Glorious Spire's fate left twisting in the wind of mediocrity
It's too early to say whether Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava's twisting condo tower, proposed for the Chicago lakefront, can yet be saved from the deforming forces of the marketplace. But Calatrava's latest design for the project, heavily tweaked to adapt to the specifications of its new developer, Garrett Kelleher, is a grim first step down the same path that took New York's Ground Zero project toward its current state of dispiriting mediocrity.
The former Fordham Spire is now the Kelleher Calamity. It would be overkill to call it ugly -- it remains more interesting than Chicago's typical human warehouse -- but compared with the exquisite original design, it's a bastardized disappointment that would hardly justify the attention it would draw to itself with its height.
The only reason to tolerate the original tower's incongruous giganticism -- at 2,000 feet, it would have dominated the Chicago skyline like a giant redwood in a forest of stunted pines -- had been its status as an unutterably lovely work of art. It earned its pride of place. Even in two-dimensional form on a computer screen or a sheet of newsprint, that poetically tapering spiral of glass made the skin prickle on your arm: a shimmering ghost-building, an ethereal curl of smoke rising to the sky.
Yes, its spire was romantically inspirational, and thus a bit of a throwback to the glories of Art Deco and of church steeples. It was also the only organic, logical completion of the overall form. It was perfect, in short, and its perfection had nothing to do with its potential utility as a broadcast antenna. To shear it off, as Calatrava and Kelleher have done (and to replace it with a series of silly protrusions like fins) is to deprive a needle of its literal and figurative point.
What was beneath it has been all but lost. Where the earlier design was elegantly slender, its successor is fatter and stubbier; it's as if the formerly sleek, light-on-its-feet building has put on weight and developed a clubfoot.
Most regrettable of all, its illusion of movement -- a consequence of the 360-degree rotation of its successive floors from the bottom up -- has been slowed by a 270-degree rotation that concludes well shy of the top. The sensual undulation of the form is now half-hearted, as if a formerly lithe ballroom dancer has lost her nerve; the result looks like a wet washrag wrung from one end only.
The sole improvements in this round of design are the elimination of a nearby parking garage (the parking is now underground) and the creation of a larger and more dramatic plaza at the building's base. The rest seems to be the beginning of the heartwrenching descent of an architectural masterpiece to the condition of a building whose claim to fame is being tall.
knance@suntimes.com