Blue Sky Thinking

What makes a landmark? Is it the stuff it’s made of? Or the goals of the architects who made it? In the case of the Inland Steel Building—a stainless-steel Chicago land-mark from 1958, designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill—these questions have become both practical and philosophical. In the lead-up to the building’s current renovation, architects, preservationists, and city and state officials all debated the future of the icon and whether continuity with the past meant keeping its material structure or innovating anew. The owner hired architects at SOM to create a master plan for retrofitting the building. They matched its original innovations in today’s terms—sustainability, flexibility, ease of use—and demonstrated the outer limits for LEED in a 52-year-old shell. Inland Steel has become a case study in what you can do to green a midcentury building, as well as what you can’t, economically and legally. As retrofits become more appealing—cheaper, greener—we may need to revisit the rules for bringing old buildings back to life.

“A serious approach to sustainability is unquestionably going be an inherent part of every building in the future,” says Stephen Apking, the SOM Interiors partner who led the team working on the Inland Steel master plan. “We’re going to see many more retrofits of existing buildings, landmarked and not, and the plan we created will be a benchmark.” What they learned was that you can create a LEED-certified landmark with all the contemporary amenities and mid-century style—but to make it happen you need new agreements on sustainability from landmarks commissions, as well as clients with the will and means to create a boutique property. “Landmark office buildings—you can’t say that they simply aren’t going to work,” he says. “You have to find a way to insert new technology that makes them viable.”

The real estate investment company Capital Properties purchased Inland Steel in 2007 for $57.25 million. Richard Cohen, Capital’s principal, was encouraged to buy it by his friend Frank Gehry, who had already invested in the building in 2005 and was frustrated with the lack of progress on renovation. “We wanted to set the goal high for innovation,” Apking says. “We had an encouraging client in Richard Cohen—anything we brought to him, he wanted more.” After deciding to go for LEED Platinum certification, Apking and SOM associate Claes Appelquist researched the building’s original design and found themselves updating many of the features that made Inland Steel so innovative in 1958.

Walter Netsch—the legendary SOM Chicago partner who designed an early version of Inland Steel, before being pulled off the project to work on the U.S. Air Force Academy—intended for Inland Steel to have a double-glass skin, and to use the space between as ducting for the HVAC system—an advanced idea even now. (It is being used in such sustainable skyscrapers as Cook + Fox’s One Bryant Park.) When Bruce Graham took over the project, the double-layer curtain wall was eliminated, replaced by distinctive green-tinted glass. The SOM master plan returned to Netsch’s original double-glass idea, suggesting the insertion of a second glass wall behind the outer window wall. Between the two panes would be programmable mechanical blinds, set to react automatically to changing light levels, but with tenant overrides.

Other features of the original building sound like they could have been specified yesterday. Graham moved the support piers to the perimeter—where they form striking stainless-steel ribs on the exterior of the building along South Dearborn Street—to create 58-by-178-foot open floors. He integrated electricity and telephone lines into the floor as part of a modular system called “Inland Cellufloor,” which shares much in common with today’s energy-efficient floor delivery systems. This system saved a foot of headroom per floor, allowing the building to fit 19 floors into what would otherwise have been an 18-story envelope.

“To us,” Apking says, “it was essential that all of the systems be integrated,” as they had been in the 1958 design. That meant keeping the streamlined profile and minimal section of the original ceiling and floor. One of the strengths of the new master plan is the slimness of the insertions, which suggests that any 1960s tower can be reworked from the inside out. The plan includes chilled beams—a series of refrigerated boxes installed at intervals in the ceiling—that can be integrated with the lighting system. Chilled beams allow for localized temperature control, since they are spaced throughout the floor, and also obviate the need for a large HVAC plant. They have been used in a number of European projects but rarely in the United States.

“We decided we had to protect our clients from tenants who might not be environmentally friendly,” Appelquist says. SOM designed a new movable wall and cubicle system, with veneer, fabric, or glass panels less than two inches thick, along with modular furniture in FSC-certified woods and three color palettes. “This is a designed product, and as a tenant you will buy into that product,” Apking says. “The ceiling is designed as a kit of parts. You can reuse the walls and the furniture systems. It is a test in terms of the marketplace: Will tenants be willing to set their egos aside?” SOM has been discussing manufacturing the system with Unifor, and it might go ahead with the product line without Inland Steel, marking a renewed engagement for the company in the world of manufacturing.