Overbite: Will New Plan for Old Post Office Amount to Anything?

image courtesy The Chuckman Collection

Yesterday the Chicago Plan Commission voted to approve a development plan for Chicago's old Post Office, the massive, two block 1932, Graham, Anderson, Probst and White structure that spans the Congress Expressway just west of the river. 

rendering Antunovich Associates

As reported by David Roeder of the Sun-Times, Phase I would involve 4,500,000 square feet, including a new 1,000-foot-high tower and parking structure to the west of the current building.  Estimated cost is $1.5 billion.  The Plan Commission vote can be seen as a casting of bait to attract potential investors to foot the bill for the plan of the Post Office's current owner, International Property Developers and its secretive CEO, British developer Bill Davies, who began his career at 15 as a construction worker and by the time he was 24 was running his own real estate company.

Will they bite? As detailed in a 2007 profile profile by Tony McDonough of the Liverpool Daily Post, Davies' track record is not exactly encouraging . . .

• In 1972, he paid £3 miilion to buy Liverpool's Aintree Racecourse, best known for the annual Grand National Steeplechase, with a promise of building one of the Europe's largest shopping malls.  It never happened, and Davies sold out in 1982.
• In 1986, Davies acquired the site of Liverpool's old Post Office.  Work on a planned £100 million shopping mall started in 1999, and then stopped.  Davies eventually sold off the site for £17 million to the Duke of Westminster.
• Also in the 1980's, Davies bought the Exchange Flags site for another grand plan and, much to the dismay of Liverpool Officials, and let it remain vacant for nearly 20 years, even after receiving £4.5 million in government subsidies.  Davies sold the site off in pieces in 2006 and 2007.
• In 1996, Davies paid £25,000 for the right to turn Liverpool's Chavasse Park into a £480,000,000 shopping center with a million-square-feet of leisure space in a single, wave-shaped building.  After British Secretary of State called the proposal “significantly harmful” to Liverpool's city center,  Davies sold back his option for £2 million in 2008.

In Chicago, Davies won control of the post office in August of 2009 with a winning bid of $40,000,000, and ignored two deadlines for closing the deal before negotiating the purchase price down to $24,000,000.  In 2012, he was taken to court over the deteriorating state of the Post Office, the same year the city filed suit to force Davies to repair and reactivate the ventilating fans whose malfunctioning was allowing flammable creosote to build up in the Union Station track areas below the Post Office, resulting in several fires.

rendering Antunovich Associates

Davies may be a visionary, as the renderings for the Post Office, the second phase of which includes a 2,000-foot-tower, would attest.  He's known to be a tough negotiator.  Yet his most consistent credential is the inability to actually build anything, and to holding onto properties for so long that increasingly frustrated civic officials pay him, sometimes handsomely, just for going away.

The structures depicted in the renderings from project architect Antonovich Associates are striking, and Antunovich is carefully integrating into the design the Post Office's one signature interior, the double-height, block long lobby along Van Buren.

rendering Antunovich Associates

The new design would be a welcome upgrade from the Post Office building's current kludgy infill  along its eastern facade, and includes, for first time, a riverfront esplanade.

rendering Antunovich Associates

Should the build-out leave space for a  potential future high-speed rail terminal, as proposed by Helmut Jahn in 2010?

image: Jahn

The larger questions, which the Plan Commission didn't touch, is whether the plan is actually a good - or even viable - idea.  When the 275,000 square-foot Block 37 mall, across from Macy's, is still largely empty, can the Post Office's West Loop neighborhood really support a mall that's even bigger (and escalates to 800,000 square-feet of retail by the final phase)?  Who would be the tenants?  Is it possible that the Post Office could become a vertical strip mall to end all strip malls, attracting big-box retailers like Walmart and Home Depot with the prospect of opening outlets as large as their suburban counterparts?  Can this area really support 300+ hotel rooms and another 1,000 rental apartments (just to start)?  If you had $1.5 billion - or a good chunk of it - is this where you'd want to be investing?

Those speculating that a casino could be part of the mix at the old Post Office should take a breather.  It's already here.

Read More:

International Property Developers North America website 

 from 2005:  Monument Mori - Post Office of the Dead

Saturday Retro: The Architects Speak!

For today, links to a selection of our interviews and encounters with architects down through the years.  Most of them are from a while back.  In some cases, they're from a time before a young architect's most famous buildings came into being.  In others, they show a seasoned architect at the time of the opening of a major project.  Whatever the context, each interview reveals different aspects of the thinking of some of most talented architects to work in Chicago.

Rem Koolhaas [2003] - “We're not trying to emulate the current mess.  We are just as interested in the sublime . . .”

Carol Ross Barney [2004]:  “When people comment on buildings, they're really talking about their comfort level . . . What they're really saying is ‘It's nothing I haven't seen before, so its OK with me!’”

John Ronan [2004]: “You don't see many great spaces anymore.  What's the great space that's been built in Chicago in the past 25 years?”

Tod Williams and Bille Tsien [2012] “It really stems from a very deep desire to try to make the world better, which is both naive, but also very strong in what we do, a motivator in what we do.”

Jeanne Gang [2004]: “When we make form, we're thinking about how we can make the identity fluctuate.  It doesn't have to be one thing all the time.”

Helmut Jahn [2003]: “Everything is left only as much as it needs to be . . . ”

Mies's 860-880 Lake Shore Drive. Love the Building? Click the Website.

click images for larger view

The two towers of Mies van der Rohe's 860-880 North Lake Shore Drive are among Chicago's most essential landmarks.  After long decades of being able to express his ideas only through drawings or models, 860-880 was first time Mies was able to turn his conceptions for tall buildings into a built reality.  For better and for worse, the world has never been the same since.

There's a new website, 860|880 Lake Shore Drive that provides an excellent overview of the building, its creator, history and importance.  It's the work of The 860|880 Website Committee -  Sara Coffou, Chris Enck, Joel Herm, Ann Knowles, and others - and it serves both as sort of an intranet for current and potential residents, and a font of information for everyone else.

The site includes an overview of Mies's work first in Europe, and then in America, and facts about the building (the original cost was $6 million, the cost for Krueck and Sexton and Gunny Harboe's award-winning restoration fifty years later - $10 million -  seems, giving the place and inflation, quite a bargain.)  There's an excellent gallery of current and historic photographs and, from 1957, both a brochure created by the tenants, and a link to a Life Magazine spread on Mies and his work, including 860-880.

There's a great essay by designer Susan Keig, who studied with Maholy-Nagy at Chicago's New Bauhaus, fell in love with 860-880, and has been living there for over fifty years.

I'm not sure how many architects live in the building.  The reason Mies gave for shacking up in a Robert S. De Golyer Italian-palazzo apartment block rather than his own iconic structure was that he feared being busted down to quasi-janitor,  trapped in the elevator listening to tenants' plumbing problems.  Still, I'm betting more than a few architects have been drawn to this temple of modernism, and one of them, John Ronan, who lives at 860-880 with another architect - his wife Claire Lyster - and their two young daughters, provides a compelling analysis of the building and its importance in his Essay in Steel and Glass . . .

It contains certain truths. It wasn’t about self-expression. It was about working through a problem and finding a solution that could be used again, elsewhere. 860|880 is Mies’ understanding of what a steel and glass building should be . . . There’s a definitive ‘statement’ quality to it. Subsequent iterations of the type looked for ways to make it cheaper, and ended up diluting the purity of the original approach.

 Great stuff. Check it out for yourself:  860|880 Lake Shore Drive

There are a number of other worthwhile building-oriented websites, including one for The Marquette Building, the Holabird and Roche landmark that found the perfect owner/protector in becoming home to the MacArthur Foundation.

And, of course, the grand-daddy of them all is the one created by Steven Dahlman for the Bertrand Goldberg masterpiece that I call home, Marina City Online, whose City Within a City: The Biography of Chicago's Marina City, is one of the most exhaustive and entertaining accounts of a single building you're ever likely to find.

I'm sure there are more.  Let me know what I'm missing.

The World of Wiel Arets lands at IIT

click images for larger view

Modesty is often not the first thing that comes to mind when thinking of architects, but the College of Architecture at IIT may be about to test it out.

It was a clear theme in the inaugural lecture by IIT's new Dean of the College of Architecture Wiel Arets last Wednesday, starting with the introduction by architect John Ronan.

"When Wiel Arets came to Chicago to interview for the Dean position at IIT", said Ronan, "we took him out to dinner the night before his interview. The very first thing he said to us was, 'You have to understand, I’m not a teacher, I’m a student.' Four hours later, as we were the last party to leave the restaurant, and they were putting chairs on the tables, we knew we had begun an interesting dialogue that would have profound implications for IIT in Chicago." 

"The school is you," Arets told the assembled students. "You are my colleagues."

Arets, 57, who was named to his IIT post this past August, was previously Dean of Rotterdam's Berlage Institute from 1995 to 2002.  In his Wednesday talk, to an overflow crowd that spilled into Crown Hall's lower core, he gave an overview of the work of his firm Wiel Arets Architects that  stressed his optimistic view of the future, including the possibilities of the PAL-V flying car.

When someone was designing a flying car five years ago it was a young student of the University of Delft.  He saw that we were able to fly with a car we can develop and even James Bond is jealous. I think at this moment one of fifty of these cars are being produced in Holland and the only problem we have is that we are not allowed to fly with them, because the rules are not allowing us to do so. I think that’s something we have to be aware of as architects. We have to be aware as architects that rules sometimes allows not to do what we want to do.

Branson is promising the world that L.A. and London will be less than two hours apart. This is the map of the world with borders. This is the map of the world without borders. That’s a world I would like to see.

This subway map positioned on a map of the world is telling us that when we take the plane or subway that we think we go from place to place. We go maybe from Chicago to New York, or from Chicago to L.A., but are we going really there? The idea that we are moving from one place to another in a physical world where we have no clue what we are doing . . . I push a button and things happen. I think that’s something I’m interested in, the fact that the world will become, and is probably already one city.

The world is one city with neighborhoods as this map shows you. When this could happen and will happen, then the cities will be not only the center point; the cities will be connected to each other, like Being, Seoul and Tokyo in Asia.  The area the we are in now will be one of the bigger neighborhoods, as well. When this is happening , then the world will shrink for us, since we can move from one place to another in less than two hours.

On the other hand, I believe that diversity and the local conditions are maybe even more important than ever.

That's a rather tall order, especially since the wide range of the world that we are compressing to simultaneity is not just geographic, but social and economic.  More people are flying and traveling than ever before, yet that group represents but a small, highly privileged subset of humanity.   The central contradiction is reflected in Arets' own striking body of work, which ranges from everything from Living Madrid, a social housing project . . .

photograph courtesy Wiel Arets Architects

, , , to the Utrecht University Library . .

photograph courtesy Wiel Arets Architects

 . . . to Hedge House, for a man with seven cars and a special room for his chickens . . .

photograph courtesy Wiel Arets Architects

What it will all mean for IIT I really don't know.   At times, it seems both too much and too little.  The mind reels, and I follow the advice of Arets as he closed Wednesday's talk . . .

"I think, John, we should have a drink."