Jenner and Block, is also set to leave for new digs in another couple years, leaving another 16 floors empty.

For now, the plan is to convert floors 3 through 14 into 275 condos. More floors may be converted as they become vacant. While reported sale prices will be about half that of the high-end Trump units next door, the fact that the IBM is hemmed in by taller structures along its long and east and west facades could make it a tougher sell.

Despite the IBM's extraordinary quality of design and its importance in Chicago's cityscape, it has yet to be designated an official landmark. It has no legal protection against dramatic, or even destructive alterations. Its current owners can do with it pretty much whatever they want.

Stop Taking Pictures of Marina City!

(Plus, a spectacular 1965 film on the construction of Bertrand Goldberg's masterpiece)

Serving on a condo board can be a thankless, high-pressure job. That's the only excuse I can think of for the declaration, equal parts loony and arrogant, of the board of the Marina Towers Condo Association:

"Because of the architectural significance of our building, the Condominium Association holds a common law copyright on the use of the Association name and building image. This means that under Federal and Illinois law, advertisers, movie makers and others cannot use the Association name or image without first obtaining express written permission from the Association . ."

Bloggers such as Marina City Online have been having a field exposing the shear stupidity of the declaration, reportedly drafted by the board's long-time attorney Ellis Levin, a long way away from his days as a progressive, independent legislator.

What kind of idiot do you have to be to actually insert the phrase "under Federal and Illinois law," when copyrights are a federal protection, and have nothing to do with state law? Then there's the inconvenient fact the condo owners only own the top 40 floors of each 60-story tower. Exactly how can they claim to own a copyright to "Marina Towers" when the first 20 stories of the towers, and the other structures of the commercial complex, are owned by someone else? And then there's the matter of exclusivity. Upon a quick Googlecheck, here are just a few of the other "Marina Towers" throughout the world.

Alexandria, Virginia
Corpus Christi, Texas
Marina del Rey, California
Oceanside, North Carolina
Beirut, Lebanon
Chennai, India
Dubai

No doubt the MTCA will soon be attempting to shake them down for royalties.

Marina City Online's Steven Dahlman deftly dissects the sloppy posturing of the board's proposal here. He has even engaged attorney Thomas D. Rosenwein, who refutes its basic legality here. Chicago Carless' Mike Doyle, redeeming himself from his support for the Chicago Children's Museum land grab in Grant Park, has also covered the topic here. And to get feel for the eclectic mix of residents at the towers, check out the MarinaWatchDog blog, which consists entirely of comment postings - some reasoned, some impassioned, some almost inscrutably strange.

As you probably already know, I am also a long term resident of Marina City. I feature numerous photos of Bertrand Goldberg's masterpiece on my website and this blog, and I guess I actually qualify as a commercial interest, as I receive regular, if pitiable, checks from Google from the ads they run there.

The proposed change to Rule Number 5 is scheduled to be voted on November 15th. So I say to Ellis and the board, pass your rule and then - please, please, please - come after me. If you're so dead set on embarrassing the building, the board, its residents, and - come to think of it - the very notion of intelligent human life, I will be a willing co-conspirator in getting your buffoonery the widest possible audience.

The Making of Marina City
On a much more positive note, an unexpected pleasure I encountered when researching this post is photographer Steven Dahlman's aforementioned Marina City Online website, co-created with real estate broker Michael Michalak. As opposed to MCTA's own almost laughably pedestrian website, Marina City Online has a wealth of useful information, including a listing of recent unit sales, maps and floorplans, and an encyclopedic history of Marina City, beautifully illustrated.

Did you know, for example, that Marina City is located on Block 1 on Chicago's original 1837 township map, or that the site was once owned by former Chicago Mayor Thomas Dyer (1856-57)? There's even a Currier and Ives lithograph showing the site and its environs circa 1892.

But perhaps the most spectacular feature of the site is a 1965, documentary, This is Marina City, produced by the Portland Cement Association. The bad news is that film has grown more than a little fuzzy with time, but the film's color images are still nothing short of breathtaking. You see the site before construction begins, surrounding by a vanished city, huge cold storage warehouses on the other side of Dearborn, surface parking at the level of the river where the IBM building is now. The film was a showpiece for the trade unions, who financed the project as a calling card for their services, just as the PCA would produce the film to promote its products.

Every phase of construction is covered - the excavation for the caissons, the complex formwork for the central cores, rising like slender reeds high into the skyline; more formwork, this time like something out of Gaudi, for the curving balconies, the painstaking pouring of the floor slabs, and views of the building at the time of its opening - the skating rink and the modern sculptures that once encircled it, the original elevator lobbies, Johnny Lattner's riverside restaurant, the gleaming glass displays cases of the first grocery store, and the office building, now the Hotel Sax, that then included the offices of Bertrand Goldberg, himself. An enthralling time capsule of a great building and its time. See it here.

Children's Museum Battle Moves to Plan Commission - plus Germania Club, Marina City. IBM Updates

Chicago Children's Museum
In a newsletter sent out last week, 42nd ward alderman Brendan Reilly writes that the Chicago Children's Museum's proposal to build itself a new home in Grant Park will "very likely [be] heard at the April 17th, 2007 meeting" of the Chicago Plan Commission. It could be that the Museum thinks it has the votes to muscle its way through the Commission. Heavy lobbying has been going on in the City Council, with the Sun-Times reporting that the museum continues to play the race card in smearing opposition to its land grab as racist. The photo you see here is of the current park, derisively dismissed by Mayor Richard M. Daley as "nowhere".

David Axelrod - the Daley street fighter behind CCM's Push
The museum has retained high-powered lobbyists to advance its interests behind the scenes. In a profile of lobbyist (and Barack Obama's chief strategist) David Axelrod in the current Business Week, Reilly characterizes Axelrod's firm ASK Public Strategies as "the gold standard in Astroturf organizing. This is an emerging industry, and ASK has made a name for itself in shaping public opinion and manufacturing public support."

Axelrod's ASK is the politically-connected muscle behind the CCM's campaign. You can see the Astroturf under its fingernails in the hijacking of a community meeting on the proposal last year where museum supporters, of whom few, if any, appeared to be from the community, filled up the auditorium and forced the actual residents, overwhelmingly opposed to the CCM's plan, into side hallways. The gutter politics continued with Father Michael Pfleger who, based on an encounter with a single person attending the meeting, began echoing the canned message refrain that museum opponents were acting out of racist motives. Astroturf, in abundance. Will Axelrod's operatives succeed in placing their Astroturf blindfolds over the eyes of Plan Commission members?

Germania Club
In the aftermath of our recent story in the Chicago Reader on how the Commission on Chicago Landmarks is leaving important buildings like the 1888 Germania Club on Clark Street twisting in the wind, Alderman Brendan Reilly also announced that, "Because of its significance, I sent a letter to the Commissioner of Planning and Development asking that we pursue land-marking this structure. Although there are currently no redevelopment plans before us, I would prefer to be proactive rather than reactive in order to guarantee the re-use of this significant, and important historic structure. " The property was recently acquired by strip-mall developer Kimco Realty Corporation.

Marina City
The indispensible Marina CityOnline website is reporting that Dick's Last Resort is suffering a number of setbacks in bringing its surly staff and penis-shaped hats to the concourse level of Marina City. A "Stop Work Order" from the Chicago Department of Buildings has been in effect since February 22nd, and in March Dick's failed ventilation, structural and electrical reviews. To date, no fewer than seven reviews, including architectural, fire prevention, plumbing and refrigeration, have been denied. The extent of Dick's intended alterations to the exterior of the iconic building have yet to be revealed.

Just across the street, as Crain's Chicago Business reported Tuesday , LaSalle Hotel Properties, the owner of Marina City's Hotel Sax, has closed on purchasing floors 2 through thirteen of the Mies van der Rohes designed IBM Building, aka 330 North Wabash, paying $46 million for 375,000 square feet that it plans for transform into a 335 room hotel. The project will benefit from tax breaks accrued from the buildings recent designation as an official Chicago landmark. A name for the property has yet to be announced. Mieshaus by Starke anyone? Think that sucks? Ok, smartguy(gal), let's see your bright ideas - post them in our comments section.

On the Ellis Levin front, MCO also carries a story on continuing efforts by resident Mindy Verson to learn the full extent of the fees paid to the Marina Towers Condo Association's controversial attorney.

Marina City Online continues to add items to what has become an extraordinarily rich on-line portrait of the Marina City complex and its history. We'll have more on that, including the story of two extraordinary 1960's films that used Marina City as a location, a few days hence, but that's no reason not to check it all out for yourself here, with a huge gallery of images here.

Design for Santiago Calatrava's 2,000 foot high Chicago residential tower unveiled

Blair Kamin and Thomas Corfman in the Chicago Tribune, Kevin Nance in Chicago Sun-Times and Alexi Barrionuevo in the New York Times both reported this morning on the unveiling of a design by architect Santiago Calatrava for a proposed 115-story, 2,000 foot high residential tower to built along the Chicago river just off of Lake Michigan. Additional commentary can also be found on today's archidose. The tower, rising from a stepped plateau base like a braided, tapering stick of white licorice, would be called the Fordham Spire, named after the development company of the same name.

Christopher T. Carley, may be seeking to move beyond the often mediocre quality of design found in the recent upper-end projects put up by the Fordham Company. of which he is president. These include the Fordham, the Pinnacle, and the 65 E. Goethe, all of which had a propensity for backward-looking styling, complete with mansard roofs.

The project, with a price tag of at least a half a billion dollars and, given the experience of the massive cost overruns at Calatrava's soaring Milwaukee Art Museum, perhaps a good deal more, may be a tough sell in a market already saturated with ultra luxury housing. Trump Tower Chicago, already rising along the river, across the street from Mies van der Rohe's iconic IBM tower, on the site of the former Chicago Sun-Times Building , has 472 "super-luxury" condos, as well 286 condo hotel rooms. The same mixed used concept is being proposed for the Fordham Spire, but it would have only 200 condo hotel rooms and no more than 250 condo's, and contain less than a million square feet, versus Trump's 2,600,000.

Farley has experienced slow sales and problems with lenders in some of his recent projects, but if the Calatrava tower is built, it will mark a major step in the revival of Chicago's skyline, plagued over the last decade with a succession of numbingly ugly 40, 50 and 60 story condo towers.

Note: links to the Chicago Tribune and New York Times stories will expire into their respective archives after seven days.