Night Magic: Wallenda Walk Lights up Chicago's River Skyline

click for larger view (highly recommended)

Today the streets will be jammed with people as daredevil aerialist Nick Wallenda's will walk across the Chicago river on a 454-foot steel cable strung between two buildings: the West tower of architect Bertrand Goldberg's iconic Marina City (1964, 61 stories, 588 feet), and Roche Dinkeloo's -post modern Leo Burnett Building (1987, 46 stories, 635 feet). - but many of the distinctive skyscrapers along the Chicago River.   The differences in height between the two buildings will require Wallenda to walk up a 15 degree incline

photograph courtesy the Discovery Channel

Last night however, there was more anticipation that people, and the evening had a quiet magic all its own as the huge floodlights as bright as a second sun . . .

. . .  illuminated not just the two buildings involved in Wallenda's walk, but many of the iconic structures along the Chicago River, showing them up with a dramatic clarity against the night sky . .  .

 Left, Thielbar and Fugard's 1927 35 East Wacker (Jewelers Building).  Right, Shaw, Metz and Associates, at the time of its 1962 the tallest marble-clad building in the world.

 77 West Wacker, 49 stories, 668 feet, 1990, DeStefano & Goettsch, Ricardo Bofil ( to the left, 55 West Wacker (Blue Cross-Blue Shield Building), 16 stories, 256 feet, C. F. Murphy Associates

 Television production trucks have been lined up on Dearborn since early this week.

Electricity is being pulled from Marina City, with lobby offices being used as a staging area.

 Mist rising over the river is caught in the light.

 Lights from atop Mies van der Rohe's IBM Building (330 North Wabash), with SOM/Adrian Smith's Trump Tower to the right.

 

 

 A crane rises for the construction of the new riverwalk along several blocks of the south bank.

Many Marina City residents are getting lighting that is both free and artistically patterned from the massive floodlights set up along Wacker Drive.

Wallenda is scheduled to make two separate walks, the ropes for each visible in this photograph.  The first is from the West Tower of Marina City (left) across the river.   In the second, Wallenda, blindfolded, will walk on a rope 94 feet from the West Tower of Marina City to its twin to the East.  Live coverage will begin on the Discovery channel at 6:00 p.m., with the actual walks scheduled for 7:00.

Bread and circuses.  On Tuesday, an epic of power will play out at the ballot box.  Every day of week, life and death dramas play out, usually all but totally unseen, in cities like Chicago all across the world, often in innocent-looking buildings just like those on dazzling display last night.  Wallenda's stunt is a dual symbol.  First, of how easily our limited attention and action are diverted from the really important battles that affect our lives.  Second, of how tenuously - as secure as we may seem - our lives cling to their moorings amidst the underlying raw vulnerabilities of human existence.

All Hollows' Eve, at the Stroke of Midnight, the Calatrava Spire Vanishes, Forever

click images for larger view

Slowly, the eerie clouds wrap around Santiago Calatrava's twisting phantom tower.  The clock strikes twelve.  The shrieking birds scatter. The dream dies.  The vision melts into air, into thin air.

The Trib's Mary Ellen Podmolik reported Friday that developer Garrett Kelleher has finally conceded that he won't be able to raise the cash to bring the doomed Chicago Spire project out of bankruptcy.  If he doesn't pony up the $22 million by end of day, the site - intended to be a 2,000-foot-high skyscraper but never getting beyond being anything more than a massive hole in the ground - will become the property of Related Midwest, which recently opened another rescued project, the 59-story 111 West Wacker.

This is the end, beautiful friend 
This is the end, my only friend, the end 
Of our elaborate plans, the end 
Of everything that stands, the end 
No safety or surprise, the end 
I'll never look into your eyes, again

Relive the Whole Amazing Story . . .

The Epic Fable of Santiago Calatrava's Chicago Spire

Boo! Chicago Center for Green Technology closes

click images for larger view

It's an experiment that's apparently run it's course.  The Chicago Center for Green Technology won't quite make it to its twelfth birthday, announcing its closed just in time for Halloween.  An email to presenters in its Green Tech U program, whose fall semester had already been put on the hold,  noted that the Center has been “struggling with funding for the past couple years”, which would dovetail with the retirement of its key supporter, former Mayor Richard M. Daley.  ”While the building tenants will still be here, CCGT will be closed to the public after this Friday, October 31st.”


The 32,000 square-foot office building, originally constructed in 1952 in what is now the Kinzie Industrial Corridor, was converted, in 2003 at at cost of $5,400,000, the Center was built as a showcase for green design, an educational resource offering training courses and public tours, and a home to sustainable-design related companies, including Greencorps Chicago and WRD Environmental, which will remain after the center closes. 

Farr Associates was the architect for the conversion, with Tylk, Gustafson, Reckers, Wilson and Andrews as structural engineers and The Site Design Group handling the landscaping, which emphasized native plans requiring minimal maintenance and a partial green roof.

Cited as the first rehabilitated municipal building in the country to receiving a Platinum LEED rating,  it was part of of former Mayor Richard M. Daley's Chicago Brownfield Initiative.  The 17 acre site at 445 North Sacramento in East Garfield Park had been filled with more than 600,000 cubic yards of illegally dumped waste, piled 70 feet high.  It was cleared and renovated using sustainable materials, and such environment-friendly features as operable windows offering natural ventilation, a ground-source heat pump system with 28 vertical wells up to 200 feet deep providing the cooling an most of the heat, and a self-monitoring building automation system.  Four cisterns could capture up to 12,000 gallons of rainwater.  The elevator ran on canola oil.

Now, with no environmentalist version of George Lucas in sight, the center will soon be only a memory.  But for the time that it had, the Chicago Center for Green Technology served well.

Y Crane? Truss Me, Block 37 is Rising Again!

click images for larger view

It's a story a  quarter-century in the making, but could well be the fastest start of any Chicago skyscraper ever.  As soon as west coast developer CIM Group announced that they had obtained all necessary permits for their new tower on September 10th, scaffolding appeared along Randolph Street next to the troubled Block 37 retail mall that will serve as the project's base.  Soon, a y-topped crane was in place, rising far above the roof of the existing four story building.

image courtesy The Chuckman Collection

Once this had been the site, at the corner of State and Randolph, of architect Peter Wight's Springer Block, built in 1872, and modified by Adler and Sullivan in 1884, and, at the corner of Randolph and Dearborn, Holabird and Roches's 1921 United Artists (Apollo) theatre. In 1989, the entire block was demolished for a sugar plum vision of a massive new development that would reinvigorate State Street, but for decades thereafter all that remained was a dirt-covered vacant lot.  Proposal after proposal - including one with towers by by Helmut Jahn  - failed to come to fruition.  Although right across from Marshall Field's Macy's massive flagship, the highest use this prime property achieved was as a temporary art gallery and winter ice skating rink.

Finally, in 2005, ground was broken for the four-story Block 37 shopping mall, which upon its opening promptly became a huge white elephant.  Where Lord and Taylor and Harrods of London had once been mentioned as tenants, there was, instead, a mall without an anchor, its top floors completely empty.

While the angled walkways and central light court give the interior a certain elegance, on the outside,  it's a numbingly generic building.  Shorn of the artwork value-engineered out of the original plan, the exterior finds its only relief from the visual monotony in undulations in the metal facade that, if you're lucky, self-animate when they reflect the light from signs on adjacent buildings such as the Oriental Theater . . .

or, if you're not, make the whole thing looks like slabs of aluminum siding with a case of hiccups.

Eventually the original developer lost control of the project, which was taken back by the lender, Bank of America, for $100 million, and then sold it to CIM Group for $84 million two years ago.  While 64% of the mall's 275,000 square feet remained empty, CIM has recently struck a deal for a new restaurant and earlier this month, another with AMC to bring an 11-screen, 44,000 square foot cinema complex to the tumbleweed-populated fourth floor.

Now the residential tower that was always envisioned for the northwest corner of Block 37 is finally coming into play - and quickly.  Those same hiccups that enliven the mall facades are being used by architects Solomon Cordwell Bunez to break up the monotony of the curtain wall facade of their new skyscraper, with a giant zipper of incised windows running up the full height of the tower about two thirds in on the Randolph Street side..  The roof of the mall structure will become home to an "amenity deck" for the apartment residents, including an outdoor deck, pool, spa and fitness center.  According to the building permit, structural work will include "a 5′-6″ matt transfer slab, steel transfer trusses approximately 30′-0″ tall, post-tensioned concrete slabs, concrete columns and concrete core-shear wall."

At 38 stories and 436 feet high, the Block 37 apartments at 25 West Randolph will tower over its neighbor across the street, Rapp and Rapp's 1926, 300-feet-tall Oriental Theater building, and nip away at the decades-long visual dominance of Jacques Brownson's 648-foot high Daley Center across the street to the west.  With 690 units, it will be the largest apartment building every constructed in the Loop, and the largest addition to date to a city center that has already seen its number of residential units triple - from about 2,000 to over 6,000 by next year.  It will either be culmination of a boom, or the first victim of the next real estate bubble - or perhaps both.

If things proceed as quickly as they began, we can probably expect the first tenants to move in next Friday.

Epic Flail: 
25 years of trials and tribulations at Block 37

What Would You Put under Block 37?  Crain's Opens up the Big Hole, and Wants to Know

Pebbles Go Bam Bam or Broken Glass Boogie Woogie at Block 37's 22 West Washington

Tales from the Crypt: City to Bury $300 Million Mistake under Block 37

Can Signage Save Block 37?

Block 37 Regains a Third Dimension

Hope at Block 37? - Ownership Changes Still Again

Mayor Richard M. Daley: The Emperor of Dirt

Block 37 - The Curse Lives!

The Entombment of the Plug Bug

Planning and its Disconnects: The Cautionary Tale of Block 37

Three Splendid Churches, One Over-the-Top Movie Palace: My First Day at Open House Chicago 2014

click images for larger view

The first day of the Chicago Architecture Foundation's spectacular Open House Chicago 2014, which gives the architecture-loving access to 150+ sites often closed to the general public, saw us heading out to South Shore and Pilsen - three churches, one movie palace, and a few extras.  Here's a sampling of what we saw, with more complete stories soon to come.

Our Lady of Peace Catholic Church, 79th and Jeffrey in South Shore.  Joseph W. McCarthy, architect.  Dedicated 1935.

The New Regal Theater (originally the Avalon) , 1600 block of west 79th, South Shore, John Eberson, Architect.  Opened 1927

 

 

Bonus: special Open House Chicago ruptured barge sunk in the Chicago River exhibit

St. Paul's Catholic Church, 22nd and Hoyne, Pilsen.  Henry Schlaks, architect. Opened 1899.

 

 

Hector Duarte Studio, Gulliver in Wonderland mural, Pilsen

St. Adalbert Church 1600 block of west 17th, Pilsen.  Henry Schlaks, architect.  1914 - 1914

 

 

 

There's last more tomorrow, Sunday, on Open House Chicago's closing day, with a number of new venues that weren't open on Saturday.  I'm heading out to Union Station's to check out the usually out-of-sight women's lounge, and improv it from there.  Check out the full list of sites and hours here.