Posted Nov 13, 2011, 8:26 PM
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Join Date: Aug 2002
Location: Toronto
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Fresh face: Columbia College plans a digital makeover for Michigan Avenue high-rise; plan will echo old facade while expressing new sustainable design
Read More: http://featuresblogs.chicagotribune....-chicagos.html
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Built in 1913 and designed by architect William Carbys Zimmerman with a glistening terra cotta façade, 618 S. Michigan got a bad modernist makeover in 1958. The building’s owners stripped off the terra cotta and replaced it with a metal and glass wall that seemed inspired by New York’s Lever House, the famous slab skyscraper on Park Avenue. While the move was in keeping with the modernist fashions of the day, it was totally out of character with the streetwall, which is now an officially-protected city landmark district. Stretching from Randolph Street on the north to 11th Street on the south, the district includes buildings by such architects as Louis Sullivan, Henry Ives Cobb and Holabird & Roche. It’s the face Chicago presents to the world, fit for postcards and TV backdrops, a nearly-continuous cliff of masonry that exhibits many styles and has few equals.
- On Thursday, the Commission on Chicago Landmarks will pass judgment on the latest proposal for the streetwall, which turns out to be another makeover at 618 S. Michigan. Columbia College, which has classrooms, faculty offices and other facilities inside the building, wants to ditch the dreary, single-layered 1958 façade for a new double-layered wall of energy-efficient glass. But this would be no ordinary glass wall. With the aid of digital ceramic printing technology, the glass will be imprinted with a ghost-like image of the building’s original façade. Though the technology has been used before, Columbia is touting the large-scale historical recall as a first of its kind.The architect, Elva Rubio of the Chicago office of Gensler, compares the veil-like design to the Shroud of Turin.
- But a traditionalist might wonder: Why not just install new terra cotta that would replicate the original design? Alicia Berg, the former Chicago planning commissioner who is Columbia’s vice president of campus environment, has a ready answer: It would cost too much—an estimated $8 million to $10 million, versus $2.5 million for the new glass. She and Rubio argue that it will be less expensive, and visually richer, to have the new façade use the technologies of the present to evoke the presence of the past. The spectral image of the old façade will also express today’s environmental sensibility. It will consist of myriad tiny images of a bird in flight. The images won’t just be a nod to the path of migratory birds along the nearby Lake Michigan shoreline. They should also provide a screen that helps prevent birds from flying into the glass and killing themselves.
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Love it. It's a great nod to what was there before it and a hell of a makeover for a facade that I've never been particularly fond of. It'll really be something else, especially right next to the Spertus Institute.
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