Editorial: New river towers must honor city’s heritage
Editorials January 26, 2012 10:28PM
333 W. Wacker, with the Chicago River in foreground, photographed Thursday, Jan. 26, 2012, in Chicago | John J. Kim~Sun-Times
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Updated: February 28, 2012 8:15AM
Chicago is about to embark on its most important building project in decades. It is critical we get it right.
The Kennedy family, with a major developer and an internationally renowned architect on board, is planning to put a trio of towers on historic Wolf Point — right there where the north and south branches of the Chicago River meet — the most dramatic building showcase site remaining in or near the Loop.
It’s an incredibly important site, once the commercial hub of pioneer Chicago. You can see it at a great distance from almost all points, from the lake to the east, up the Chicago River from the south and down the river from the north.
Whatever goes there will fix Chicago’s image in the minds of many of us who live here and those who visit.
Do it right, and we’ll have another crowning achievement worthy of Chicago’s amazing architectural heritage.
Do it wrong, and we’ll have a century or more to gaze upon a missed opportunity.
Chicago’s riverscape is second only to our stunning lakefront skyline as the city’s metaphorical front door. It is the home of the Wrigley Building, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s 330 N. Wabash Building (formerly known as the IBM Building), Marina City and numerous other structures of worldwide significance.
Now just a parking lot, Wolf Point is the sweet spot of that riverscape.
Make no mistake, this is a critical test for Mayor Rahm Emanuel. If the building is a success, it will be to his lasting credit. If it falls short of excellence, it will diminish Chicago’s international reputation as an architectural capital and become Emanuel’s lasting baggage.
For inspiration, Emanuel need only look to his predecessor, Mayor Richard M. Daley.
Architects will tell you that in his long career Donald Trump never put up a worthwhile building. But when Trump came to Chicago, Daley hung tough, and we wound up with a skyscraper that is widely admired, a worthy addition to the city’s riverscape.
Emanuel must take the same tough and tenacious approach to Wolf Point. The bottom-line mindset that gave Chicago those Citibank ads on a historic river bridgehouse last year won’t do.
“It must be a landmark in the real sense,” says Chicagoan Joey Korom, author of The American Skscraper 1850-1940: A Celebration of Height. “It must mark the land.”
Geoffrey Baer, writer and host of WTTW-Channel 11’s programs about Chicago architecture and history, compares the site to that of the Chicago Board of Trade at the end of La Salle Street — the dramatic terminus of a powerful visual sweep.
Fortunately, the project is off to a good start. The architect, Cesar Pelli, is world renowned. The developer, Hines Interests LP, is first-rate. But the Kennedy family itself, which owns the four-acre site, has no particular record of putting up inspiring buildings.
The three towers envisioned for the Kennedy property would gaze across the river at the sparkling 333 W. Wacker building and the Chicago Riverwalk, the city’s “second shoreline.”
The Wolf Point buildings, just west of the Merchandise Mart, must be fully integrated with the river, engaging the water as opposed to coldly looming over it — very much, we would hope, like the curving river-green 333 W. Wacker building. The development must retain its eco-friendly soft river bank, home to fish and beavers. It must provide superb access. Above all, it must be aesthetically captivating.
Wolf Point, for those who know their local history, will always remind us of Chicago’s pioneer past. How right it would be if an architectural gem were erected there now, a symbol of the city’s future.
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