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Critic Blair Kamin charts Chicago architecture's bumpy 1990s ride.
By Julie Lasky
January 2002
Why architecture matters should be one of those questions that end conversations
rather than begin them. It ought to prompt looks of wonderment, or even
pity. Teachers' salaries, Matt Damon, the U.S. debt to the UN, dessert forks,
the continued existence of Amazon.com--all these cry out for rationales,
but the buildings in which we spend most of our lives? The cities that Frank
Sinatra sang anthems about? The skyscrapers that serve as cultural symbols
so potent that a pair of them were brought down by terrorists at the cost
of five thousand lives?
The sad truth, of course, is that ignorance about the connection between
architecture and daily life is widespread. Since 1992, making that connection
has been Blair Kamin's job as architecture critic of the Chicago Tribune.
In a city known for nurturing some of the world's most progressive architects--and
for sponsoring some of the profession's worst abuses--Kamin charted architecture's
rise from the early 1990s recession to the turn-of-the-millennium technology
boom. It was a decade, he laments, when "Chicago simultaneously found
itself as a city and lost its architectural nerve."
Why Architecture Matters: Lessons from Chicago collects 61 examples
of his Pulitzer Prize-winning column and groups them in thematic sections
introduced by brief essays. Taken together, they cover the waterfront of
Chicago's urban ills, along with their proposed and often misguided remedies--from
dreary cul-de-sacs imposed on the street grid in an effort to reduce crime,
to public housing that tries to minimize the miseries of residents, to suburban
developments tackling sprawl, to antique buildings shored up or torn down
depending on the winds of preservationism. Occasionally Kamin ranges farther
afield--to Berlin, Bilbao, New York, Washington.
Every city serves as its own textbook for the kinds of "lessons"
this book teaches: how humane, well-constructed, contextually sensitive
buildings can make people (and businesses) happy; and how shoddy, ill-proportioned,
crudely sited buildings can make people (and profits) slump. But there's
no better curriculum than Chicago. Its didactic value lies not just in its
legacy as the city of big innovation. "As the historian Perry Duis
has suggested," Kamin writes in the book's introduction, "Chicago
often serves as the great American exaggeration, expressing at larger scale--and
often in excruciating contrast--design trends evident elsewhere in the country."
Kamin distills the city's historical essence from a blend of Burnham, Sullivan,
Wright, and Mies, with several dashes of reference to Carl Sandburg's industrial
giant on the plains and Sinatra's toddling town. Reminding readers that
downtown State Street once deserved to be called "that great street,"
he writes with sadness and sometimes anger about the many adulterating substances
that have befouled the elixir: buildings turning boulevards into canyons,
public plazas into deserts, urban history into themed entertainment.
Kamin's views are nonetheless balanced and his tone marked by fair play.
He holds a special grudge against cheesy pseudo-historicism (such as the
Sullivan-style ornament coating the exterior of the Disney store on North
Michigan Avenue) and contextual oblivion (KPF's proposed, and later rejected,
design for a retail, hotel, and residential complex on State Street, aspects
of which remind him of 1950s suburban shopping malls and mirrored-glass-clad
towers in the Sun Belt). But he isn't precious about Chicago's architectural
heritage. Though he mourned the 1995 demolition of the Mies-designed Arts
Club of Chicago, on East Ontario Street, whose hallmark was a white-painted
steel stair the club managed to salvage, he criticized the blandness of
John Vinci's self-consciously Miesian box built in 1997 for the organization's
new home three blocks away. Kamin even proposed that the stair, the new
building's central design feature, might have been better off in a museum.
He endorses avant-garde projects that try to match the harmonious balance
between structure and surroundings, humanity and materiality achieved by
the city's most celebrated monuments, though he finds the best recent
examples in other cities (Gehry's Guggenheim, in Bilbao; Jean Nouvel's Cartier
Foundation, in Paris). There's even a tinge of despair when he writes about
what he believes were Chicago's bungled opportunities for progressive architecture
(Hammond, Beeby, and Babka's Harold Washington Library and Josef Paul Kleihues's
Museum of Contemporary Art).
Kamin exhorts readers to see the tourist-magnet value of good design but
is generous enough to admit when poorly executed schemes--the disjointed
redevelopment of Navy Pier, for example--end up drawing crowds. And though
many took potshots at the 1999 Cows on Parade project as a blatant promotional
opportunity for its sponsors, he bravely came to its defense for bringing
urban-hostile people to Chicago and giving them a pretext for chatting with
strangers.
He makes shrewd, temperate observations of design flaws in unbuilt
works, such as SOM's proposed (and eventually dropped) 1,550-foot skyscraper
at 7 South Dearborn, which was intended to give back to Chicago the world's
tallest building after Malaysia's Petronas Twin Towers overtook the Sears
Tower. Kamin saw its potential to be "a shimmering beacon with a bold
profile," but it needed refinements to avoid resembling "four
medium-sized office buildings impaled on a spike." And he is quick
to show how developers seeking the biggest return on their investment destroyed
an architect's vision. Indeed if this book has a villain, it is the aptly
named developer John Buck, who signed the death warrant for the Arts Club
of Chicago and whose bland hulking properties killed off much of the Beaux-Arts
charm of North Michigan Avenue.
In his introduction Kamin relates that the collection's title spun out of
a 1992 rumor that the Tribune's then editor, Jack Fuller, was thinking
about eliminating his job. Though unemployed architects were driving cabs
in those lean years, Kamin fought for and kept his role as a civic watchdog.
By winning that battle, he scored points for the tiny community of architecture
critics at U.S dailies. Still, even the best newspaper reviews tend to be
hit-and-run affairs, written the moment the scaffolding comes down and the
floors are polished. The book contains several columns devoted to reassessing
works like SOM's John Hancock Center and Sears Tower, and Peter Eisenman's
Aronoff Center, in Cincinnati. Kamin attaches brief postscripts to many
essays to tell us the fates of unbuilt or controversial structures. But
to do full justice to his title, he could have lavished additional retrospective
attention on more of his subjects. How are they holding up? How are they
being used? What has been their influence on design in Chicago and
beyond?
Also missing are photographs of interiors to which Kamin devotes ample text
space. Except for a handful of projects for which it would have been folly
to neglect interior views (including James Ingo Freed's United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum, in Washington, D.C.), the book offers only one black-and-white
exterior photo per building. In his descriptions of the soaring atrium of
Lohan Associates' 300 East Randolph tower and the magnificent elevator lobby
in Daniel Burnham's restored Reliance Building at Washington and State Streets,
Kamin's evocative prose makes one hunger for more imagery.
Finally--and most trivially--the pieces could have been edited for repetitive
phrases and ideas. Kamin's echoing appreciation of the Hancock Center's
"muscularity," or his mixture of amusement and disdain for Mayor
Richard M. Daley's beautification strategy (planting more trees and
flowers), are fine spread over a decade but get a little wearisome
compressed within a book.
It is customary at this point for reviewers to say such things are quibbles.
And they are. Why Architecture Matters might have read like a sequence
of frozen appraisals if Kamin didn't write with such a good eye and heart.
The book tempts one to visit the buildings he critiques, not to test but
to fully appreciate his observations. Like a devoted teacher, Kamin can
be a bit of a scold, but he doesn't give up on his underachieving city:
he just patiently corrects its homework. His wish that Chicago design would
struggle to its feet and once again assume aesthetic leadership is infectious
and, I hope, persuasive. It's high time the town started toddling again.
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