They are two of the most contested pieces of ground on Chicago's lakefront -- the first, where the Chicago Children's Museum wants to build its controversial kiddie bunker; the second, where Mayor Richard M. Daley executed his infamous "midnight raid" and shut down Meigs Field.

Big changes are in store for both. And -- hold your breath -- they might even turn out for the better.

The Chicago Park District on Wednesday hired the highly regarded New York City landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh to redesign 25 acres in Grant Park's northeast corner, an area that encompasses the dreary Daley Bicentennial Plaza and, within it, the proposed site of the mostly subterranean Children's Museum.

As part of the project, which will renovate the East Monroe Street Garage below Daley Bicentennial Plaza, just about everything in the plaza -- grass, shrubs and sidewalks -- will be ripped up. In turn, the park will get a completely new layout, including a children's play area of up to 5 acres.

Meanwhile, on Nov. 10, a design team led by JJR landscape architects of Chicago and including Studio Gang Architects, the Chicago firm responsible for the spectacular new Aqua tower, held a workshop for remaking Northerly Island, the 91-acre peninsula that once was home to Meigs Field. Among the ideas floated at that forum: integrating the peninsula's massive Charter One concert pavilion into a hillside as part of an effort to create a more naturalistic landscape

That the Chicago Park District has engaged such talented designers is a sign of how much Millennium Park and its Lurie Garden have raised the standards for landscape architecture along the lakefront. But given the bitter controversy that has preceded them, no one should expect either project to travel a smooth road.

(November 19, 2009-Chicago) The Chicago Architecture Foundation’s recognized six patrons for the annual Patron of the Year awards held today at the University Club of Chicago.  The six top winners are: Trump International Hotel & Tower, 300 North LaSalle (new headquarters of Kirkland & Ellis LLP), Chicago Cultural Center: Preston Bradley Hall  Dome restoration, Chicago Main Branch Riverwalk,  Charles H. Shaw Technology and Learning Center, and  Richard J. Klarchek Information Commons, Loyola University, Chicago.

Four honorable mentions were also included: 155 North Wacker, 156 West Superior, 235 Van Buren, and the Wit Hotel. In all, 31 patrons had been nominated. The Patron of the Year awards are presented to clients of architecture, honoring the individuals, companies and institutions responsible for commissioning the project. Nominations were accepted for all building types falling under one of three categories: commercial, governmental and institutional.

“The patron, the city, and the designer came together to produce the Trump International Hotel & Tower -- something that adds a major landmark to the Chicago skyline,” said Stanley Tigerman, FAIA, Jury Chair.  “Despite the difficult scale, economics, site, parking and other considerations, Trump collaborated with the city, the designer and the public to great effect.”

All of Chicago is a winner with the new Riverwalk. The portions completed over the past year—demonstrate the patron’s foresight as well as ambition. As the Chicago River is evolving from a “backwater” to a leisure destination, the Riverwalk provides a welcome amenity to residents and visitors. A civil engineering project of this scope poses a formidable challenge, but the Chicago Department of Transportation was able to muster the resources and the civic might to make this a reality. The result is a new destination, a kind of open-air architecture museum that can only be found on the Chicago River.

The Chicago Architecture Foundation’s Patron of the Year awards program began in 2004, when Steven G.M. Stein, partner at the law firm of Stein, Ray and Harris, LLP, first suggested that, for all of the public attention lavished on outstanding architectural design in Chicago, few recognize the leading role of clients of architecture.

Past winners include Millennium Park, Inc., Hines Interests, the University of Chicago, Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies, and Serta International.

The Chicago Architecture Foundation is a nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing public interest and education in architecture and design. The Chicago Architecture Foundation pursues this mission through architecture tours, exhibitions, panel discussions, and youth and adult education programs. Current exhibitions are Chicago Model City and B Like Burnham. The Chicago Architecture Foundation is located at 224 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago, Illinois 60604. For further information visit www.architecture.org or call 312.922.3432.

Chicago Architecture Foundation’s Patron of the Year Selection Committee

Stanley Tigerman, FAIA, Chair

Steven G.M. Stein, Senior Partner, Stein, Ray & Harris LLP. Michael Cornicelli, Executive Vice President, Building Owners and Managers Association of Chicago; Sunny Fischer, Executive Director, The Richard H. Driehaus Foundation;  Michael B. McCaskey, Chairman of the Board of the Chicago Bears Football Club; Donna Robertson, Professor and Dean, IIT College of Architecture; Greg Van Schaack, Senior Vice President, Hines Interests; Mark Sexton, Principal, Krueck & Sexton Architects.

Van Valkenburgh, 58, is best known for such projects as Teardrop Park in lower Manhattan (left) and has also designed for the Boston Children's Museum. On his design team for the Chicago project are Chicago architects Ron Krueck and Mark Sexton, the architects of the Chicago Children's Museum.

In an interview, Van Valkenburgh said he had not completed a design, but hinted that his work would include a strong tie-in to the Children's Museum. 

"One element that we're interested in is a children's play area. We're operating under the expectation that they [the museum] are going ahead. We're interested in how you draw some of those kids to a very different kind of play space, something you wouldn't find in a catalogue."

The children's play area, he said, would be more than 2 acres and less than 5 acres, making it a "significant, but not dominating" presence in the new parkland.

Despite the protests of opponents who argued that the construction of a privately-owned museum in Grant Park would violate landmark court rulings that the park should remain free and clear of structures or other obstructions, the Chicago Children's Museum won city approval last year to build a mostly-underground facility in Grant Park's Daley Bicentennial Plaza.

But the museum has yet to break ground, leading to speculation, also fanned by the recession, that the project might not go ahead and that the museum would remain in its present home at Navy Pier.

Van Valkenburgh's project, which is officially known as the North Grant Park Project, involves the redesign of three areas--Daley Bicentennial Plaza, the Cancer Survivor's Garden and the so-called "Peanut Park," which is between the Cancer Survivor's Garden and Lake Shore Drive.

The remake of Daley Bicentennial Plaza is necessitated by the need to renovate the East Monroe Street Parking Garage below it. The plaza, which is built atop the parking garage, will be complete removed, park district officials said. Van Valkenburgh called the plaza "artistically bland," adding: "The city has spectacular pieces of landscape. To me, Daley Plaza just sits there."

His contract is for $4.25 million over three years. The overall budget for the project is $45 million, park district officials said. Work on the East Monroe garage is to begin next year. The new park above it could be ready by 2014, park district officials said.

The building, designed by New York City architect Robert A.M. Stern, will have three main parts--an archive, a museum and a policy institute. The 225,000-square-foot structure will be built on a 23-acre site on the university's main campus.

"Laura and I are thrilled with the plans," Bush said in a prepared statement.

No cost figures or timetable for construction were released. Here is an in-depth appraisal of the plans by Dallas Morning News architecture critic David Dillon.  

Laura Bush told the Morning News that the building is not meant to be a shrine.

"One of the things we discussed with all of the design team was that we did not want this to be monumental like some other libraries are," she said. "We're very aware that the presidents are men. They are people. We wanted it to be human in scale."

Stern agreed, telling the newspaper: "It doesn't say anything specific about President Bush. It's not a portrait or a defense of his policies. It is about the presidency, the dignity of the office."

In addition to the demolition of the Friend Convalescent Home, which I told you about in October, demolition crews have now taken down the hospital's laundry building, preservationists say, and are in the process of ripping apart the hospital's Serum Center along 31st Street. That building was one of eight on the Reese campus designed with involvement of Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus and one of the most influential architects of the 20th Century.

There are five Gropius-associated works still standing at the former Reese campus, but four are targeted for destruction. City officials have only promised to spare the Singer Pavilion, a low-slung psychiatric facility on which Gropius worked with the architects of record, Lobel, Schlossman and Bennett of Chicago. Developers building a new residential complex at Reese are likely to have the ultimate say on whether the Singer Pavilion (visible in the background of this photo) will be saved.

The ongoing cultural vandalism, carried out with the approval of Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, makes a mockery of the State of Illinois' hearing on Dec. 4 to consider the Reese campus--or what's left of it--for inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places.

In an effort to stop the demolition, The Gropius in Chicago Coalition plans a protest on Tuesday, Nov. 24, near Chicago's City Hall. For more information, you can email the coalition's director, Grahm Balkany, at gbalkany@gropiuschicago.com.    

In a news release, the club says: "In this upcoming exhibition, Lin integrates the analytical aspects of science, technology, and architecture with the intuitive practices of drawing and sculpture, to create works that reveal and investigate topographies of our environment. The exhibition will include wood-constructed land formations and bodies of water, wire wall pieces, drawings, and a piece created specifically for Chicago."

The show will open in early February--I'll let you know the exact date as soon as I know--and will run through April 2010. Lin will appear at a member's event at the end of the show, but will not give a public lecture.

The Arts Club is located at 201 E. Ontario Street. Its exhibitions are free and open to the  public. Gallery hours are Monday through Friday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.

The reason for the shift: The Chicago-based Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, the global arbiter of height standards, has changed its criteria for measuring skyscrapers.

The old standard was that a skyscraper's height was determined by calculating the distance from the sidewalk outside the main entrance to the building's spire or structural top.

The new standard is that height is measured from "the lowest, significant, open-air, pedestrian entrance" to the top.

For the Trump tower, this means an extra 27 feet in height. Its bottom is now considered to be the entrance to the still-unoccupied shops along the along the Chicago riverwalk, not the main entrance on Wabash Ave.

This brings the tower's height to 1388 feet, 6 inches, instead of the previous 1361 feet, 6 inches, vaulting it ahead of the Jin Mao Building in Shanghai. (As you can see on the above chart by the Council, Chicago's Willis Tower occupies the fifth spot, followed by Trump and Jin Mao. The Council rounds up Trump's height to 1389 feet.)

The Jin Mao Building was designed by the same architectural firm responsible for Trump, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill of Chicago. Its chief designer on both projects, Adrian Smith, now has his own firm.

The council's change in criteria will affect another Skidmore/Smith collaboration--the Burj Dubai, which is set to open Jan. 4 and is sure to become the world's tallest buidling upon its completion.

The Burj meets the ground at three different levels. Now, the lowest of those levels will be factored into the building's height. That height already has been estimated at more than 2,600 feet--the equivalent of the John Hancock Center stacked atop Sears Tower.  

Here's a link to the Council's story announcing the change. The group says that the Burj's pending completion prompted it to reexamine its height criteria.

In addition, the Council has not changed its standard that spires count in height measurements while antennae, like those atop Willis Tower, do not.

That standard was affirmed in 1996 in response to the construction of the Petronas Towers, whose spires exceeded the height of then-Sears Tower's roof by about 30 feet. The Council determined that spires are  part of the skyscraper's height while antennae are considered add-ons. That standard remains controversial, especially in Chicago. 

I'm also providing a link here to my September story on this blog, which let readers know that this change was in the wind. 

Here's an image of the original plan for the dorm, which called for 14 stories rather than the 9 that were  built, and had "belts" of glass wrapping around the three bar-like masses of its limestone-faced exterior. Cost cuts, due to high construction prices, forced the trim in height, according to the architect Geoff Wooding of the Boston firm Goody Clancy. In addition, he said, university officials felt that the "belts" made the building appear less than solid, so they were cut.

Too bad, because the extra height would have improved the dorm's proportions and would have enabled it to act as a vertical marker to draw students south of the Midway. The 14-story central tower also would have served as the top of the building's wedding cake-like massing, as this rendering clearly shows. The glass belts, meanwhile, would have lent the structure much-needed clarity by articulating the divisions between the house-like groupings of students inside the dorm.

Which do you prefer--the dorm as built or the dorm that was envisioned?

Now the university is making its biggest push in years to bridge the divide between its disparate north and south sides.

This fall, it opened a city-friendly, 9-story dormitory, clad in the familiar material of Indiana limestone, south of the Midway. On Tuesday, the university announced that it would break ground next spring on a handsomely-austere, 11-story arts center, also south of the grassy expanse. And much more is planned, including the installation next spring of 40-foot-tall light pylons (below) that will seek to make the vast Midway more inviting to pedestrians, particularly at night.

While the new designs are not without anti-urban details, such as the prison-like bars to keep intruders out of the dormitory's courtyards, the surge of construction as a whole is praiseworthy.

Just two years ago, a Senegalese graduate student was shot dead in the 6100 block of South Ellis Avenue, steps from the site of the new dorm, in an apparent armed robbery. Instead of raising the drawbridge and retreating behind the Midway's grassy moat, however, the university has continued its push into what it calls the South Campus--in part because it has few other places to expand.

The efforts build on South Campus projects that the university completed last year: restoring the luster of two mid-20th Century modernist gems and adding a 21st Century jewel.

Chicago architects Krueck & Sexton rehabbed the university's best steel and glass box, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's School of Social Service Administration Building. The Chicago firm of OWP/P finished a 10-year renovation of Eero Saarinen's U. of C. law school and its iconic "pleated glass" library (left). At the new South Campus Chiller Plant, Chicago architect Helmut Jahn used a sleek skin of glass to reveal the colorful pipes inside--and how such hum-drum buildings can be beautiful.

For all their individual distinction, however, these and other South Campus buildings don't come close to making a coherent or lively place. None are tall enough to beckon students, as do the filigreed Gothic towers of the university's Harper Memorial Library. Several dutifully face the Midway, but they barely acknowledge each other. Indeed, some of the buildings have the haughty air of embassies -- no surprise, since their architects, including Edward Durell Stone, shaped notable American overseas outposts in the post-World War II era.

Located at the corner of Ellis Avenue and 61st Street and known as the South Campus Residence Hall, the new dorm strives to introduce a traditional street-friendly urban design to the area south of the Midway.  At that, it largely succeeds.

As part of the project, architect Geoff Wooding of the Boston firm of Goody Clancy discretely attached a mostly-glassy, wedge-shaped dining hall to the back of the neighboring Burton-Judson Courts, a 1931 neo-Gothic dorm. Between the eatery and the new dorm, Wooding put a paved outdoor plaza, creating a lively mid-block oasis for pedestrians (left) that continues eastward as a pathway to the adjoining law school. With all the buildings creating a critical mass, you even see students walking across the Midway. The dorm also tiers downward to five stories along 61st Street so it doesn't overwhelm the modest homes of nearby Woodlawn.

So much for the self-contained embassy school of urban design.

While the building's exterior verges on fussy--almost to a fault, Wooding tried to break it down with  idiosyncratic details--the interior could turn out to be a model for transforming anonymous, mid-rise housing into intimate residential clusters.

Wooding went beyond the customary layer-cake organization of such building and encouraged students to interact. He divided the dorm's 811 beds into eight "houses" of roughly 100 students each and linked the floors of each house with an internal staircase (left) while threading generous common spaces like two-story lounges for each house into the traffic flow.

The students appear to have taken ownership. They've decorated the hallways to express the personality of each house. At Crown House, for example, hallway walls are papered with drawings that suggest castle-like fortifications and medieval crowns. "It's the best house," one student said.

Such pride and interaction is precisely the aim of the architects of the arts center, Tod Williams and Billie Tsien of New York City. And their plan could turn out to be architecturally distinguished as well as a social and urban design success.

Known as the Reva and David Logan Center for Creative and Performing Arts, the center, due to be completed in 2012, will bring together dance, painting, music, theater, film and other artistic disciplines in two interlocking buildings: a flat-topped, 11-story tower and an L-shaped, 3-story base that will rise at Ingleside Avenue and 60th Street.

The design, which has been simplified since Williams and Tsien won an invited architecture competition in 2007, shows that economic austerity can make buildings better rather than watering them down. The architects cut such unnecessary flourishes as a cafe that would have cantilevered boldly outward from the tower. The base, with its saw-toothed skylights, took on an appealing directness inspired by the light-filled, structurally-advanced factories of the 20th Century Detroit architect Albert Kahn.

With the glassy northeast corner of the tower facing directly toward the campus' heart (below), the arts center could become a beacon, a new skyline symbol that will lure students and faculty to cross the Midway. It also should enliven street life, with a mid-block, east-west pathway that will lead visitors into a lively courtyard and a glassy south front that will present an inviting face to Woodlawn.

There are risks, to be sure. The architects need to ensure that their tower, which will be faced in Indiana limestone or a more varied stone from Wisconsin, doesn't come off as bland and corporate. Nonetheless, this is a plan of great promise, one that could draw together the north and south sides of the U. of C. and help turn the Midway into a new quadrangle, not a moat.

POSTSCRIPT: I'd like to credit two firms in this version that space constraints did not allow me to mention in the print version.

The light-emitting pylons that will be constructed on the Midway are by James Carpenter Design Associates of New York City. They are intended to create a "light bridge" across the Midway, inspired by Frederick Law Olmsted's unrealized plans to flood the Midway's sunken portions after the Chicago world's fair of 1893 and turn them into a canal. Land bridges would have crossed the canal.

Also worthy of mention is the Chicago firm of Ross Barney Associates, which designed a new U. of C. parking garage south of the Midway (it's project "E" in the graphic below). Unlike a typical garage, the lower stories of this one are wrapped with offices that makes them more appealing to the eye and enlivening for the street. 

I also did not have room in the print version of the story to refer to the controversy that has sprung up over the Chicago Theological Seminary's plans for a new building south of the Midway. The construction of the building will force the destruction of a community garden south of the intersection of Dorchester and 61st Street to provide a staging area for construction. The Tribune has already covered this dispute and I link to that story for your reference. Finally, here is a follow-up post on the dorm, which shows the original vision for the building. 

This piece provoked a heated response from some architecture critics who felt otherwise. Time magazine's Richard Lacayo, in Chicago to check out the Modern Wing of the Art Institute, even weighed in.

Now, finally, it looks like the brick hut is about to make way for the station, which will serve Metra's Rock Island line. IIT's internal newsletter reported Thursday that construction on the Metra station will begin on Monday, Nov. 16. "Sidewalks on the north side of 35th Street, between Wentworth and Federal Streets, will be closed to foot traffic. Sidewalks on the south side of the 35th street will remain open," the newsletter said, according to an email I got from an IIT spokesman.

Despite the rancor it's caused, the debate over the little Mies building has been valuable. It's forced architecture critics to articulate the underlying reasons for historic preservation. Lacayo does this best, citing--and then defusing--the argument of preservationists who say that every scrap of Mies' work should be saved, just as we would save even the smallest scrap from Mozart.

"[A] scrap of Mozart can be stored in a drawer," he writes. "Buildings occupy land, and in a densely settled city every acre is contested ground. The point of the historic preservation movement that got off the ground in the 1960s is that architecturally (or sometimes just historically) significant buildings — stress significant — deserve to go on occupying space that newer construction might like to invade. But preservation is part of an eternal balancing act with development. It's not a blank check to preserve every crumb that fell off the Great Architect's desk."