Now known as the Sullivan Center, the landmark building has undergone a soon-to-be-completed, two-year restoration led by Harboe Architects of Chicago.

The firm's Bob Score will discuss the project on Thursday, Nov. 19, as part of Landmarks Illinois' Preservation Snapshots series.

Score's talk is at the Claudia Cassidy Theater in the Chicago Cultural Center, 77 E. Randolph St. The public is invited. Admission is free. The talk begins at 12:15 p.m.

The vote, an advisory recommendation to the Illinois Historic Sites Advisory Council, was 5-3. Commissioners Ernest C. Wong, a landscape architect, and Edward I. Torrez, an architect, were among the dissenters. Architect Ben Weese voted with the majority.

The vote occurred against a backdrop of continued demolition at the campus, which the City of Chicago is tearing down to make way for a residential complex. 

The state historic sites council is scheduled to consider the National Register proposal on Dec. 4. But by that time, it is not known how many of the Reese buildings--eight of which were co-designed by Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius--will be left.  

Also Thursday, the commission unanimously voted to recommend to the City Council that the houses of two great African-American literary figures, author Richard Wright and poet Gwendolyn Brooks, be given City of Chicago landmark status.

As you know if you've read this blog, I'm no fan of the spire atop the Trump Hotel & Tower--it's too short and too thin, a mere pinprick of a finishing flourish when something much better was called for. Now, as you can plainly see, the spire is finally being lit at night. People who live in the skyscraper report that the lights change from green to purple to red.

Definitely different--but good?

What do you think?

POSTSCRIPT: The spire was not lit on Thursday, Nov. 5, leading many of you to ask what's going on. Trump Tower executives say they have been testing the spire lights. "We should be done soon," said T. Colm O'Callaghan, managing director.

(Thanks to Justin Carlson for this photo)

Seizing upon this year's 100th anniversary of Daniel Burnham's Plan of Chicago, state legislators and open space advocates on Thursday will make public a series of steps designed to create a new legacy of parks and trails throughout the Chicago area, including new lakefront parkland.

In an event called "Our Green Metropolis: The Next 100 Years," Rep. Marlow Colvin, D-Chicago, will announce that he and Illinois Senate President John Cullerton, D-Chicago, will introduce legislation in February to transfer about 100 acres of lakefront property from the Illinois International Port District to the Chicago Park District.

"We're known for our public ownership of the lakefront. Why not complete it?" Cullerton said in an interview. Because the land already is publicly owned, he added, little or no money would have to be spent for the transfer.

Citing the lack of convenient access to lakefront parks and beaches for Southeast Side residents in his district, Colvin said in a separate interview: "I thought this was an excellent opportunity for us to cure that disparity."

The lakefront property, known as Iroquois Landing, occupies the site of a former steel mill just north of Calumet Park at 95th Street. A portion of the property is home to a disposal facility for dredged material.

Aqua, the spectacular new Chicago skyscraper with the sensuous, undulating balconies, is the pearl of the long-running, now-ending Chicago building boom, a design that is as fresh conceptually as it is visually.

A skyscraper typically consists of repetitive, right-angled parts, a money-saving device that frequently produces aesthetic monotony. But in this defiantly non-Euclidian high-rise, almost nothing seems to repeat.

Its white, wafer-thin balconies bulge outward, each slightly different than the other. They race around corners and shoot upward in fantastic, voluptuous stacks. This is a new vision of verticality and it makes Aqua one of Chicago’s boldest — and best — skyscrapers in years.

Located just north of Millennium Park at 225 N. Columbus Dr., the 82-story tower is still in the finishing stages, so it is impossible to fully assess whether its function is as successful as its form. Nonetheless, it can be said that Aqua is remarkable on several counts.

It is the tallest building designed by a woman-owned architectural firm and the first skyscraper from Chicago’s Jeanne Gang, of Studio Gang Architects, who is just 45 years old. Aqua also is a real estate miracle: Its financing documents were signed in late August 2007 — just before the credit crunch hit it. Had the tower been delayed by 60 to 90 days, says the building’s architect-of-record and co-developer,  Jim Loewenberg, it might never have been built.

None of this would matter without Gang’s singular design (left), whose three chief components are hotel space (for now, without an occupant) on floors 4 through 18, apartments on floors 19 through 52 and condominiums from floors 53 to 81. There are also shops, parking and townhouses facing an adjoining park.

Essentially, then, Aqua is a residential skyscraper, a place to live (or sleep) rather than a place to work. And it fully takes advantage of the aesthetic freedom afforded by that identity, which means it doesn’t have to be tidy and buttoned-down, like a corporate headquarters.

Santiago Calatrava’s design for the 150-story Chicago Spire also promised to endow the skyscraper genre with a new sculptural freedom. Due to the recession, the Spire remains nothing more than a hole in the ground. But at least we have Aqua.

The story of how this tower came to be is already the stuff of legend: In 2004, Loewenberg, a veteran Chicago architect and developer who had blighted River North with banal high-rises, was seated next to Gang, a rising star whose then-tallest independently completed work was a Rockford community theater that had a 90-foot-tall fly tower, at a Harvard Club dinner where Frank Gehry was the speaker.
Loewenberg was looking for a young architect who would produce an out-of-the-box design for a tall tower at Lakeshore East, which rises west of Lake Shore Drive and south of the Chicago River. In Gang, he found one.

Responding to the site for the proposed tower, which was surrounded by a forest of nearby high-rises, she and her colleagues produced a novel concept: A skyscraper whose balconies would be stretched outward, by anywhere from 2 to 12 feet, to capture views that would not be available otherwise. If you lived on the east side of the tower, for example, you wouldn’t just see Lake Michigan. You would be able to peer through the thicket of adjoining high-rises and see Millennium Park.

In turn, Gang sculpted the balconies into a larger visual order inspired by the layered topography of limestone outcroppings along the Great Lakes. Reflecting her talent for giving poetic form to mundane materials, the design seized on the plasticity of concrete. When the plan was unveiled in 2006, it prompted raves from critics — and no small amount of private sneering from some of Gang’s male competitors, who clucked that the balconies would be mere decorative appendages.

Yet the nearly finished outcome richly fulfills the promise of Gang’s concept. The balconies elevate an otherwise-ordinary concrete-framed structure to the level of art.

From afar, to be sure, the balconies don’t have much of a skyline impact. But as you move closer and see Aqua from oblique angles, they become a stunning presence, flowing like ocean waves across the facade (left) and forming organic, irregularly shaped towers within the tower. Crucially, the thin metal pickets on the balconies fade from view, allowing the tower’s sculptural forms to predominate.

In the 1920s, the great flourishes of tall buildings came with richly decorated bases and highly articulated tops. The middle was almost an afterthought,  simply a way to connect these two parts. At Aqua, the old base-middle-top formula is out. The top is conspicuously flat. It is the middle, with its playful bulges, that is the star.

The balconies, it turns out, were not a wild extravagance. The premium for them,  Loewenberg says, was about 1½ percent of the building’s $325 million construction cost, which works out to about $4.87 million — not a bad deal considering all the buzz they generated.

Contractors built the balconies by loading Gang’s specifications for the curving balcony edges directly into a surveying tripod with a built-in computer. That allowed them to bend steel formwork to precisely the contours Gang and her colleagues designed.

In a further display of the virtues of customization, Gang tweaked the balconies for sun-shading, making them deeper on the south than on the north. She and Loewenberg also put as many balconies as possible next to living rooms, thus forming visual extensions of the living spaces. Finally, the oval-shaped “pools” of glass between the balconies use a tinted, reflective glass (as opposed to the clear glass employed elsewhere) to prevent apartments from overheating.

These features allow Aqua to rise above a criticism frequently leveled at such “wow” buildings — that they are simplistic one-liners where form overrides function. At Aqua, there is a reason for everything. If the tower indulges in expressionism, it is at least a rationalized expressionism, grounded in Midwestern practicality.

The only problem goes back to the thicket of skyscrapers that formed the balconies’ reason for being: This show-stopping, but hemmed in, tower lacks an effective stage on which to preen. You wish you could set it alongside the Chicago River, where it could show off like its curvaceous, 1960s antecedent, Marina City.
Aqua’s other great virtue is that it is skillfully woven into the fabric of the city, setting it apart from Marina City, whose corncob-shaped high-rises meet the ground awkwardly.

The tower sits on a beautifully sculpted two-story base, which is  rectilinear enough to shape the street, but not so rectilinear that it’s a visual bore. Atop the base is an outdoor activity level, one of Chicago’s largest green roofs, that forms a “fifth facade.” When residents of Aqua and occupants of nearby buildings look down on it (above), they see irregularly shaped pathways and swaths of green, not an ugly asphalt roof.

Gang further joined her tower to the city with two boldly sculpted concrete stairs that let pedestrians walk from Columbus Drive (which occupies the highest level of a mutli-level street system) and the ground-level park at Lakeshore East. One is a switchback with corrugated concrete walls; the other, a spectacular helix. These aren’t just stairs. They’re architectural events.

The most dramatic space of the tower’s interior is a clear-span hotel ballroom, which is not sealed off from the outside world, as ballrooms tend to be, but offers pleasant views of the nearby park. Only when you venture upstairs do the functional advantages of the balconies — and some possible disadvantages — become clear.

Aqua’s apartments, which range from convertibles to two-bedrooms and have 8 foot ceilings, are not exactly spacious. Without the balconies, they might have felt claustrophobic. With the balconies, they seem far more expansive.

Some offer striking views, not only of the cityscape but also of the curving, sheltering underside of the balconies above. That impact is even more pronounced in the mostly unoccupied condos, which range from studios to penthouses and have ceilings close to 9 feet high and roughly 13 feet in the penthouses.

Gang speaks of the balconies (left) as an “inhabited facade,” conjuring visions of urban cliff dwellers enjoying a communal outdoor space on the side of a skyscraper. Given that Aqua’s uppermost balconies reach 200 feet higher than those at Marina City, it’s going to be fascinating to see whether people actually use them or shy away because of vertigo.

While the minimal presence of the thin metal pickets is just right when Aqua is seen from street level, some condo dwellers may feel the need for a greater sense of enclosure.
That caveat aside, Aqua can be deemed a smashing success, a building that takes us in dazzling new aesthetic directions yet still manages to respond to both its urban environs and to the environment as a whole.

The tower has enough energy saving features to strive for a LEED silver (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) rating from the U.S. Green Building Council. It’s already won an award from the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals because birds will be able to see its curving balconies and therefore will be less likely to fly into the tower.

So credit Gang for an extraordinary debut on the big stage, one that adds to Chicago’s allure as laboratory for skyscraper innovation. And credit Loewenberg for a risk-taking act of enlightened patronage. The risk has paid off. At Aqua, to paraphrase F. Scott Fitzgerald in “The Great Gatsby,” the building boom finally has produced something commensurate with our capacity for wonder. 

For my YouTube video tour of Aqua with Jeanne Gang, while the skyscraper was under construction, click here.

Separately, Goldberger will be speaking Wednesday, November 4, at an event sponsored by the Art Institute of Chicago's Architecture & Design Society. The program will be a conversation with the museum's architecture and design curator Joseph Rosa. The event is at Fullerton Hall at 6:30 p.m. Tickets are $5 students, $10 for Architecture & Design Society members and $15 for the public.

Richard Moe, 72, a Minnesota native who once served as chief of staff to Vice President Walter Mondale, made the announcement at the trust’s Washington, D.C. headquarters.

“We need to see things through the eyes of a younger generation, in terms of technology and how we can work better with communities,” Moe said in telephone interview. “Now it’s time for somebody else.”

The trust, created by federal legislation in 1949, is a private, non-profit group that seeks to save historic places and rebuild communities. A successor is expected to be named by next spring.

During Moe’s 17-year tenure, the longest in the group’s history, the agency moved beyond its traditional mandate of saving individual structures associated with historic figures.

In the early 1990s, the trust helped led the fight to stop Walt Disney Co.’s plans for an American history theme park, to be known as Disney’s America, outside Washington, D.C. The park’s attractions were to have included mock Civil War battles and a roller-coaster ride through a turn-of-the-century steel mill.

In 1996, after Chicago City Council maneuvering stripped 29 buildings and historic districts in the city of their temporary landmark status, Moe personally lobbied Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley to save the buildings.

“I came out and saw Rich Daley,” he recalled Tuesday. “I said these are really defining structures for Chicago—you cannot afford to lose them.” Subsequently, at Daley behest, the City Council granted permanent landmark status to 28 of the 29 threatened sites.

Moe has been “a tremendous leader during a critical time in the history of preservation,” said Jim Peters, president of Landmarks Illinois, the Chicago-based, non-profit advocacy group.

Soon after Moe became president of the trust in the early 1990s, a Republican-controlled Congress cuts its federal funding in half. In response, Moe negotiated a three-year phase-out of federal funding for the group and raised new funds from foundations, major donors and the syndication of historic tax credits.

Moe also put his stamp on such causes as revitalizing historic communities and saving mid-20th Century landmarks of modern architecture.

In 2003, the trust lent its prestige to the successful effort to purchase Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s threatened Farnsworth House at an auction, thus keeping the modernist icon at its original site along the Fox River in far southwest suburban Plano. The trust still owns the house and will begin managing it next year.

After Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast in 2005, Moe helped secure $50 million in federal funds for restoring damaged historic buildings. “I think we saved literally thousands of structures there and helped thousands of lives get built back,” Moe said.

He is expected to stay on the job until his successor is named. Trust board members will act as a search committee.

From today's print edition

Tribune reporter

If South Michigan Avenue's so-called Streetwall, a strip of historic buildings on the western border of Grant Park, must be weaker, at least maintain its impressive facade, a preservationist and residents say.

The city and the owner of a seven-story property at 830 S. Michigan, known to preservationists as a historical gem for its impressive attention to detail on one of the oldest YWCA buildings in the country, are trying to figure out how to best deal with the long-deteriorating building.

The owner, Michigan 830 LLC, has filed an application to tear down the structure, a move that some in the area say is a shame given the rich history of the building. Last week, nearby residents, along with staff from Ald. Bob Fioretti, 2nd, attended a court hearing in which the city was given a Nov. 12 deadline to come up with a plan for the structure. Exactly what those plans are have yet to be revealed.

The building was designed by John M. Van Osdel II -- nephew of prominent Chicago architect John Mills Van Osdel -- to fit in line with some of the nearby extravagant hotels of the time. Construction of the property was completed in 1895.

Instead of having the look of a typical charitable organization, the YWCA building was lavishly ornamented with brick and terra cotta and used to house working women newly arriving in the city, said Jim Peters, president of the nonprofit advocacy group Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois, which placed the structure on its endangered landmarks list last year.

If South Michigan Avenue's so-called Streetwall, a strip of historic buildings on the western border of Grant Park, must be weaker, at least maintain its impressive facade, a preservationist and residents say.

The city and the owner of a seven-story property at 830 S. Michigan, known to preservationists as a historical gem for its impressive attention to detail on one of the oldest YWCA buildings in the country, are trying to figure out how to best deal with the long-deteriorating building.

The owner, Michigan 830 LLC, has filed an application to tear down the structure, a move that some in the area say is a shame given the rich history of the building. Last week, nearby residents, along with staff from Ald. Bob Fioretti, 2nd, attended a court hearing in which the city was given a Nov. 12 deadline to come up with a plan for the structure. Exactly what those plans are have yet to be revealed.

But he was excited to find his condo now, in the middle of downtown's action, where one could easily shop, take in the opera, and where the lake was easily accessible.

Although the residents at 888 S. Michigan cannot see their neighboring building without trying, if one leans over the ledge of the complex's rooftop patio, several holes and crumbled brick can be seen scattered about the roof next door.

The vacant building was a draw for taggers who used the property to deface another building nearby. Last year, Choldin said, vandals broke into the YWCA property and used the access to tag graffiti on the wall of the Johnson Publishing Building on the other side. The damage has since been over.

Choldin accepts that not much may be done to completely restore the YWCA building, but he said completely demolishing it would ruin the balance of the historic neighborhood.

"It would be like someone with a really nice smile with one tooth missing," Choldin said.

Gayle Veltrop, 56, an artist and technical writer who lives on the eighth floor of the Crane Co. Building, said that if used creatively, the old YWCA building could be a prime location for boutiques or restaurants that already dot much of the historic strip.

"If you look, everything else is all rehabbed -- and then you have scaffolding on that building," Veltrop said. "It is a nice neighborhood. ... The more this area is redone, the more the place stands out."

As bulldozers roll at the former Michael Reese Hospital site, tearing down mid-20th Century modernist buildings co-designed by Walter Gropius and Chicago architects (at left, the maimed Serum Center), the Commission on Chicago Landmarks on Thursday will take up the issue of whether the hospital should be nominated to the National Register of Historic Places.

Specifically. the commission will be making an advisory recommendation to the Illinois Historic Sites Advisory Council on a revised National Register nomination. In August, the commission turned down the Gropius Coalition in Chicago's bid to get the hospital listed on the Register. But commission members said publicly that they might be open to a more limited nomination that included fewer buildings and had more tightly drawn boundaries.

It's hard to imagine that the commission members, who are appointed by Mayor Richard M. Daley, would try to stand in his way. Daley has been adamant about tearing down the Reese campus to make way for a new residential development, though he at least consented recently to spare the hospital's 59-year-old  psychiatric building for the time being. Plans have long called for the hospital's Prairie-style main building to be saved.

I asked Grahm Balkany, director of the Gropius Coalition, for his thoughts on the Thursday meeting. Here is what he wrote in an email:

"As the self-proclaimed Architectural Capital of America, Chicago has already committed an unthinkable cultural crime, the destruction of a work of Walter Gropius, one of history's foremost architects.  No city government in history has purposefully stooped to this appalling level of cultural negligence.

"Now, the Commission on Chicago Landmarks has the opportunity to address the deplorable situation unfolding at Michael Reese Hospital by supporting our Nomination of the campus to the National Register of Historic Places.  In doing so, the Landmarks Commission would in no capacity be standing in the way of development, but as a public body would be ratifying what we already know is overwhelmingly the sentiment of the public at large - that the work of Walter Gropius is an important and irreplaceable part of our cultural heritage that must be preserved. 

"The Commission indicated in August that they would be open to accepting our proposal if we addressed their list of concerns.  We feel we have done so, and have in fact far exceeded the requirements for a typical nomination of this type.  Noted historians and experts on these matters stand behind our proposal as written.  Therefore we would highly encourage the Commission, which is charged with protecting our architectural heritage, to endorse this proposal as we move forward to the statewide Council.

"The National Register process is a gift from the Gropius in Chicago Coalition to all Chicagoans.  It would open the doors to greater recognition of the Michael Reese site, promoting Chicago and Bronzeville to the rest of the United States and the world.  And, it would provide a 20% dollar-for-dollar Federal contribution for sensitive rehabilitation of the site's historic structures.  That's Federal money that would not be coming to Chicago otherwise, potentially amounting to tens of millions of dollars. In this troubled economic time, Chicago cannot afford to ignore this potential infusion of capital that would help put this 'Block 37 in the making' back into productive use."