Inland Steel - Jewel Box of the Loop - Goes to Seed: popup sculpture Garden Alterpolitan

The main floor retail space of the Walter Netsch/Bruce Grahm/SOM Inland Steel Building went green - literally - last week.

photograph: Chicago Loop Alliance (click images for larger view)

As reported by Treehugger, volunteers laid down 3,800 square feet of sod and installed plants and 27 sculptures to create Alterpolitan: An Indoor Sculpture Garden, a collaboration between Noisivelvet, Art Advisory LTD and Turnstone for one of the Chicago Loop Alliance's more than a dozen current installations in its popular Pop-Up art projects.  Check out a video of the laying down of the sod here.

By this past Saturday, however, the lawn seemed to have already entered its brown phase.  I wasn't able to get inside, but the gallery is open weekdays, 10:00 a.m. - 6:00 p.m. for the next couple weeks, "a social space where pedestrians can enjoy impromptu conversations and an artful reprieve from Chicago's bustling downtown."   You can see all the sculptures and learn who made them at Jyoti Srivastava's indispensable Public Art in Chicago website here.


You can also check out Richard Lippold's Radiant One, commissioned by Inland Steel in 1957 for their building's lobby.

It's also a chance to visit one of the most iconic and beautiful buildings in Chicago, the Jewel Box of the Loop.  When the Inland Steel was  completed in 1958, it was the first new skyscraper to be constructed in the Loop since the Great Depression.  It's brushed steel finish showcased the product of the company making the building it's home, and it's innovative design supported the structure on just 14 columns that stand outside of the curtain wall, leaving the interiors completely unobstructed. The floors cantilever out dramatically at the north and south ends, and the green-tinted windows, an early form of anti-heat-gain technology that replaced Netsch's original design of a dual-pane system, give the Inland Steel a visual texture unique in Chicago architecture.  The detached service core is, itself, a spectacular steel-clad tower.

At the time of its construction, Inland Steel was the tallest thing around.  Although it had one less floor, it was sixty feet taller than the 1905 Majestic Theater Building next door, and a hundred feet taller than Burnham's 1903 First National Bank Building across from it on Dearborn.  Over time, the great view from the south captured in this classic Ezra Stoller photograph was obliterated by the replacement of the two-story structure to the south with SOM's rather dreadful 33 West Monroe.  By that time, however, another open view was created to the west when the First National Bank was demolished and replaced by the huge plaza of what is now Chase Tower.

In 2005, another open view of Inland Steel emerged, this time to the North, when the 1902 building Holabird and Roche designed for the Chicago Tribune was demolished to create a 16,000 square foot plaza for DeStefano Partners' One South Dearborn.  And while the turf at Alterpolitan may be turning a bit brown, the plaza to the north, designed by Daniel Weinbach and Partners,  holds one of my favorite spots in Chicago, a grove of sugar maples that have matured into a forest canopy respite from the proud, insistent towers.

Trumped: An Oasis of Urban Magic Vanishes

Look at this landscaping . . .

click images for larger view

If you had never been in the place before, no doubt it would strike you as professional and pleasant.  Then why, when I first saw it about a week ago, did my heart sink into my stomach?  Because I was expecting this . . .

This is an example of the absolutely wonderful landscaping designed by Hoerr Schaudt Landscape Architects for the Trump Tower riverwalk, a rich, complex composition of native plantings that was a delight, as I've written before, even in the winter's snow.

Now it's all gone.  According to Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin's report, when Peter Schaudt first saw what had befallen his design "I was aghast.  My mouth dropped."  Which was pretty much my reaction when I saw the workers from McFarlane Douglass destroying Schaudt's work, for this . . .

According to Kamin, Schaudt was not even given the courtesy of a call to warn him.  Daniel Weinbach and Partners were called in to replace him.  Weinbach is certainly capable of fine work.The firm's  tall-treed plaza for One South Dearborn is one my favorite new public spaces. Apparently, however, all Trump management was asking for was something comfortably generic, lots of the kinds of plants that people are used to seeing everywhere else, lots of evergreens that show no signs of decay, no winter's death, a kind of landscaping botox that turns the wonder of nature into a denial of the seasons.

They've already made gravel a big part of the design.  Why not just replace everything else with plastic and be done with it?

Schaudt's design was unlike anything else you could find in downtown Chicago, a special place that took seriously Trump's claim to uniqueness, giving the riverwalk a spectacular beauty.

Now the Trump landscaping looks pretty much like what you can find in any suburban apartment complex.  Serviceable.  Common.

If you've been around for a while, it shouldn't be a surprise, but it still shocks: aim low, and you can live forever. Create magic and be prepared to watch it snuffed out impatiently, as if it were a disease.  Yet for all who experienced and loved it, Schaudt's landscape will endure clean and bracing in our memories, even as its replacement is forgotten the moment you walk past it.