Chicago is a young city, even by American standards. The cult of architecture is potent here – the first Chicago Architecture Biennial is currently underway – with great civic consensus on a pantheon of architects.
It started with Daniel Burnham and Louis Sullivan, skyscraper innovators who had a knack for appropriating classical architectural language in their modern forms. Frank Lloyd Wright and an entourage of Prairie School practitioners led the next generation with idealised homes, both open and insular, that helped sell suburbia.
Post-war Chicago attracted Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and a cohort of European and American Modernists. The city became their laboratory, their theories flourishing in academia.
Many of the 200-plus buildings featured in the fifth annual Open House Chicago, 17-18 October, pushed the architectural boundaries of their day. Here are 10 highlights not to be missed.
Chicago Athletic Association Building
Home to an exclusive sports club for more than a century, the Chicago Athletic Association Building re-opened this year as a hotel and playground for the Millennial jetsetter. The stunning and severe Italianate facade belies an interior re-engineered for revelry. At last count there were three bars, one fine dining restaurant, a rooftop club and a game space with billiards, bocce and a shuffleboard.
Photography: Eric Allix Rogers
Chicago Athletic Association Building
Photography: Eric Allix Rogers
Chicago Athletic Association Building
Photography: Eric Allix Rogers
This Frank Lloyd Wright house is a compact variation on his Isadore Heller House, also in Chicago. Last year a multi-million dollar restoration brought the Bach House out of the shadows. It’s the only Wright home in Chicago operating as a vacation and event rental space, and includes a newly conceived Japanese Tea House. Visit the Robie House and the architect’s collection of Oak Park homes, but for the full Wright experience, it doesn’t get get better than this.
Photography: Eric Allix Rogers
The 36-storey namesake of Tribune Media was an early work of Raymond Hood, lead architect for the Rockefeller Center. Embedded in limestone masonry are fragments from many of the world’s great structures, including the Parthenon, Great Pyramid, and Taj Mahal. The 1925 Tribune Tower holds its own in a forest of skyscrapers, thanks to the Neo-Gothic flair of its exterior buttresses, gargoyles and crown that evoke France’s Rouen Cathedral.
Photography: Eric Allix Rogers
Photography: Eric Allix Rogers
Chicago Temple (First United Methodist Church)
A close cousin to the Tribune Tower and built the year prior, the hub of Chicago’s First United Methodist Church is part office building, part chapel. In a way it’s an Americanisation of the Cathedral, rationalised and consolidated. There are two places of worship on site – one on the ground floor and one in the clouds – and the Reverend’s triplex puts other penthouse apartments to shame.
Photography: Eric Allix Rogers
Chicago Temple (First United Methodist Church)
Photography: Stephanie Barto
Holy Trinity Russian Orthodox Cathedral
Tsar Nicholas II partly financed this 1903 Russian Orthodox cathedral, a rare church design by skyscraper pioneer and Wright mentor Louis Sullivan. Holy Trinity is small and understated in the company of several large cathedrals in the Ukrainian Village neighbourhood, and Sullivan went heavy on stucco, bringing an octagonal twist to the dome and bell tower. The interiors are marvelously ornate and colourful by contrast.
Photography: Caroline Nye Stevens
Holy Trinity Russian Orthodox Cathedral
Photography: Eric Allix Rogers
Holy Trinity Russian Orthodox Cathedral
Photography: Eric Allix Rogers
John Root and Daniel Burnham designed The Rookery, which belongs to Chicago’s first generation of skyscrapers constructed in the 1880s. The building tops off at 12 storeys, a sensational feat back then, and blends Venetian, Moorish, Romanesque and Byzantine revival styles in its richly detailed masonry facade. Its lobby, skylight with flying steel beams and a floating staircase, is Wright’s handiwork.
Photography: Eric Allix Rogers
Photography: Eric Allix Rogers
Photography: Eric Allix Rogers
Photography: Eric Allix Rogers
Seventy storeys of tinted glass by Mies van der Rohe protégés, Lake Point Tower is the only downtown high-rise right by the water (Lake Shore Drive muscles between buildings and beaches for some 20 miles). So there are your bragging rights. Given its visibility, were the tower an eyesore it’d be a major insult on the skyline. But it’s elegant and curvaceous – engineered to give a lake view to every apartment.
Photography: Eric Allix Rogers
Photography: Eric Allix Rogers
Illinois Institute of Technology, S. R. Crown Hall
Mies van der Rohe came to Chicago and adopted the high-rise but he continued to finesse the low-slung box too. And the Illinois Institute of Technology’s Crown Hall, designed in 1956, is a show of the architect’s talents informed by 45 years of trial and error. The steel and glass structure is hoisted on a platform separating it from its environs. In Mies’ hands, the materials are almost weightless.
The new HQ of the Poetry Foundation and Poetry magazine is a magnificently shifty building crouched low amid the towers of River North. The building sports a 100-seat performance hall acoustically optimised for the human voice and a 30,000-volume poetry library. Chicago architect John Ronan went minimalist and composed a building of overlapping privacy screens. Peel the skin, enter the public garden, and watch the organism unfold.
A remnant of the Union Stockyards – the horrific heart of unregulated meatpacking from a century ago – The Plant brings kinder, gentler uses to an old slaughterhouse. Now a vertical urban farm and food business incubator, this new facility fosters sustainable agriculture while working to power itself entirely by way of anaerobic digestion.
Photography: Eric Allix Rogers
