Frontier Outpost: The Roosevelt Collection and the Future of the Viaduct District

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Other than a couple of former sandbars, Chicago is flat, flat, flat.  Even when we raised the city out of the muck in the 19th century, it was basically just to a higher level of flat. 

The Roosevelt Road viaduct is another example of Chicago's man-made levels.  It goes on for blocks, towering above Dearborn Park, over once endless strands of railroad tracks now mostly gone, and on to the approach to the bridge over the Chicago River.

In the middle of that viaduct is The Roosevelt Collection, a mixed use development with 342 residential units and nearly 400,000 square feet of retail space, A. Epstein, RTKL and Hirsch Associates, architects.  While it has a new Target to the east, the complex, whose site plan looks like an oversized clothespin, otherwise lies within a moat of some of Chicago's largest tracts of undeveloped land.

The project, conceived by Centrum Properties, broke ground in 2007, the tail end of the condo bubble.  By the time things came on line after the crash, there was so little interest in the condos that existing contracts were torn up and the units converted to rental.  And while those apartments are reportedly now fully leased, the retail component, tther than a huge Icon movie multiplex, remains uncontaminated by tenants to this day.  In 2010, Centrum put the whole thing up for sale, and last year it was acquired by a joint ventured headed by McCaffery Interests for less than half the $350 million it cost to build. 

Since then, McCaffery has moved quickly,  with a new marketing campaign for what is now named The Lofts at Roosevelt Collection.  McCaffrey turned to Antunovich Associates to restart the design.
A series of clunky, never-occupied retail buildings in the center were demolished to create a more open plaza, now nearing completion, with dramatically lit fountains dedicated earlier this month.  

Construction has been going on so long,  it's been memorialized by a couple of J. Seward Johnson sculptures of construction workers installed on the plaza.

Even after all this effort, however, the retail plaza is still eerily quiet.  When I was there last Friday, the only sound was the music from a workman's radio.  Despite of flurry of speculation this past spring over prospective tenants - including everything from Lulelemon to Ulta to an Apple Store - the shopping center remains, as of today, a festival of emptiness.

The area around the Roosevelt Collection has always been a Bermuda Triangle of lost opportunity, centered around the massive corporeal ghost of former railyards that once served Chicago's great depots.  When Mayor J. Daley initially wanted to build a new campus for the University of Illinois there, he wanted it here, but was stymied by the prices the railroads, spinning towards bankruptcy, demanded for the land.  He wound up demolishing a large part of Chicago's Little Italy instead, for the UIC Circle campus.  It's taken nearly half a century for Little Italy to recover from the damage, and still the former railyards are empty.

The Roosevelt Collection is built on land that once held tracks leading into the old LaSalle Street Station.  The two blocks to the north remain vacant.

To the west, along Wells Street, the Roosevelt Collection shears off to another empty void, formerly holding the tracks leading to Solon Beman's masterful Grand Central Station, demolished in 1971.  In the center of this site, Bertrand Goldberg's River City was erected in the 1980s.  River City was originally to have been the capstone of Goldberg's career, a massively ambitious project on 230 acres with nine 72-story-high triad towers.  In terms of civic support, however, River City lost out to an alternate project, Dearborn Park, built beginning in the 1970's on 51 acres of formerly railyards formerly serving the decommissioned Dearborn Station.  The only part of the River City to be realized was the mid-rise element we see today.

The area along the river south of River City and next to the Roosevelt Collection remains vacant, as does the 11 acres north of River City, on the site of Grand Central Station.  In 2007, it was finally sold off by CSX - the successor corporation to the B&O Railroad - to a Skokie capital firm, but its highest use remains as an impromptu dog park.

The real prize, however, is to the south of Roosevelt  Road, 62 acres of former railyards that have reverted to a wonderous, semi-wilderness.

Rezmar Development had  big plans for the site - 4,600 residential units and 670,000 square feet of retail, centered on the first Ikea in the city's borders, but they were done in by the twin curses of the economic crash and the conviction and imprisonment of Rezmar's boodler/CEO Tony Rezko.  The site was put up for sale in 2010.  2nd ward alderman Robert Fioretti has suggested it as a location for the up-to-now mythical Chicago casino.  In 2010, the winning proposal in the Network Reset design competition co-sponsored by MAS Studio and the Chicago Architectural Club called for turning the 62 acres into parkland. Right now, however, it's just the land that time forgot.

As you can see, all of these parcels around the Roosevelt Viaduct  are below it.  McCaffery seems to sense the need for patching it all together, and has taken the unprecedented step of constructing a stair at the back of the Roosevelt Collection linking down to the lower level, although the only thing  there right now is a new dog park.

A multiple-level city is something Chicago encounters so infrequently that we don't do a very good job of it.  In terms of developing a visually compelling urban landscape, nothing beats breaking the flatness, whether it be the hills of San Francisco or the Spanish Steps in Rome.  The vistas created, and the contrasts they provide, can make a city both more comprehensible and more compelling.  You no longer seem lost in a grid that seems to just repeat, unto infinity.  You can see edges and borders, with well-designed stairways or inclines the markers of transition.  It brings a dense city back to human scale.

Right now, the Roosevelt viaduct is an anti-urban disconnect from the fabric of the city, just as the retail to the west of the river veers towards an anti-urban, shopping-within-a-sea-of-parking vibe.  Assuming all those vacant tracts around the Roosevelt viaduct eventually begin to fill up, the city needs something more than a development-by-development improvisation, lest the district become just a series of insular, self-contained mega-projects, existing in near-perfect isolation one to another. That's the profile of a second-rate suburb, not a great city.  All the parcels will be developed separately, but continuity counts.  Chicago needs a plan and a set of guidelines to stitch this tabula rasa together if the Roosevelt Viaduct District is to realize its potential as one the city's great neighborhoods

Last Two Weeks for Young Architects of Spain exhibition at Instituto Cervantes

Update: the exhibition has now been extended through April 25th, and it includes two lecture/panel events that we will be discussing tomorrow.

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You have only two more weeks, through April 25th, to see an ambitious exhibition, Young Architects of Spain (YAS): A Window to the Unknown, at the Instituto Cervantes, which has set up shop at 31 West Ohio, providing a small slice of culture in the banality of the Grand Plaza residential towers. The exhibition, part of the ongoing Architecture and Urban lecture series organized by the Instituto Cervantes of Chicago and MAS Studio and directed by Iker Gil.  "Its goal is to establish a platform in Chicago for an open exchange of design ideas and interesting experiences within the world of architecture and urbanism."

The exhibition grew out of a competition staged by Spanish Ministry of Housing, "an open call to all young Spanish architects [under 40], both within and outside of Spain’s borders." The more than 700 submissions were culled down to 62 by an international jury that included such luminaries as Juhani Pallasmaa. Alberto Campo Baeza, and the omnipresent Kenneth Frampton. The selected works were exhibited first in Madrid in 2007, and then made the rounds to the Columbia School of Architecture in New York, last winter in Brussels, and now here to Chicago.

102 viviendas en Carabanchel, Madrid, Dosmasuno Arquitectos

The handsome, bilingual catalog includes often fascinating essays from each member of the selection committee, with an especially personal one from Campo Baeza, who finds commonality in the designs of Spanish architects along three lines: Idealism (ideas over mere form), sincerity in construction, and functionality. "Their houses," he writes, rather than arbitrary formal exercises, are houses to be lived in happily."

SGAE, Santiago de Compostela,  Ensamble Studio

Jorge Otero-Pailos records some basic facts about the participating firms. First, they are small - two principals, on average, plus four additional architects. Almost a third work from a home office. Only 18% of employees are foreign nationals. Average firm billing is 171,000 (about $250,000 at today's exchange rates). Average salary is between about $20,000 and $31,000, or only about 2 to 3 times the mandated minimum annual wage.

Numancia Gymnasium, PO2 Arquitectos

Otero-Pailos takes note that what may have been the first architectural competition, in 448 BC Athens, for a war memorial on the Acropolis, was decided by popular vote, an unlikely prospect today. He also discusses how the stereotypical set of human figures used to inhabit architectural renderings has descended largely unchanged from the 1870's down to the present day's no-longer-young radicals such as Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren, but the younger generation has different ideas.

[Younger Architects such as] Royo and Morales do not presume to know visitors or wish to reduce architecture to a stage set within which people are understood as videogame avatars and expected to perform predictable behaviors. . . . The commanding function of the author-architect is interrupted by the recognition of an alien presence, the visitor, who creatively interjects and participates in the creation of architecture.

Although the architects are Spanish, the projects are placed throughout the world, including the Puente peatonal, in Shanghai, by Pedro Pablo Arroyo Alba (CA-Group), show below both under construction and completed.

 

Over half a decade after its inception, and in the wake of a grave worldwide recession, Young Architects of Spain now serves as a snapshot of a more optimistic moment.  It continues through April 25 at the Instituto Cervantes, 31 West Ohio.  Gallery hours are 10:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m., Monday through Thursday, 10:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m., on Friday, and 9:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. on Saturday. 

Calling all Flâneurs : MAS Studio, CAC competition Network Reset seeks to reinvigorate Chicago's boulevards for the 21st century

I remember when I was a very small child (pre-embryonic, actually),  my dad driving us to visit my grandparents in the near western suburbs.  Somewhere at midpoint of the journey, we found ourselves in a world very different from the constricted, rigid grid of streets that made up our Lakeview neighborhood.  Suddenly, we were speeding along curving garden roads, set within sprawling lawns, in the shade of a forest of tall trees.

Before the expressways, there were the boulevards.  They were created in the last decades of the 19th century both in the easternmost sectors of Chicago, and along the city's then western borders, connecting a sequence of spectacular new parks.  The boulevards were Chicago's attempt to create suburbs within the city, a refuge for the wealthy, who lined them with their mansions.  They were an early example of a successful public-private partnership.  Built by the Parks Commission, the boulevards made a lot of developers rich, created a wave of new construction, and expanded the city's tax base.

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Over time, mansions were replaced by luxury apartment buildings.  As the rich fled to the suburbs, the middle-class took over, and when the middle-class fled, the sturdy old structures were often appropriated by slumlords.  What were leisurely carriage drives became, with the coming of the automobile, express routes out of the city  With the opening of the expressways, even that purpose was taken away.  The grand old houses were left to decay or, in times of rage, burned to the ground, leaving what were once considered among Chicago's most prized civic assets littered with boarded-up buildings and vacant lots.  No new boulevards were created.  As the city stretched to its final borders, it just bled almost imperceptibly into the adjacent suburbs, with occasional strips of forest preserve as insulation.

What should be the role of our boulevards in 21st Century Chicago? 

That's the subject of a new competition, Network Reset: Rethinking the Chicago Emerald Necklace, an international competition organized by MAS Studio and the Chicago Architectural Club, funded with a grant from compulsive urban tinkerers Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture LLP.

A few years ago, UrbanLab came up with its own concept of the "Eco-Boulevard" that created a new vision that combined social, environmental and energy conservation considerations.  Network Reset, in contrast, "seeks to provide ideas and actions that can reactivate the Boulevard System of Chicago and rethink its potential role in the city . . .

While portions of it, such as the Logan Square Boulevards District (an official city landmark district since 2005) still maintain the original character, other parts have just become underutilized areas and oversized streets that act as barriers within neighborhoods.

That is where we are now and this competition asks you to envision where we can be in the near future. These are some of the questions that we are asking ourselves and we want you to think about in your proposal: What if the system becomes a new transportation corridor in the city? What type of transportation would that be? What if the open space becomes an active layer and not just a passive one? What if this system provides activities that the city as a whole is lacking? What if the system becomes a tool for social cohesion? What if the system has a strong visual identity? What if it becomes an economic catalyst for the neighborhoods? What if the system is all of this and more?

Participants are asked to look at the urban scale and propose a framework for the entire boulevard system as well as provide answers and visualize the interventions at a smaller scale that can directly impact its potential users. Through images, diagrams and drawings we want to know what are those soft or hard, big or small, temporary or permanent interventions that can reactivate and reset the Boulevard System of Chicago. 

The competition launched on January 17th.  The Q&A period runs through February 4th, with a February 21st deadline for submissions, and a March 14th announcement of winners: a $2,000 first prize, $1,000 second, and $500 third.  Check out the Network Reset website for more detailed information.

I think my favorite of all the boulevards is Drexel, once described as the gem of the boulevard system.

It's width two hundred feet, the original design comprised a central ornamental space, one hundred feet wide, arranged with paths and with grass-plats, planted with trees and shrubbery, a driveway running on each side.

According to the Waymarking.com website, it was the creation of the  father of the Drexel brothers of Philadelphia, who  acquired the 80 acres from 47th to 51st through foreclosure, and donated the plot to the park district.  His sons would profit from the now highly valued real estate development along the boulevard, and his sons memorialized him with what has been called Chicago's earliest public fountain, at the south end of the Boulevard at 51st street, where the figure of Francis Martin Drexel, as sculpted by Henry Manger, still holds watch over creation.  Like Michael Reese, there is no record that he ever visited the city where he played so vital a role.

Our recent years of relative prosperity have seen the revitalization of much of Drexel Boulevard, with old mansions restored for affluent new owners, and new construction interposed where empty lots once stood.  You can see works by Burnham & Root, Frost & Granger, and Henry Ives Cobb in something approaching their original splendor, and get a sense of the kind of grandeur and uplift the boulevards can provide.

In 2006, in preparation for writing a paper, "ink" biked the entire 28 mile system, taking photographs all along the way.  The result is a rather splendid photo-essay.  Check it out here.

Rethinking Madrid, Barcelona & Bilbao, Eric Owen Moss, Terzo Piano, Decarbonization in the Loop and celebrating The Complete Architecture of Adler & Sullivan - the November calendar fills

We're still not done with the November Calendar of Architectural Events and, even with the holiday, we'rve already got over three dozen great items.  The Instituto Cervantes kicks off a three lecture series Restoring, Regenerating, Rethinking: The Urban Transformation of Madrid, Barcelona, & Bilbao, with a November 18th lecture by Ibon Areso, Bilbao’s strategic evolution. From the industrial to the post-industrial city, to be presented in Spanish with simultaneous English translation. The series is curated by the tireless Iker Gil of MAS Studio, whose Fall issue, Information, of the excellent - and free - periodical, MAS Context is now available for download.

The 18th is turning out to be one of those nightmare scheduling logjams that Chicago is prone to.  All on the same evening, there's a just announced lecture by Eric Own Moss for the Architecture and Design Society of the Art Institute of Chicago, Roger Frechette talking about the PositivEnergy Practice of Smith+Gill architects for AIA Chicago,  landscape architect Nelson Byrd Woltz lecturing on Stewardship and Design in the Urban and Agrian Landscape at Crown Hall, IIT, and architect Dirk Denision and chef Tony Mantuano talking about their new Terzo Piano at the Art Institute's Modern Wing while feeding you samples from the menu.

On Tuesday the 30th, AIA Chicago will celebrate with Ward Miller and John Vinci the publication of one of the most essential and stunning books of the year, The Complete Architecture of Adler & Sullivan.  At AIA Chicago lunchtime on the 9th, Peter Kindel of Smith+Gill will be discussing their firms Decarbonization Plan for the Central Loop.  And on Thanksgiving eve, November 24th,  leading Chicago structural engineers will discuss the tensile and aerodynamic properties of the skeletons of turkeys, both before and after cooking.  Following the discussion, surviving turkeys will get to dress up as pilgrims and shoot randomly at spectators.

Start filling up your dance card: check out all the events we've added to the November calendar here.