Pro Football's Urban Spectacle : NFL Chicago Draft Town's Pop-Up Civic Space

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In Daniel Burnham's 1909 Plan of Chicago, Congress Parkway was to be the great civic promenade of the new city.  In reality, it became a feeder ramp for the Congress Expressway.  Where Burnham envisioned the Field Museum, Buckingham Fountain stands.  Congress Plaza itself, the Michigan Avenue gateway to the fountain and Lake Michigan, has also never quite lived up to its potential.

For a while, it was the location of the city's Christmas tree, and for a brief time in April of 1963, it hosted a 9-story tall, 50,000-pound Atlas Missile to celebrate Space Month.

For some time now, however, it's been little more than a barren sweep of concrete, a foreground for Ivan Mestrovic's The Bowman and the The Spearman sculptures, flanking either side of Congress just before it crosses a trench of railroad tracks.

image courtesy National Football League

So in that sense it was the perfect location for NFL Draft Town, a mini-city with the shelf live of a Atlas Missile on display.  It marked the draft leaving New York for the first time in 51 years,  setting up shop in and past Congress Plaza and headquarters in Adler and Sullivan's Auditorium Theater across the street.

For a few days, we saw temporary constructions pop up along Michigan Avenue . . .

photograph: Bob Johnson

 . . .  to counterpoint the classic architecture of its landmarked streetwall.

The totally enclosed "Selection Square", looking a bit like a 1940's airplane hangar, was the site of the real action.  It was here the tables were set up where representatives from each team made their draft picks.

Beyond that was an open structure with attractions for the fans that architect Marc L'Italien  likened to the vanished train shed of the demolished Illinois Central Depot, just a few blocks to the south, similar to the Grand Central Station shed pictured below.

The low arch set itself off both from the arches of Louis Sullivan's auditorium building, and the stepped verticality  of the buildings along the streetwall.

Buckingham Fountain, itself, was turned on a week early for the Draft.  At night, it shifted hues to the team colors of the franchise making its selection at that given moment.

 

 

The flamboyant celebration of multi-millionaires playing "pick me!" before a roster of billionaire owners left many a bit queasy, including this projectile-vomiting seahorse.

Still, it was an intriguing insertion, playing off a background of great Chicago architecture.  A momentary apparition, now to vanish without a rack.  Wait until next year?

Heavy Metal (construction) vs. the Cubs - new Wrigley Field, on the street, and on tonight's season opener on ESPN

It's like deja vu all over again.  But supersized.

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It was less than a decade ago that the Chicago Cubs were rebuilding the Wrigley Field bleachers, removing the original 1914 brick walls to add over 1,700 new seats, extending the structure out over the public sidewalk.

Child's play.  Now under it's new ownership, the Cubs are completing the transformation from a neighborhood ballpark to the cash machine of a modern franchise eating up the surrounding community.

image source: Wikipedia Commons

Back in 1890's, the Chicago Lutheran Theological Seminary had built their new campus on what was them the largely unsettled outskirts of the city, but the tranquility of the site was soon overtaken by the city's explosive growth.  After the trestled "L" was constructed right at their back door in 1900, their was no stopping the development.  The seminary picked up stakes and moved to Maywood, selling their land and buildings for the construction of the 14,000 seat Weeghman Park.  On opening day in 1914, the Seminary buildings could be seen just outside the stadium's walls.

In 1917, the Chicago Cubs made the park their own. For decades, the team was owned by chewing gum tycoon William J. Wrigley, Jr. and his heirs. The closing years of their reign was marked by a kind of lazy decrepitude that was the source of what has come to be seen as Wrigley's unique charm.  Teams were most often not very good, crowds often dipped into the low thousands, and residents living in the greystones across the street from the park would sometimes drag lawn chairs and beer up to the roof to take in the game.

This was the legacy up through 1981, when the Chicago Tribune bought both the Cubs and Wrigley field for $20.5 million.  Mostly the deal acquired a cheap source of lucrative programming for the Trib's broadcast properties.  The Trib tinkered - executing that 2005-6 renovation and expansion of the bleachers, adding lights to allow for the first night games.  Changes were conservative and incremental.

Outside Wrigley field, however, the future was already simmering right under the Trib's nose.  An astonishing mutant capitalism emerged, catering to fans willing to spend big bucks to emulate the rooftop experience the guys in bermuda shorts sitting on a lawn chair used to get for free.  The greystones became corporate "baseball clubs" which constructed their own slices of bleachers on the rooftops.  In 2004, the Tribune company actually entered into a 20 year revenue-sharing deal to allow the rooftop clubs to continue to poach on their attendance.

By then, however, things had changed dramatically.  The newspaper publishing business was no longer a license to print money, and Tribune Company's revenues and profits were in a free fall.  As journalism waned as an industry, professional sports teams went from the playthings of millionaires to the creator of billionaires.   In 2009, the club the Trib had paid little more than $20 million for less than 30 years before was sold to the Ricketts family for $845 million.  Last month, after the Ricketts sold a minority int6erest in the club for $175 million, Forbes Magazine placed the current value of the Chicago Cubs and their stadium at $1.8 billion.

Last year the Ricketts announced a $575 renovation and expansion plan for Wrigley Field.  A large part of that is taking control of a large part of the surrounding neighborhood.  After a major court victory last week, the Ricketts are in the process of destroying the views and running the rooftop clubs out of business. As part of agreements with the city, they'll be able to shut down adjacent streets on game days.  They've acquired major pieces of the property just to the west of Wrigley.  The nearest block, site of tall coal silos for much of the stadium's history, is currently under construction for a new office building and plaza.  On the other side of Clark street, a Ricketts-owned hotel is next. An 800 car garage is also on the boards.

The original Weegham Field was constructed in just two months.  The renovations, by VOA Architects, aren't so lucky.  A "harsh Chicago winter" has been blamed for the new bleachers not being ready for opening night (tonight, April 5th).  Right now, the site is a festival of steel and steelworkers.

Since the brick wall that Bill Veeck began planting with ivy over 70 years ago, isn't all there at the moment,  there's faux ivy imprinted on the screens for the construction fences.

The Cubs are saying the left-field bleachers will be finished on May 31st. (Even after the concrete is poured, it has to cure for a month.)  The right-field is scheduled to follow sometime in June.

There may be no seats for many season-ticket holders, but the Cubs at least have their priorities straight.   The 6,000 square-foot Jumbotron should be ready for its network debut for the ESPN Sunday Night Baseball broadcast beginning at 7:00 CDT tonight.

Cubs rendering of Jumbo-tron

42 feet high and 95 feet wide, it's as tall as a shoe-horned River North condo project, and a lot more capacious.  To power all the pixels, there looks to be enough wiring to connect a small city.

Right now, the construction crews at Wrigley are putting on quite a show.  Let's hope it doesn't prove more winning than the one on the field.

Clean Up, sculpture by Ted Sitting Crow Garner

Play Ball!

Read More:

Ragged Liberty or Polished Upscaling? Speculating on the Future of Wrigleyville's Mutant Urbanism.

Foul Ball Hotel: the In-Your-Face Mediocrity of The Wrigleyville Sheraton

 Four Buildings and a Funeral - Wrigley: The Architecture that Remains after a Great Company Dies

Lucas Museum: Not Dead Yet?

Buried deep in the Sunday Trib, in the  business section, is a Front Page story from Melissa Harris. 

The proposed Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, which has practiced a bunkered omertà for the past nine months as controversy swirls all around it, may be stirring.  Harris reports that architect Ma Yansong "remains at work on more detailed drawings, which may include meaningful revisions . . . " 

For that sentence to be anything more than an empty PR holding action, what's needed now is not, as Harris proposes, a call from George Lucas to Mike Madigan.  That kind of backroom, insider horse trading is what got the museum in trouble in the first place.  What's needed is transparency and public engagement. 

When a job is at risk, architects can make coherent revisions to their concepts and renderings overnight.  After a nine-month disappearing act, the "remains at work" statement fed to Harris sounds less like a world-class architect than a high school student buying time to finish an overdue term paper.   While Friends of the Parks, Blair Kamin, and various other opponents hell-bent on running Lucas's project out of town remain formidable opponents, at this point, the Lucas Museum remains its own worse enemy.

Above is a photograph of the parking lot museum these opponents are battling to protect.  I hope to be writing an update on that effort - and its implications for Chicago, its lakefront, and its role in world architecture - soon.  For now, since little has changed from last July other than the overheating of the rhetoric, my original post provides a thorough overview of the potential, pitfalls and controversies of bringing the Lucas Museum to Chicago.

The Heresy: Why Chicago Should Welcome the George Lucas Museum

Mie's New Friends: Ju Ming sculpture lands at IBM Plaza

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No wonder those businessmen look a bit tired.  It's taken the better part of two years for them to get to their destination.

It was in July of 2013 that the Langham Hotel Chicago, owners of the sculpture, opened in Mies van der Rohe's last skyscraper, the iconic IBM Building (now officially renamed AMA Plaza.)  And it's been 15 months since the Commission on Chicago Landmarks reversed its initial decision to ban the metallic travelers for being too close to the building.  The move followed an agreement to move the sculpture from its original position beneath the Landham's gilded canopy on Wabash to a spot on the adjacent riverfront plaza.

The pedestal for the work by Taiwanese sculptor Ju Ming was installed last December, but stood empty as late as last Saturday, when it was used as a stepping stone for photographers snapping shots of the annual St. Patrick's Day dyeing of the Chicago River green.

Then, sometime this past week, without fanfare, the travelers took up their station.  As with other of the sculptor's works, visitors are already enjoying sharing space with the frozen figures.

Ju Ming, born in 1938 and trained as a woodcarver, has gone on to an international career creating works in a wide variety of materials.  In 1999, he spent most of his life savings to create the Juming Museum near Taipei to showcase both his own work and that of other contemporary masters.  It is Taiwan's largest sculpture garden.  His subjects range from generic everymen, women and children, to paratroopers and even Albert Einstein.

If the businessmen had been placed under the hotel's canopy, they would have looked like they were waiting for their rides, cousins to J. Seward Johnson's Allow Me hailing a cab outside the Four Seasons on East Delaware.  Standing isolated on the plaza, however, they begin to look a bit dazed and confused, 1960's Man-Men-era executives teleported in an instant from an unknown place to a place unknown.

Read More about Mies van Der Rohe's IBM Building and the Langham Hotel Chicago:

•  The Langham Chicago official website

• IBM Building Landmarks Designation Report
  
  
• Part One -  Apotheosis of the Skyscraper:  The Rise of Mies van der Rohe's IBM Building.
• Part Two -  How Do You Get to AMA Plaza? High-tech, decline and revival at Mies van der Rohe's IBM Building. 



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• Part Three - Mies Goes Soft: At the IBM Building, The Langam Chicago Pushes Against the Envelope.
• Five Things I Learned from Dirk Lohan about Mies van der Rohe's IBM Building

• The Ninotchka of River North: George Schipporeit's IBM Self-Park

Presidents and Their Monuments: The Barack Obama Library spurs both a Design Competition and a Battle over Chicago's Parks

Barack Presidential Library Commission
entry from Aras Burak Sen (click images for larger view)

When it comes to civic buildings, how do you define the relationship between architecture and power? Imposing scale conveys might, to be sure, but heavy classicism, to cite another frequently deployed design stratagem - does it express majesty or empire?  Dignity or a bulwark against dissent?

Next month, the announcement will be made as to where the Barack Obama Library and Museum will be located.  Whether the still unnamed architect for the project engages any of the above questions remains to be seen, but a new - and unauthorized - design competition for the library, co-sponsored by the Chicago Architectural Club and Chicago Architecture Foundation, brings more consideration and imagination to the core issues of what a Presidential library should express than the officially designated architect will probably ever be allowed to consider.

U.S. Presidential libraries have become America's pyramids.  From the $375,000 FDR raised for the first one back in the 1940's, to the nearly quarter billion dollars spent on the Robert Stern-designed 200,000 square-foot George W. Bush Presidential Center just outside Dallas, they've gone from being centers of scholarship to full-up pharaonic monuments.

George W. Bush Presidential Center, photograph J.P Fagerback Wikipedia commons

The bidding and selection process for the site for the library that will archive the achievements of Barack Obama has become a study in the arrogance of power, with the Obama Foundation, the University of Chicago, and the Emanuel administration seeming to be in their own competition to see who can be the least transparent and most contemptuous of the general public. (Not that there's anything new to this, as a recent recent Chicago Tribune story by Dahleen Glanton on the contentious history of presidential libraries has ably documented.)

Earlier this month, the Chicago Park District unanimously rubber-stamped Mayor Emanuel's deal with the University of Chicago to appropriate 20+ acre slices of either Washington or Jackson Park for an Obama Library site.  After the Metropolitan Planning Council demanded that any lost parkland be replaced with new acreage, the Emanuel administration originally promised it would, but in Rahm's patented middle-finger style, this quickly devolved into the mayor declaring that the 21-acre giveaway had already been replenished by the 750 acres of new open space he claims to have added during his time in office.  So I guess we should be prepared for the loss of any of other 729 acres whenever he feels like dealing them away to favored private interests. (The current line is that only the five acres built upon will actually be replaced. Emanuel neglected to mention that Chicago's 182 square feet of park land per resident is the lowest among all major U.S. cities, less even than New York and little more than a quarter of that in Milwaukee)

The proposal has been vociferously  opposed by advocates such as Friends of the Parks, even as public meetings seem to indicate a clear majority of the residents around the sites support the deal.  Friend of Parks requested a personal audience with President Obama when he visited Chicago last week so they could deliver in person notice of their intention to sue him if things don't go their way.

proposed Jackson Park site

The proposed Jackson Park site is the most conventional, a large rectangle of land currently taken up mostly by a soccer field surrounding by a running track.  Olmsted left this section of the park long ago.

proposed Washington Park site

In contrast the Washington Park site is a extended triangle beginning at 55th/Garfield and Cottage Grove, with its eastern boundary meandering west as it moves north, coming to a point at 51st.

To compensate, the Washington Park proposal includes adding to the site by acquiring properties along Cottage Grove to the Green Line station to the west.

Unauthorized Thoughts on what Presidential Libraries Should Be

from left: Chicago Architecture Foundation Lynn Osmond,
Chicago Architectural Club co-presidents
Martin Kläschen and Carl Ray Miller

None of the debate over the museum site has even touched on the quality of the architecture, and so the Chicago Architectural Club made the Barack Obama Presidential Library the subject of this year's version of it's biennial Chicago Prize design competition.  Earlier this month, teaming up with the Chicago Architectural Foundation, the CAC announced and unveiled the boards for the competition winners at the opening of the CAF exhibition, Presidential Libraries: Designing a Legacy.

The Drone Aviary, Ann Lui and Craig Reschke

While a persistent optimism marked the five displayed entries, beneath the surface you could also sense undercurrents of unease.  This was most overt in what was nicknamed the "dishonorable mention" winner, Ann Lui and Craig Reschke's The Drone Aviary . . .

The Drone Aviary doesn’t lock artifacts away—it collects and disburses them. President Obama’s legacy, the population and automation of the skies, would be the critical operation of his Presidential Library. The Obama Library drones both collect and distribute information. They can scan agricultural production, monitor the climate, and follow former presidents for live updates. Teachers can also borrow the pen used by Barack Obama to sign the healthcare bill by requesting that the library send it, via drone, to their classroom. Artifacts remain tucked into the Aviary wall until called upon for delivery. At street level a sculpted landscape serves as a neighborhood park for visitors who watch the drones in the tower above.

"I think it's a provocation," said Chicago Architectural Club co-president Carl Ray Miller.  "It has a double edge that cuts both ways.  While it's very optimistic, there is dark, sinister part about this, about the world to come."

"We probably should say that the dishonorable mention is a positive," added the Chicago Architectural Club other co-president Martin Kläschen. "Distinguished and disturbing because of course drone technology also stands for big brother surveillance and maybe also war technology, and that's where it becomes disturbing." Kläschen said the the jury saw the dual qualities of the entry as a debate on the president.

Juror Andrew Metter noted the Drone Aviary spoke to basic questions about the way we store knowledge in a high-tech world.  "Humans are essential to absorbing the knowledge or disseminating the knowledge." In the Drone Aviary, however . . .

The tower has few inhabitants.  Drones move about making necessary repairs to one another to one another and the building.  Artifacts remain tucked into the Aviary wall until they are called upon for delivery, future iterations of existing library automation services in places at sites like the University of Chicago.  Long dark banks of servers whir away between drone stations. A lone repairman wanders the tower executing the few tasks the drones cannot.

"What does it say of our future society?",  asked Metter.  "Having books talks about the tactile aspect of knowledge in the fact that somebody has to read them, so it definies human interaction, whereas the drone scheme implied maybe no interaction."  Is this paradise, dystopia, or an amalgam of both?  Just last week "Father of the Internet" Vinton Cerf warned of a "digital dark age" where, in the absence of hard copies such as photographs or books, the entire record of an era may be lost to history through a discontinuity of digital technologies.

Whatever their other merits, no other winning entry offered such a subversive sense of irony.

between SKY and GROUND, Dániel Palota

The second honorable mention, Dániel Palotai's between SKY and GROUND offered . . .

A wide and open public square combines the elements of the city context, connecting the river, the platform of the tracks and street level, situates new and existing buildings an exciting interaction. The gently rising terraced slope is a mixed combination of small intimate platforms, open air exhibition spaces, green surfaces, ramps and stairs, accessible from every direction. These set of various and well-defined levels embrace and include the ground floor of the library, and lead to the main and most exciting series of covered and open spaces on the first floor. Various ceiling height enhance the experience of the voids, ensuring intimacy and openness at the same time. Indoor exhibition and library rooms are situated on upper stories organized by the similar space typology.

Kläschen spoke of described the proposal as "a neutral building on the outside; on the inside we see a very well refined set of well developed spaces and spatial interaction . . . a building connected to an extraordinary urban landscape, an interface to the city."

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There were two striking aspects to the last honorable mention winner, Drew Cowdrey and Trey Kirk's A Mobile Archive.  Very much in the tradition of the methodology of Chicago architects like Jeanne Gang and John Ronan, this entry began with an exhaustive research of all twelve presidential libraries, tracking their size and cost, and what percentage of the space is actually devoted to storing documents.

Out of this, Cowdrey, an architect with SOM-NY, and Kirk, an architect now working with a firm in Tennessee, came up with a typology and a process.  The typology is strikingly Miesian glass cube, set on a wide plaza that is a staging area for the process - loading up museum contents onto larger trailers that fan out into Chicago's neighborhoods.  Once the trailers have left the loading docks, the plaza becomes a public square.

"What was noted by the jury," said Miller, "was that although the skin of the building is very familiar to Chicago, there was something very special about how this building interacted."  Added Kläschen, "What became the debate, a very interesting debate, especially with Stanley Tigerman being on the jury, is this facade.  It's such a statement, that refers to Mies's early modernist building and we were questioning whether this was a building that was supposed to become generic, and blend in to the landscape, or is this maybe a statement that refers to Mies."

Kirk claimed this was all a surprise to him. "We're fans like anyone else of Mies," he said, but what appears at first glance to be classic Miesian I-beams on the structure's facade are in actuality glass fins.  "We didn't intend it to be perceived as having mullions.  The fins are only six or eight inches."  The exterior is a dual-skin facade, with a 3-foot wide air cavity both for energy efficiency and to protect the contents of the library.

What was supposed to be a first, second and third prize was changed by the jury to two co-first prize winners, sharing the $3,000 in prize money contributed by the Chicago office of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill.  Considered together, they seem almost like complementary geometrics, Saturn and its rings.

First Prize Winners

Both of the first prize winners bridge the competition's museum site to the other other two shores of the juncture where the Chicago River splits into North and South branches,  the source of the city's "Corporate Device", the Y symbol that denotes Chicago and can be found all across the city in everything from ornament on bridges to the lights of the Chicago Theater marquee.

In the case of Boston-born Aras Burak Sen's first prize entry, this is accomplished through a "Bridge of Hope . . . shaped as the peace sign connecting three sides of the river." Sen shows his OMA roots in the way his design includes semi-autonomous components - in this case eight stacked structures, each holding archives for a single year of Obama's presidency and rotated to provide a different view out onto Chicago - contained within a single mega-structure, a giant sphere that evokes memories of Etienne-Louis Boullée's Cenotaph memorial for Isaac Newton.

The proposal includes a commentary on the limits of power . . .

The levels above this bridge is the distortion of the hope in random directions.  The form of these floors could be seen as the artifacts of an era struggling to do something great when it is impossible to do so.  The distortion of great hopes.

As with other entries, the ground level of the building is seen as an expression of democracy . . .

. . . without any glass, without any walls, Obama Presidential Library provides a free amphitheater for Chicago to communicate, discuss anything.  The Bridge of Hope cuts through the theatre, looking above discussions being held, allowing them to be overhead.

Sen's intent is to distinguish the Obama from other libraries that are "no different than a mausoleum for the president."

"The jurors felt", said Miller, "that the monumentality and the disruption of the platonic volume with these view portals into different directions and different neighborhoods of the city was very, very symbolic.  The jury concluded, said Miller, "this monumental building was something that would hold the site very well, and that was one of the points that had them coming back to this project."

The Big O

A different kind of symbolism was at play in the other first-prize wining entry, a massive set of 800-foot in diameter, 100-foot-wide rings bridging and floating above the three points of the river's juncture seeking "a brand new typology and form" for the Presidential library."

On hand at the ceremony was the entry's Chinese design team, led by Dr. Zhu Wenyi, Dean of the School of Architecture at Tsinghua University in Beijing.  "There is a Plan A or Plan B," said Zhu, "But also Plan O.  I think that Plan O is better."

O as in Obama.  O as in the shape of the rings.  "This is a kind of symbol of President Obama," explained Zhu.  "A kind of metaphor" and a spiritual place for visitors to the library.  "Considering that Chicago is the birthplace of skyscrapers and is full of high-rises, the roof engraved with famous quotes from President Obama is designed to be 'the fifth elevation.'"  Zhu talked about creating multi-dimensional spaces that allow visitors strolling along the rings to experience both the library and the city outside.

"I want to emphasize," said Zhu, "the interior space." Obama's life and career are organized around six themes, express in the strutter as "6 parallel ways instead of the separated 'units' of exhibition. Visitors can enjoy different angles of President Obama's life at one time when strolling in the library" in those multi-dimensional spaces.

Zhu Wenyi discusses his teams entry to the the competition

Back to Reality

River Point rises on the competition's hypothetical site

Design competitions are most often the architectural equivalent of fantasy football, but this competition was especially unencumbered by reality.  Not only is the competition's designated site not among the four finalists chosen by the Obama Library Foundation, it's neither vacant nor available.  The concrete core for what will eventually be the 60-story River Point office tower is rising quite visibly there now.

This disconnection of the competition with the actual problems of the city left me pre-disposed to hostility, but in looking at the five winners now on display at CAF, I was struck by the fact that the entrants are bringing far more analysis and imagination to the project than will likely ever be seen in the library building that's actually constructed.  (The work of the named architect for the library will be tightly constrained by the National Archive's 265 page brief Architectural and Design Standards for Presidential Libraries. )

More to the point, it now appears the addiction to fantasy may spill far beyond the competition, taking in the supposedly big-power players attempting to lure the library to Chicago.

In a recent column, the Sun-Times's Michael Sneed claimed the final decision on where to locate the library has been placed firmly in the hands of Michelle Obama.  According to Sneed, the First Lady wants the library go to New York's Columbia University, a city and school with zero relation to Barack Obama's history.  And wouldn't that be a a kick in the head to a city that thinks it wrote the book on insider politics?

I can see the T-shirts now:  "The Obama Library went to Columbia and all I got was this nifty design idea".

Presidential Libraries: Designing a Legacy is currently on view at the Chicago Architecture Foundation. You can view the winning entries on-line, as well as a video of the award ceremonies.