Someone should give Lynn Becker , the architecture critic, who has his own Web site and writes for the Reader and other print publications, a civic award. He starts his current Reader cover story on the state of Chicago architecture with the suggestion that architect Jeanne Gang’s design for Aqua, a stunning new Lakeshore East high-rise, might be the tipping point for local design. Becker’s thesis is that we’re on the verge of a third Chicago School, but the real tipping point might have come in January of 2003, when he wrote a Reader piece headlined “Stop the blandness” that would have made Martin Luther proud. Not that the founder of the Lutheran church and the local critic share a sensibility, but Becker’s article had on a much smaller scale, the force of The 95 Theses nailed to the front doors of our own civic church.
At that point, the city had seen a decade of residential development ramping up to the frenzied pitch of the late ’90s. As they did in an earlier building boom, however, after the Great Chicago Fire, architects could measure nearly all of this work in miles of building fronts. Design was an afterthought, and our built environment remains scarred by the resulting mediocrity.
Chicago Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin, who should have been pounding this story for years, responded to Becker’s piece with his own article rehashing a lot of the same criticism. Suddenly, local media were full of stories about our atrociously evolving, or devolving, architecture and the damage it was doing to Chicago’s heritage as a city of great design. It was as if, after a decade of steadily building blandness, the public, or a key portion of it, woke up to find itself in a concrete / pseudo-Victorian / neoclassical hell. Even Mayor Daley, the guiding force behind so much bad, retro design, publicly called for it to stop.
In the earlier piece, Becker singled out Magellan Development and architect-developer James Loewenberg for the lion’s share of scorn. That was partly because of the developer’s record in River North and partly because it had recently begun Lakeshore East, a massive development in the heart of downtown, at Lake Shore Drive and the river (on the Illinois Center land that temporarily hosted a nine-hole golf course). Becker challenged Magellan to build something that would have enduring value for the city, and with Aqua, the developer has responded affirmatively.
Becker’s Reader story (when’s the last time we wished a Reader story was longer?) offers some fascinating insight into Aqua’s origins, which apparently started when Gang and Loewenberg were seated next to each other at a Harvard alumni dinner. He tracks the obvious influence of Koolhaus, though we can’t help thinking of Gaudi’s voluptuous curves and sculpted facades when we look at Gang’s more restrained design (Mies meets Gaudi?).
What of the Third Chicago School? Well, maybe that’s an exaggeration — only history will tell for sure. A “school” implies some sort of shared vision or at least defining traits. We have yet to see such commonalities emerge from the current spate of exciting, well-designed buildings, but something promising is afoot in Chicago design, and if it’s not the harbinger of another Chicago School, Aqua may yet prove an important watershed.