Save Prentice Movement Grows
“But just as a patient expects his doctor to pull out all stops in search of a cure, Northwestern must pursue every avenue before daring to raze one of Chicago’s architectural and engineering treasures.
We don’t think they’re trying hard enough. Surely, there’s a solution.”
That is from an editorial in the Chicago Sun-Times yesterday, one of several actions that have ramped up the pressure on Northwestern University to explain why it needs to demolish Bertrand Goldberg’s pathbreaking 1975 Prentice Women’s Hospital, which I have been writing about here for over two years. The first building to use computers in aid of its design, Prentice is a song, a crescendo of 45-foot concrete cantilevers twirling into a quatrefoil of cylindrical skin delicately punched with ovals, a bold sculpture on a base that makes the regular buildings around it look dull-witted.
The architecture geeks have loved this building for a while, and of course I announced its ascension to the National Trust Eleven Most Endangered List a little over a year ago. Continue Reading
False Choices and the Process of Preservation
Reportedly the largest chandelier in the United States and the 7th largest in the world. Would you hold a party under this for a 25-year old preservation planner who had been working in the field for less than three years? I will be there again tomorrow.
I am fond of saying that heritage conservation (historic preservation) is a process. It is the process whereby a community (however defined and constituted) determines what elements of its past it wants to bring into the future. The process consists of establishing context (historical, architectural, environmental, social), criteria, evaluating resources (tangible and intangible) and then determining how we want to treat those resources in the future.
Mayor Emanuel fumbles first landmarks test
Okay, so a couple years ago a career gadfly and scold sued the City of Chicago claiming the Landmarks Ordinance was vague and arbitrary, the sort of legal challenge first-year law students learn about before they move on to the real stuff. But this is Chicago, and this is Illinois, and three judges at the Appellate level agreed with the charge, mostly based on the fact that the criteria in the ordinance were “vague” because they used words like “significant” and “values” and “importance” which of course caused me to opine and label the whole thing “Appellate Nuttiness” at the time.
The case is still out there and now we have Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who is already facing the question of whether we should have three vacant city blocks in a row just east of Michigan Avenue in Streeterville (the Prentice Women’s Hospital issue) and he also gets to appoint people to the Commission on Chicago Landmarks, who are by ordinance “professionals in the disciplines of history, architecture, historic architecture, planning, archaeology, real estate, historic preservation, or related fields, or shall be persons who have demonstrated special interest, knowledge, or experience in architecture, history, neighborhood preservation, or related disciplines.” Continue Reading
Crunch Time on Prentice
Tomorrow, June 2, 2011, the Commission on Chicago Landmarks will consider preliminary designation of Prentice Women’s Hospital as a Chicago Landmark. This is the result of a joint efforts by Landmarks Illinois, Preservation Chicago and the National Trust for Historic Preservation (which used a photo of Prentice on its new Financial Assistance publication!) to give the building its day in court, or in the words of Landmarks Illinois Advocacy Director Lisa DiChiera “This building is just too high-profile to let it slip away without a thorough, transparent review of its landmark eligibility.” Continue Reading
Mayor Emanuel 2011
Helmut Jahn’s latest at U of C
Chicago has a new Mayor, Rahm Emanuel, and he spent his first Saturday in office doing something aldermen usually do: expediting permits. It seems the University of Chicago – the city’s fifth largest employer- complained that it was taking them 23 months to get permits for decorative streetlights and various construction projects, so he sat down with them to see if he could cut that in half, approve some sort of master plan and get his city departments to coordinate their approvals. This of course has resonance with anyone who has ever dealt with bureaucracy, which is everyone. But there are a few lessons and a few cautions here.
After sorting out U of C’s master plan, Emanuel hopes to do the same with other universities. Make no mistake: universities and hospitals are the ONLY ones building things these days. Both types of institutions have a nearly insatiable appetite for land, which means they are the ones threatening landmarks like Prentice Women’s Hospital. U of C has mostly been taking down serviceable sustainable but otherwise undistinguished flat buildings in the area north of its hospital, which has been creeping north from 58th St for some time. Continue Reading
Prentice Women’s Hospital April 2011
The most significant preservation battle in Chicago for some time has been the effort to save Prentice Women’s Hospital, a pioneering 1975 design by Bertrand Goldberg. It’s four-lobed curving concrete form is being imitated by the NEWEST hospital building in Chicago and I called it perhaps the first acknowledgement of the feminine in architecture. My colleague Anthea Hartig said “The forms at Prentice are in the same instant structural and sculptural. This is truly the unity of art and function, the continuing discourse of artistic and engineering expressions.” The building’s seamless integration of art and science is manifest in concrete cantilevers that pushed the lobes 45 feet beyond their base, a feat that took one of the FIRST applications of computers to aid in an architectural design. And it’s gorgeous. Continue Reading
Prentice Women’s Hospital, Chicago
The next great new building in Chicago is Perkins and Will’s new hospital building for the Rush-Prebyterian St. Luke’s Hospital complex on the Near West Side. The new building features a multi-lobed design rising above a square base, looming over the Eisenhower Expressway and expressing with its insistent curving form a humanism central to the successful medical relationship. It is new and exciting. Continue Reading
End of the year roundup
from deep in the thickness of the holidays, a time when we celebrate traditions that seem to be really old but really aren’t, some reflections on the current state of preservation in Chicago and elsewhere….
Al Capone’s house – there was a lengthy article on the Al Capone house, a modest c. 1915 red brick flat building in Park Manor on the South Side. When this was proposed for the National Register back in 1989, I remember all hell broke loose thanks to a collection of Italian-American organizations objecting to giving the mobster any honor. Of course, landmark designation is not “honoring,” otherwise we wouldn’t landmark things like the Vesey Street staircase or Manzanar, but the media sweatfest was enough to torpedo the designation. Now, the owner of the house since 1963 is selling it, so the Capone history has come back in the form of a big article in the paper and a $50,000 boost on the sales price. People are always in favor of preservation when it pays off – the trick is seeing the payoff when it is still in the distance.
Barack Obama got elected, so we may get the 2016 Olympics, which means the Olmsted landscape in Washington Park will be affected. Keep an eye on this one.
Institutions – especially schools, hospitals and churches – are sometimes more likely to cause demolition of valuable historic resources than private developers. A classic example is the move of Children’s Memorial Hospital from Lincoln Park to Streeterville. The move not only threatens the buildings they are leaving – serviceable and urbane but not spectacular – but also the neighborhood they are moving to. Turns out Ronald McDonald House has to move with them, putting a landmark up for sale in Lincoln Park and potentially leading to the demolition of two buildings on the near north side. First, they are planning on building a new Ronald McDonald House by demolishing a nice 1887 warehouse – again serviceable and urbane but not spectacular. (See September 4 2008 blog) Second, they are NOT re-using Prentice Women’s Hospital, one of Bertrand Goldberg’s great buildings. This would have been a natural. I guess that would require a contemporary high-definition widescreen preservation vision. Too much to ask?
The Expense of Preservation
Preservation is often characterized as expensive. Why? Because it is a good excuse, even for the richest.
One of the preservation tragedies we have been awaiting these last few years is the demolition of Bertrand Goldeberg’s Prentice Women’s Hospital in Chicago, a mighty and evocative design from the 1960s, the last era of optimism. A Quatrefoil in plan, it took the stem-and-petals constructional idiom of Goldberg’s signature Marina City and evolved a powerful flower of a building, four cylindrical lobes of beautiful 60s concrete studded with rounded windows – for a guy Goldberg was pretty good at channelling the lost feminine tradition in Modernism and he was certainly an intellectual leader in recapturing that tradition from the Miesian hegemony.
Continue Reading