The new Sofitel designed by Viguier

Architecture, like food, is something that you make part of your everyday life whether you are cognizant of it or not. While food in Chicago has enjoyed a virtual renaissance in its quality and an explosion of boosters over the past 25 years, Chicago architecture has been the butt of jokes by the Prince of Wales (his reference to a Mies van der Rohe design for The City being "a glass stump more suited to Chicago") and the target of popular criticism from all quarters. There are many local personalities extolling the pleasures of food and cuisine. For instance, Rick Bayless has a fantastic Mexican cooking show on PBS. If you ask someone on the street in Chicago to name a few local chefs, they could probably roll off a few names. Ask the same person to name a living Chicago architect and they'll be hard pressed to answer you.

So this column attempts to rectify this...

Whereas Chicago is known throughout the world for its innovative architecture, much of it was built 35 or more years ago. The situation today is far more uncertain. Our mission at makeARCHITECTURE is to make you aware of and appreciate architecture in the same way that food critics and chefs make you aware of and demand fresh quality food and cuisine. We realize that this is only a small step and it will take years of work to create the critical mass to really make a large difference and create demand for better designed buildings. But if the restaurant people were able to make us want world class cuisine, why can't we architects raise the level of expectations on building?

Let's start with the new Sofitel at Wabash and Walton. Designed by the the French architect Jean-Paul Viguier (a Parisian Architect), the building is arguably the most interesting new high-rise in Chicago since the extension on the Northwestern Hospital Power Plant and the curved green-glass 333 West Wacker Drive. Unlike these two, it's a destination for fun and pleasure rather than a workplace or a service building.

Why is it such a remarkable building?

Three reasons:

1. The massing and siting: The hotel's rectangular site lies across the street from a wedge-shaped park. Formerly a parking lot, the site was previously occupied by 6 dilapidated two and three story Victorian buildings on standard 25' by 125' city lots. The lower stories of the hotel almost fill the rectangular lot. That's where convention is left behind. Taking a queue from the wedge-shaped park across the street, the floorplate is triangle with the hypotenuse facing southwest and the principal leg with rooms bordering Wabash Street. The elevators and services line the shortest leg on the north facing a brick wall. But it is the missing shape that makes the building so interesting. As Jean-Paul Viguier explained when he was in Chicago recently for the Humanities Festival, he likes to make a small model of a building when he first starts desiging. He enjoys creating shapes and then subtracting from them. He extruded a triangle and then created an elliptical cone whose peak lies at the top of the building. The cone extends vertically down towards the ground. This cone is subtracted from the wedge to give the tower interest and create a piazza in front of the building. If you think of French architecture -- the Architecture of the Beaux Arts as creating spaces with poché, then Viguier is working within that tradition. In a Beaux Arts plan, the negative space formed by the poché becomes the room. In Viguier's composition the cone is like the poché, it creates the space but is no longer there.

2. The public space: The piazza combined with the public park across the street creates the most interesting and welcoming public space for a high-rise in Chicago in 30 years. Whereas most new highrises give the public garage doors and brick walls at street level, Viguier embraces the street. The Wabash elevation at street-level is a ribbon of sawtoothed glass that allows for views into and out of a street-level bar and restaurant. That's a welcome change from the new buildings in Chicago that ignore the street. It makes for safer, cleaner, pedestrian neighborhoods and the kind of city we can take pride in. The Walton street entrance features a canopy that keeps guest dry. Once past the imaginatively detailed canopy, you walk over lights in the floor that change color with time. Much of the exterior and part of the lobby features frameless glazing siliconed in place. It comes in two varieties: milky white and clear. In the lobby there is a shaft of milky white glass that has a light show projected from within. It makes the interior dynamic. This dynamic quality is one of the welcome new ideas in architecture, an idea present in the wings of Calatrava's Milwaukee's museum.

3. The handling of the facade: Most high-rise facades are a variation on what Louis Sullivan or Mies van der Rohe did: one floor is simply repeated and placed on top of the other. Here Viguier treats the enclosure as a modular system. Each room is six modules wide framed by one module of milky white glass. Viguier mixes up the six modules into 2 vision, 1 translucent, 3 vision; 1 vision, l translucent, 4 vision, etc.. The facade is alive and the glass reflects its rich surroundings. (See the subtle reflection in the lower part of the west facade, photo above left.) Chicago a architects have been stuck in repeating the same glazing system. Viguier breaks free of the monotony and the new Sofitel soars.

What do you think?

Which is the brand new house?

One of these houses is under construction in the western suburbs. The other is over 100 years old. Which is the brand new house?

This is sort of a trick question. The house on the left is under construction in Hinsdale. The house on the right is considered to be one of the classics of American architecture. What is interesting is not that one is "new" and one "old" -- let's face it the Boston architect H.H Richardson uses a 12th century French stable as its prototype for the Glessner house -- but what people value and how their tastes develop. The house on the left is Richardsonian Romanesque in style but it pretends to sit on its site like a country house although there is very little room to spare. It mines the fussy, heavy and dark Romanesque houses found on Drexel Boulevard for its precedent. While Richardson's Glessner House transforms its 12th century precedent by enclosing a light filled court, the new house in Hinsdale adds a three car garage (top left). The powerful masonry (see the arched servant entry, top right) of the Glessner House was a provocative rebuke to the overdone exercises in decoration that surrounded it; the house in Hinsdale is just a big dark house. Furthermore, the street wall of the Glessner house is a plane and the openings are cut out of them; the exterior walls of the house in Hinsdale are willy-nilly.

We at makeARCHITECTURE believe that a significant opportunity was lost. Instead of regurgitating what is an ugly house design, the architect could have shown the client the amazing things that are being done with stone today. After all, if you're gonna' spend 5 million dollars on a house, why not do your homework and go through the process? That's what makeARCHITECTURE is dedicated to: going through the process with an idea in mind rather than aiming for a fixed image. It makes for better work. The kind of work that is a pleasant surprise. It's like that class in college where your head hurt but your world became richer and brighter. We'll put up a stone house design of our own, one that's forward-looking and that learns from the past rather than embraces it uncritically. Nostalgia is fine but you can't live in it. If you try, take some time to make distinctions between old houses that are worth copying and those that are better left to the dustbin of history.

What do you think?

Can we do better than SUV architecture?

We're a group of architects who think it rather odd that today in Chicago, a city with so much great architecture, we choose to design, build and purchase new town homes that ignore design basics and misuse materials like split-faced concrete block. The block, the cheapest material available, is unfinished and unless sealed by scrupulous contractor, absorbs water providing conditions for mold growth. We think that many of the new town homes resemble behemoth SUVs: they are bursting at the property lines, comfortable at their neighbors' expense and are often an exercise in bloated kitsch...

Can we engage good design and architecture, not only during Sunday visits to house museums, but during our everyday lives? Chicagoans from the 1830s to the 1960s courageously embraced this attitude. Our city is blessed with the products of this engagement. They are the balloon frame house, the early skyscrapers of Louis Sullivan and Charles Atwood, the first mixed-use buildings, and the innovative post-war high rise apartment buildings of Bertrand Goldberg and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Can we rediscover this adventurous attitude, the forward-looking vision that gave us new, exciting works of architecture? Can we resist merely regurgitating the past so that we, like those Chicagoans from the 1830s or the 1950s, can create something of our own that will inspire future generations?

Can we do better than SUV architecture?

Tell us what you think. Please participate. Join us for a discussion and lively debate of the current state of architecture in Chicago and the new residential construction.