Handsome Allstate, Looking for Good Hands

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What started as a simple post on the former Allstate building on Chicago's west side has turned into a full-up consideration of one of the most compelling architectural cities in the city.  This is the first of two parts . . . 

It's a place where you can read in architecture the entire arc of the 20th century, the former Sears Roebuck complex on Chicago's West side.  It's the story of how an architectural juggernaut arose out the kind of ruthless innovation that builds cities, of its rise to dominance, decline, and fall, and of the unsteady phoenix that now struggles, outcome still uncertain, to rise out of abandoned district time had passed by.

photograph: Preservation Chicago

Perhaps the best place start is today, at the 1949 Allstate Headquaters Building.  Located just south of the Eisenhower at 3245 West Arthington, it was the last major structure to be constructed at the complex, and nows stands empty and decaying.  A few weeks ago, Preservation Chicago named it one of its 2013 Chicago Seven list of ‘most endangered buildings’. 

Everyone remembers that the Prudential Building was first  skyscraper erected in Chicago after the Great Depression.  That was in 1955, but the first multi-story building constructed in Chicago after the beginning of World War II was actually the ten-story Allstate headquarters, completed in 1949 to a design by the firm of Carr and Wright.

Never heard of it?  Don't be surprised.   Out of sight, out of mind, in a Sears complex that grew out of the residential North Lawndale neighborhood.  It's not a trophy building like the Prudential, or Inland Steel, which followed downtown in 1956, but even in its current, derelict state, it's a beauty.  Not steel and glass, but concrete and two-tones of brick, mediating modernism with the classically-styled original buildings constructed at the Sears complex nearly half a century before.

The brick and heavy rectangular massing gives the Allstate a real bulk, while the continuous strips of metal-framed double-hung windows impart a counterpoint of lightness, the brick banding floating above bands of windows that wrap around and dematerialize the corners, holding the entire design in a kind of visual tension that's very powerful.

According to Preservation Chicago, the building has been vacant for years.  It's a good thing it's no longer controlled by Allstate, spun off by Sears as a separate company in 1995, because it would probably already be nothing more than a vacant lot.  In  2012, Allstate announced plans to demolish a half-million square foot building on its South Barrington campus.  The year before, it demolished a 430,000 square foot building in Prospect Heights. Back on Arthington, a 2005 plan to convert the building into 238 condominiums went nowhere.

photograph:  Preservation Chicago

Recently, Crain's Chicago Business reported that the Chicago Public Schools was looking to sell off their current headquarters, the 1907 D.H. Burnham and Company Edison Building, across from Mies' Federal Center.  The Allstate, close to downtown and both the Blue and Pink lines and multiple bus routes, would be a great solution, with Rahm dipping into his infrastructure trust for the rehab.

The Allstate headquarters was the last major building constructed at the Sears complex, a city within a city that helped build the City of the Century, and define the American Century.  Looking at today's Sears - both complex and company - it's hard to imagine that in its time, it was both Amazon and Wal-mart, and as dominant as either.   The true origins of Amazon are not Jeff Bezos, but Julius Rosenwald.  Everything Amazon has done, Sears did a century before, with far less sophisticated technology, with an interface, not of a website, but of catalogues.   

more tomorrow . . .

Pecha Kucha, Abalos +Sentkiewicz, Pennoyer, Grospierre, Benjamin Marshall, Ed Uhlir, McKim,Mead, David Woodhouse, Nieto and Sobejano, and Mies's 125th - check out the March calendar! (now with more exclamation points!!!!)

If you can find something that interests you on the March Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events, you must be dead.

The month begins with a bang this Tuesday the 1st , with Pecha Kucha Volume 17, and a range of presenters from activist and education reformer Bill Ayers, Studio Gang, world architecture mapper Chris Botham, architect/design Ania Jaworska and many more.  As always, the month is heavily front-loaded, and it also includes SEAOI's dinner program on the Wacker Drive Reconstruction, and a panel discussion at the Graham featuring Jeanne Gang and John Petersen marking the publication of the new book, The Power of Pro Bono. On Wednesday, the 2nd, Jonathan Fine of Preservation Chicago unveils of the Chicago 7 Most Endangered Historic Places of 2011 at CAF,  and Iñaki Abalos + Renata Sentkiewicz lecture at UIC.  On Thursday, the 3rd, Peter Pennoyer discusses Re-Imaging Architectural Traditions for ICA  at Driehaus Museum/Nickerson Mansion, while photographer Nicolas Grospierre speaks at the opening reception for the Graham's new exhibition of his work, One Thousand Doors, No Exit, and Whitney French, Director of Farnsworth House, discusses Mies van der Rohes iconic work at the Oak Park Public Library.  On Friday, the 4th, The Benjamin Marshall Society has a fundraising gala at the Drake celebrating the Centennial Anniversary of East Lake Shore Drive.

A documentary on the 100 women architects and designers who worked with Frank Lloyd Wright screens at CAF on the 9th, where Dhiru Thadani talks about his book, The Language of Towns & Cities on the 10th and the recent work of Wheeler Kearns is subject on Wednesday, the 23rd.  Ed Uhlir discusses Millennium Park's Future in the Post Daley-Era at the Great Cities Institute on the Thursday, the 10th, the same day David Woodhouse lectures on Pavilions in the Parks: Selected New Buildings at the Oak Park Public Library.  Mosette Frederick discusses her new book, Triumvirate: MicKim, Mead & White, Art, Architecture, Scandal and Class in America's Gilded Age, at the Driehaus.  AIA/Chicago offers a tour of Florian Architects' new Hyde Park Bank Loan Processing Center on Tuesday, the 17th, the same day Rolf Achilles and Christoph Lichtenfield discuss the 1933-34 Armco-Ferro house for Landmarks Illinois at the Chicago Cultural Center, while the same group holds its annual Legendary Landmarks gala at the Ritz-Carlton on the 31st.  Also  on the 31st, Barbara Geiger, author of the upcoming Low-Key Genius, a biography of landscape designer O.C. Simonds, has a lecture at the Second Presbyterian church. A three-day Structures for Inclusion conference brings together activists, designers, funders and policy makers at SAIC on the 25th through the 27th.

Mies's 125th birthday is celebrated at his Crown Hall at IIT on Monday, the 28th, and on the 30th, a lecture by architects Fuensanta Nieto & Enrique Sobejano marks the opening of a new exhibition, Young Architects of Spain, at the Instituto Cervantes.

And did I mention this is just a sampling of what's coming up in March?  We're already at over 50 great events.  Check out the complete March calendar here.