Infinite Curve: Viñoly's Chapel at the U of C Center for Care and Discovery

When we wrote about the new Logan Center for the Performing Arts at the University of Chicago at the time of its opening last fall, we included this view towards of Rafael Viñoly's Center for Care and Discovery, the $700 million, 240 bed hospital whose massive bulk looming over the U of C campus we described as looking “like a beached ocean liner”.

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In Viñoly's defense, he was working with the University's program, which stressed the kind of supply-chain empire-building that is a dominant force of our time in general and in health care in particular.  As I learned from a generous and informative tour from Viñoly Architects Project Manager Joe Cliggott earlier this month, Viñoly's exterior design incorporatea a number of features to break up the monolithic quality, as well as a highly creative approach to making the hospital experience more - well, hospitable - for care givers, patients, and visitors alike.  I hope to cover these in more detail in a later post. (And also the new Carol Ross Barney daycare center you can glimpse in the bottom right of the photo below.)

While during my tour I learned any number of things that impressed me, today I want to take a look at the one feature that surprised me, and in a very positive way.  It's the chapel on the seventh floor ‘Garden’, the sky lobby encompassing waiting and support rooms for visitors, which are not only gracious, but provide some of the most spectacular views in Chicago.

The chapel is a counterpoint to so much of the rest the design.  In the larger design, the right angle, save for rounded columns, predominates, relentlessly.  In contrast, in the chapel, the right angle is banished, even in its expression on the exterior of the building.

The wall facing the lobby curves.  The entrance door is not immediately apparent.  You look at the wall and place your bets, but you know immediately when you find it, by the feel on your hand of the thin, hidden strip of metal near the edge, whose cool, smooth texture is a shock to the touch compared to the texture and temperature of the otherwise omnipresent wood.  The cherry wood veneer is in striking contrast to the celebration of metal, glass, and applied color in the rest of the hospital.

Once you enter the chapel and close the door behind you, you are in interfaith room completely unmarked by any religious imagery.  The objects - whether they be sacred or seating - required by individual religions are stored behind another hidden door in a small closet that bumps into the room as if stretching the unbroken banding of wood.  Above that wood, a band of white wall and a narrow continuous strip of clerestory windows wraps around the top of the room.

There are no right angles in this room.  If you can imagine away the rude but code-required Exit sign, it's as if you find yourself in  a space where you don't how you got there, or how you'll get out.  The acoustic seal creates one of those places where you actually ‘hear’ the silence.  Occasional sounds from the lobby filter in, muffled and distant, as if you're hearing them underwater.  Although the placement of the closet ‘bump‘ subtly demarcates a visual focus towards the ‘alter‘ area, the chapel, ultimately, is an ever continuous space.  No beginning.  No end.  It just ‘is’.  A sanctuary, filled from above with celestial light.  A glimpse of eternity, claustrophobic, until you give yourself over to its serenity.

In alternating succession, the experience of Viñoly's chapel can be both unsettling and comforting.  I like this space.

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Rafael Viñoly talks Wright, new hospital, at the Logan Center for the Arts

Ronald Reagan Wrecked

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The great Lee Bey is reporting today that the University of Chicago is currently demolishing the apartment building where Ronald Reagan lived as a small boy.  DNAinfo.com Chicago,  which also has some nice photos, is saying the University promises to put up a plaque.

The structure was already cast in the deep shadows of Rafael Viñoly's hulking new Center for Care and Discovery (translation: it's a really big hospital).  When I wrote about this last December, it was less about history and more about the way that the U of C is super-densifying its campus at the expense of any sense of community or human scale.

Read: Say Goodbye to Ronald Reagan's Apartment: The Supply-Chaining of Hyde Park

Say Goodbye to Ronald Reagan's Apartment: the Supply-Chaining of Hyde Park

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It's really not a building you'd give a second look.  A nondescript apartment block, presentable enough, to be sure, but pretty much what you'd see in any Chicago neighborhood.  When you walk by and it's gone, will you even notice?

But the six-flat building resting gently at the corner of Maryland and 57th has one great claim to fame.  For less than a year, it was home to a four-year-old Ronald Reagan.  It was here, according to a an eloquent requiem by Mary Clare Kendall in the Examiner, that young Ronnie would watch horse-drawn fire engines race by his window.   In his gas-lit apartment, the small boy dreamed of sportscasting and Hollywood and Pennsylvania Avenue, and of a nearby Theological Institute rededicated to the theology of Milton Friedman.  On warm, summer days, his mother would take him to feed cabbages to the small dinosaurs that still grazed in Washington Park.

Today, the apartment block sits in the deep shadow of the new, state-of-the-art University of Chicago Center for Care and Discovery, right across the street.  That same kind of hyper-density is planned for the two blocks to the north of the massive battleship of a hospital, including where the Reagan apartments stand.  Kendall writes that it may be gone as early as January 1st.   The Commission on Chicago Landmarks has already determined the building doesn't meet the criteria for designation, and Kendall says Mayor Rahm Emanuel's office hasn't responded to her request for comments.  (Considering how Emanuel not only crafted an elaborate charade to designate Bertrand Goldberg's Prentice Hospital a landmark and rescind that designation only minutes later, but was actually complicit in helping Northwestern develop a campaign to destroy the building, I would advise Kendall not to hold her breath waiting.)

The University of Chicago is both a world-class institution and an urban mega-power.  It goes where it pleases, and strikes where it pleases, and in this it is largely unchallenged by governmental entities, such as the city, which operate in the same Era of the Supply Chain dynamics of relentless consolidation and standardization.  When Rafael Viñoly , architect of the new Center for Care and Discovery, mapped out the eventual filling out of the blocks to the north with the same massive amount of square-footage as in his building, he cited a basic principle that the sign of success when you do something is that you wind up doing more and more of it (and build even bigger buildings).

Such is the case in health care, where what was once a distributed network of neighborhood hospitals is being supplanted by a smaller number of far larger, increasingly centralized facilities like the U of C, Rush, Lurie and Northwestern, all of which have recently completed new facilities with price tags of half a billion dollars on up.  You can witness the fallout at Ravenswood Hospital on the northwest side, a community institution with a century of history that, even as it bulked up, found itself unable to compete.

 In 1998, the hospital barely retained its Medicare eligibility after a 15-year-old gunshot victim who collapsed only 35 feet from the hospital's entrance died after being refused care.  That same year, Ravenswood was acquired by Advocate Health Care, which merged the facility with Illinois Masonic, cut jobs, downgraded the status of the emergency room, and eliminated in-patient services.  It didn't help. Ravenswood's healthier competitors hired consultants to poach its doctors,  and Advocate closed the hospital in 2002. The brain surgeons (this is not a metaphor) who took it over and made it a  Neurologic and Orthopedic Hospital departed for better climes in 2009, and Ravenswood was euthanized for good.  A 2005 proposal to convert the hospital to condos went nowhere.The once modern showcase of a building remained boarded-up and empty.  This past July, a 16-year-old boy broke in and fell two stories to his death.

Now the main hospital, the Adler Building, a rock-solid structure not much more than 40 years old, is being demolished for a handsome new $33 million Lycée Français School designed by Krueck and Sexton.  May it live to least half a century.

rendering courtesy Krueck and Sexton

This is an example of outlying districts actually de-densifying - it takes a lot less construction to serve hundreds of students than 300 hospital beds.  At the cores, however it's a different story.  Density is good, say the urbanologists, so it follows that more must always be better - right?  In the case of the University of Chicago, this means an enormously rich and powerful institution spilling over into the residential districts on its borders and remaking them in its own super-scaled image.  So long, Ronnie's apartment - at the end, your bulked-up neighbors made you look like a discarded toy.  Hello - eventually - to Center for Care North.  Relentless big, bearing down, block after block.

On the peripheries of the University campus, the juxtapositions are almost surreal . . . 

The old stone-clad houses on Maryland Avenue, reflected in Helmut Jahn's spectacular West Campus Combined Utility Plant, are like ghosts who have yet to realize they're dead.

Rafael Viñoly talks Wright, new hospital, at the Logan Center for the Arts

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Architect Rafael Viñoly was at the University of Chicago last night, speaking in the Performance Hall of the new Tod Williams/Billie Tsien Reva and David Logan Center for Arts, about to open with its own Logan Launch Festival this Friday through Saturday.  (Normally, I'd link to the architect's website, but the Rafael Viñoly Architects url is currently popping up a malware alert, so here's a link to his Wikipedia entry.)

Viñoly gave a preview of the thinking behind the newly christened University of Chicago Center for Care and Discovery, a $700 million, 10-story, 1.2 million square foot facility scheduled to open early next year.  The design is based on a 31'6" x 31'6" x 18' basic module extruded out to a building that's 570 feet long, 180 feet wide, and 198 feet high.  The actual inpatient rooms are on the top three floors, just above an inset sky lobby, providing both patients and visitors views out over the rooftops of the University and, to the north, the complete Chicago skyline.

I hope to be writing a lot more about this structure as we near the opening.  (Right now I'm working on finishing up my interview/tour with Tod Williams and Billie Tsien of the Logan Center.) For the moment, we'll just give you a little bit of Viñoly talking about Frank Lloyd Wright's Robie House . . .

. . . which was brilliantly reflected in Viñoly's own design for the Booth School of Business, just across the street . . .

 Says Viñoly . . .

Architecture is the art of the specific. There’s nothing open-ended or undetermined in architecture. It’s not, as some people used to say in the early 70’s, an autonomous discipline. There couldn’t be anything less autonomous than architecture. There’s money involved, there’s uses involved, there’s science, technology, a number of things which are more exactly parallel to the kinds of instruments and use of information than to the mastery of the craft as it happens in traditional visual art.

I think that what is remarkable in Wright’s work is the fact that he wasn’t doing the Prairie Style simply as a stylistic approach. He was pursuing a research on a proportional system and overall a compositional system that wasn’t even actually invented up until that point. If you put that in context with what was happening in Europe, it’s also a completely different approach than what modernism was based on, which was in appropriating images and ideas from painting and from the traditional arts and try to create a reality, a new philosophy.

What the Robie House does is fundamentally investigate the one thing I think unifies all architecture, which is the phenomenally subtle play of proportions and scale.

Viñoly's lecture was sponsored by Frank Lloyd Wright Preservation Trust, and was an early event this this year's edition of the incredible Chicago Ideas Week.