BP Gehry Now Actually Bridge to Nowhere (Temporarily)

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“Nowhere”, is what former Mayor Daley claimed you'd find once you crossed over the sinuous Frank Gehry-designed BP Bridge in Millennium Park into Daley Bi-centennial Plaza.

At the time it was a lie, designed as part of a campaign to jam a Children's Museum into Grant Park.  Now, the Gehry has actually become a bridge to nowhere.  It's fenced off at the far end, and overlooks a devastated landscape . . .

The good news is Daley lost on his gambit to build on public land declared in a famous A. Montgomery Ward court decision to be “Forever Open Clear and Free”.  The bad news is that Daley Bi had to be destroyed, anyway.  The membrane separating the park from the parking garage below had failed, causing major leaks, and it had to be replaced.  And so the the trees, flowers, shrubs and lawn of Daley Bi have been torn out, and the the topsoil carted away.

. . . although if you know the right people to let you in, you can apparently still have a picnic  . . .

The better news, however, is that, instead of a tortured building, we're getting a first class new park designed by famed landscape architect Michael van Valkenburgh.

And perhaps the best news is that technology has evolved to where we may be able to keep the new park for longer than the 35 years Daley Bi lasted before having to be replaced.

According to Grant Park Advisory Council President Bob O-Neill . . .

The new waterproofing is a hot applied monolithic membrane system that has a series of protection layers and drainage layers above it. The benefit of this system is that it has minimal seams because of its hot-applied installation.  Then there are several drainage measures in place to convey water off of the roof before it even comes in contact with the membrane itself.    As a result, a much longer lifespan is anticipated from this system than the previous installation.

You can see some examples of hot melt surfacing here and here,   A lot of riding is on the technique's durability:  a hot-applied rubberized membrane is also what separates Millennium Park from the garage and rail tracks below it.

In another couple years, we should have something very special at Daley-Bi, now renamed as Maggie Daley Park, including a thousand new trees.  (You can keep up to date on the project's website here.) 

For now, the Gehry BP is the bridge you can't cross - you can only go back the way you came - but it's a great observation platform for watching Maggie Daley Park come into being.

Goodbye Daley Bi; Hello Maggie Daley Park - stripping North Grant Park bare

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Former Richard M. Daley condemned it as "Nowhere", the 20 acre park named after his father that he wanted to destroy so he could repopulate it with the stalagmite-styled skylights needed to try to erase the subterranean gloom in the Childrens Museum he wanted to jam beneath its surface.

That was over five years ago, and now, finally, Daley Bicentennial park is about to be erased.  But not for a museum.  The combination of a failing economy, anemic fundraising and persistent public opposition proved to much even for someone as powerful and persistant as Mayor Daley, and the Childrens Museum decided to stay put at Navy Pier.

No, as was always the case, the park is being torn up because the membrane that separates it from East Monroe parking garage below needs to be replaced.   A new North Grant Park, named after the late Maggie Daley, will be constructed atop the new membrane.  Designed by Michael Van Valkenburgh, it stands to be a handsome counterpoint to Millennium Park to the west, combining elements both passive . . .

. . .  and active . . .

For now, according to Grant Park Advisory Council's Bob O'Neill, there are over 800 trees to be uprooted. with a mere 38 to remain at Peanut Park to the east, and at the miniature golf course to the south.  None of those 800 trees, which O'Neill claims to be all be aged, diseased or dying, will be replanted, although some of the wood will be reused on the new playground.  1,000 new trees are to be placed in the Valkenburgh landscape, of a mix still being determined.

Chain link fence is going up.  The majestic trees will soon be only a memory.  They served well.

Read a photoessay on the uprooting of a different park:  A Forest Departs - Tree by Tree

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".