Studio/Gang on the Move: About to Enter its High Polish Period?

former Polish National Alliance (click images for larger view)

What could you do with this building?  Or more to the point, what could Jeanne Gang and her team do?  Gang is taking Studio/Gang Architects to another big leap, but this time it's not about a pathbreaking design - at least not yet - but jumping from the renter class to the ranks of ownership.

On the heels of recent announcements of her firm being in the hunt for major new residential towers both in San Francisco and back at Chicago's Lakeshore East, which her sculpted Aqua tower put on the international map, DNAInfo Chicago's Alisa Hauser's reported last week that Gang's lawyer was appearing before the permit review committee of the Commission on Chicago Landmarks regarding his firm's retrofit of the building at 1520 W. Division as their new headquarters.  Although Gang is proposing the building be landmarked, it wasn't even on the Commission's March agenda, but that didn't stop commission staff from recommending approving - with certain conditions - the architect's plans for making the structure a workable home.

Last December the district in which both Gang's new and old homes are to be found - around a square with an entrance to the Blue Line CTA stop and centered by the Nelson Algren Fountain - was officially designated by the Chicago City Council as the “Polish Triangle”, but its central roll in the lives of Chicago's Polish citizens goes back nearly a century-and-a-half.  Beginning just after the Great Fire of 1871, the three-way intersection was known as the “Polish Downtown”.  According to the Northwest Chicago Historical Society history, “Nearly every Polish undertaking of any consequence in the U.S. during that time either started or was directed from this tight-knight neighborhood.”  With shops, theatres and large department stores (Wieboldt's and Goldblatt's), the district thrived as one of Chicago's many vibrant neighborhood commercial centers, until the lethal combination of the malling of America and white flight to the suburbs wiped them all out in late mid 20th-century.

image courtesy The Chuckman Collection

In addition to strong parishes such as St. Stanislaus Kostka and St. John Cantius, the district has also been home to important Polish institutions, including the Polish National Alliance, founded to aid in the fight for restoring Poland as an independent nation.  In 1896, two lots west of Noble were purchased for $4,900, for the construction of the stately building you see above.  It's now the site of a Shell gas station.

image courtesy of The Chuckman Collection

In 1938, the alliance moved to a new Art Deco styled building at 1520 West Division.  In 1976 the Alliance decamped to 6100 North Cicero, and most recently the structure was home to the College of Office Technology.  Now it's Studio/Gang's turn.

For over a decade, Studio Gang has grown from a small office to taking over the entire second floor of a simple two-story building on Ashland just north of Division at the corner of Milwaukee.  You walked up a long stair to reach a series of offices formerly occupied by a loan company. A more recent social services tenant left behind a Diego Rivera-like labor mural covering one of the walls.

Private offices behind a sequence of glass doors surround a large open space for junior architects, stuffed with books, renderings and models.  

Another room served as a model shop, and there's a small outdoor patio used both as a recreational space and for testing materials against the weather.

More recently, a graphic mapping the terrain of Northerly Island, another Gang project, was mounted next to the otherwise anonymous first-floor entrance.

It was here that the distinctive designs that have made Gang globally renowned originated, from The Starlight Theater in Rockford, to the titanium shingle-clad Chinese American Service League, the still unbuilt Ford Calumet Environmental Center, to Aqua, the Columbia College Media Center, and, the WMS Clark Park boathouse.  The walls are infused with the spirit of that creative history, but Hauser quotes Studio Gang's Harry Soenken as saying that, now up to 50 employees, the old offices are “bursting at the seams.  We hope to have 65 people by the end of this year.”  And to move into their new space shortly thereafter.

Polish Triangle, 1950's (current Studio/Gang Office below the big Chevrolet sign)
image courtesy of The Chuckman Collection

The Polish Triangle is also changing, in an increasingly upscale way.  There's always been a shoe store beneath Gang's offices, but what used to be a Pay Less is now an Aldo  - a far swankier line, even if it's an outlet.  Last year, what was long a fast food joint was replaced by Wheeler Kearns' spiky 1611 West Division apartments.  Nicknamed the “Tower of Pizza” after the site's former occupant, a Pizza Hut, Crain's is reporting the developer is already looking to cash in by selling off the property.

With many of their employees walking to work, Studio/Gang wanted to stay in the neighborhood, and so they're moving little more than a block away.  This time they get to retrofit an entire building to their needs and tastes.  According to the Permit Review report, the plans include a one-story addition, setback on the rooftop, and replacement of the aging windows.  As is the norm, staff recommended that all new exterior alterations try to match, as much as possible, the original materials.  Staff approved lowering the basement window sills on Bosworth “only if needed.”  Changes to signage are to be reviewed once completed.

No renderings for the interiors have been released.  It's unknown whether any of the original interiors will be protected by the landmark designation, but most often protection is confined to exterior elements.  At their current offices, it was more the energy of the place than any radical design initiatives that energized the space.  I've visited a number of architects' offices, and without exception they've been more work horses than show horses.  Spartan or expressive, however, it's will interesting to be what Gang, Soenken and her team will come up with.

Related: 

Jeanne Gang Before Aqua - a look at her life and early work.

Light and Shade at Polish Triangle: Wheeler Kearns' 1611 West Division

click images for larger view

Except for the required shadow analysis, how often do architects study the effect of light on their buildings.  You could argue, “What's the point?”  The sun comes, the sun goes, hour to hour, day to day, season to season.  There's not much you can do about it.  It is what it is.

Still, sunlight makes dramatic differences not only in how we see buildings and, quite possibly, but how they affect our psychological balance.  This is the landmark former Home Bank and Trust at Polish Triangle on a overcast day.

And this is how it looked a couple weeks ago in full sunlight.  The heavy stone takes on a mimicking lightness, becoming almost luminous.

The day I stopped by, it was well into afternoon, and so the shot you see at the top of this post of Wheeler Kearns Architects ' 1611 West Division, which began welcoming tenants last month, was on the shadow side of the sun, tending to flatten the contours of its jagged facades, just as it does with classically-styled bank building under similar conditions.

Walking back to the western side of the building, the impression was quite different . . .

The building goes full-up 3-D.  The metallic metal jigsaw pieces pop, stressing a verticality held together by the black spandrels.  The windows become cool blue streams of reflected sky.  The tall concrete service core at the corner becomes the anchor that holds all the lightness in place.  What appears in shade as a monolithic metal box with perforations, becomes, in sunlight, an articulated facade of discrete elements in lively conterpoint.

Clearly, Wheeler Kearns was looking for a new way for designing an anchor building at a major intersection, something between the heavy stone massing of traditional design, and the generic  sameness of the modernist glass box . . .

A page on the projects website discussing the architecture refers to “an expressed circulation core pulls away to clearly read as a separate public entry to a mix use of offices, exercise and bicycle storage above." 

Holding the Corner, Framing a Gateway.
Responding to the pivotal location on the park and the communities expressed desire for a major building/gateway to and from Division Street, 99? apartments are built above, with easy access to public transport and the city. The perfect opportunity to use Transit Oriented Design strategies.

Folded Facades Give Back.
The two street facades are pushed back, creating an enigmatic profile from the street, the facets catching light in subtle ways, emphasizing verticality. The sidewalk experience benefits from these widened pedestrian ways, around the bus shelter and puts the retail more in view.

A Woven Façade. Thought of as a mass wrapped by fabric, the façade is created by luminous, vertical metal panels and deeply recessed windows, more open where living occurs, more closed where sleeping does. Implicitly acknowledging the varying characters within, each façade varies in composition as it rises, making each apartment a unique experience.'

In direct response to the neighborhood and city, the project eliminates parking for residents, creating a development marketed entirely towards mass transit goers, bicyclists and pedestrians. It also addresses the larger environmental goal of providing higher density housing and services without adding un-desired traffic. The project is a rare example of cooperation and collaboration between community, municipality, developer and architect that embodies the vision and mission of Wheeler Kearns Architects.

As discussed by Chris Bentley in his report for the  Architects Newspaper's Chris Bentley, the community's campaign for something more ambitious than the usual Walgreen's with surface parking dates back to 2007.

Served by three major bus lines and the Division stop on the CTA Blue Line, 1611 actually walks the TOD talk.  Although the building includes retail on the first floor, offices and studio space on the second, and 99 apartments on the top eight floors, the only parking is nine spaces for the retailers, first-come/first-served, at the adjacent Wendy's parking lot.  

Known as the Tower of Pizza Hut after the site's previous tenant, 1611's design has inspired spirited discussion, which is welcome.  The great banks and department stores that anchored our neighborhoods for most of the 20th century are long gone; the proud buildings they constructed survive as historical artifacts often starving for viable re-use.  We need new ways for larger-scale structures to visually anchor the “town squares” that channel the character of the city's neighborhoods.  Wheeler-Kearns 1611 is a bold calling card in that debate. 

On a related note  . . .

From Drugs to Dollars to Deli: the story of Walgreens and the Landmark Noel State Bank