Beating a dead horse

The Spanish/American poet and essayist George Santayana is perhaps best known for his axiomatic quote:

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Notoriously oblivious to the past, in the name of what we call "progress", we Americans are famous for trudging ahead, never looking back to reflect upon our mistakes, committing the same thoughtless acts over and over again.

And in doing so, we are continually reminded by cautious observers of the Santayana quote which despite how true, has become a tiresome cliché.

It shouldn't be at all surprising that we Americans behave as we do, after all, many of us are descended from folks who by choice discarded the old ways of life. leaving their old world behind in search of something new, never looking back.

It's part of our DNA.

I was reminded of this as I drove past Bertrand Goldberg's Prentice Hospital building yesterday as it begins to be covered up with the shroud of scaffolding signaling its doom.

In my previous posts on the subject, I've noted how similar the reaction to the planned destruction of this unquestionably significant building has been to previous battles we've had in this city over other great buildings that were lost, most notably the Garrick Theater and the Old Stock Exchange Buildings, both by Louis Sullivan.

Today, hardly a soul in this town doesn't mourn their loss, saying how absurd and short-sighted was their wanton destruction. Yet back in the days when something could be done to save them, there was little public support for the small, yet vociferous band of brothers and sisters who wrote passionately, signed petitions, marched, went to court, in short did everything they humanly could to preserve a significant part of this city's architectural legacy.

To the general public, these buildings, crumbling after years of neglect, thoughtlessly remodeled through the years,  were tired and old, representing a bygone era that nobody cared to remember. "New" and "Modern" in those days were highly sought after ideals, and architecturally speaking those words translated into steel and glass, not stone and terra-cotta.

If Louis Sullivan was considered an important architect, well we had plenty of his buildings still around, so nobody would miss one or two.

Photograph by Hedrich Blessing

Flash forward some fifty years and all we have left of the architect that Frank Lloyd Wright called his "lieber Meister," are the Auditorium Building, the Carson Pirie Scott Building, and a sprinkling of some lesser works. The vast majority of his oeuvre, including two of his greatest works mentioned above, are lost.

Goldberg's Prentice, like the Old Stock Exchange and the Garrick, has been altered in ways that detract from its original form. It wasn't maintained properly, and as these things go, its design speaks of a time, the 1970s, that we no longer consider appealing except as examples of kitsch; think bell bottoms, platform shoes and the Gremlin.

Despite protests in front of the shuttered former women's hospital where countless children (including mine) came into this world, public interest, including that of architecture enthusiasts regarding the imminent demise of Prentice, is mild at best. When it was built, Prentice was considered a bold, innovative statement, a daring example of Modern Architecture. Today, not even forty years old, it has become dated. Unfortunately, the building is in that in-between, no-mans land of a period, too old to be modern, to new to be charming or historic. We've lost many great buildings in this town for exactly that reason.

And what did Mayor Rahm Emanuel say in his support of the demolition of old Prentice? He said that while Prentice was a significant building and Bertrand Goldberg was an important architect, we have other buildings of his in town.

After all, progress is progress.

And after fifty years of progress, we still haven't learned a damned thing.

The end is near...

A demolition permit has been issued by the City of Chicago for old Prentice Hospital, the Bertrand Goldberg building that has been the front burner issue for Chicago's architectural preservation community. The battle it seems is all but lost as the legal means attempting to stop the demolition and to question the motives of the Landmarks Commission have been exhausted. If you recall, last fall the Commission went out of its way to heap praise upon the building, saying by all means it was significant and very worthy of designation as a landmark, and then declared it a landmark. Then in the next breath they went on to say that the needs of Northwestern Hospital who owns the building and land it sits upon, trumps its architectural significance, then rescinded the declaration they had made only minutes earlier.

In one unfortunate ruling, the Commission essentially declared itself and its work irrelevant, a far greater concern than losing one wonderful building. It seems the fox is in the henhouse of the Landmarks Commission; as of that ruling, no building in Chicago is safe from the wrecker's ball.

Other preservation concerns are quickly moving to the forefront as the wrecker's shroud is about to be placed over Prentice. Lynn Becker has this wonderful elegy to many of the churches that have been lost or are very likely to be lost in the near future including St. Boniface on the near northwest side, whose fate is again uncertain as the funds to convert it into a home for the elderly have not come through.

Here is Robert Powers' testament to St. James Church in Bronzeville whose date with destiny is close at hand.

These are troubling times indeed for our historical and architectural legacy.

Deja vu all over again

It was interesting to see deposed alderman Burton Natarus testifying at the Landmarks Commission hearing that decided the fate of Bertrand Goldberg's Prentice Women's Hospital building. Natarus, the Yogi Berra of Chicago politicians, (which is really saying something given the quality of oratory in that esteemed group), said the following about the building:

This is not a good piece of architecture...We have a Yiddish word for what it is, farshimmelt.

I must admit not having known what farshimmelt means, but I do know that seldom does a person use a Yiddish word to describe something favorably. From the site Wordreference.com I found this:

This term is used to describe a confused state of mind, disorientation, or feeblemindedness.

Now that's one man's opinion and I have to respect it for what it's worth. Lot's of people think the building is shall I say, less than appealing, certainly not worthy of the fuss to save it, given that Northwestern Memorial Hospital plans to use the site for a facility that will not only produce medical research that will save countless lives but will also bring thousands of jobs and millions of dollars of revenue into our fair city. At least that's what they say.

An even more colorful term I've heard to describe the building is "butt ugly." Fair enough, everyone's entitled to his own opinion.

But I do have to disagree with all due respect of course, to the former alderman's assessment of old Prentice as "confused, disoriented, and feebleminded". The building in fact is everything BUT those things. It was one of the most sensible, well thought out buildings ever built in this city. Goldberg's "bed tower", the cluster of cylinders, containing hospital rooms. around a central core which contained the nurses' stations, was a brilliant, ground breaking design; the architect's sensibilities putting patient care at the forefront of his efforts gained him worldwide acclaim.

Uninformed as they were, Natarus's were probably the most honest words spewed during yesterday's meeting. The Commission went to great lengths to present Prentice as a building that met more than the minimum number of requirements necessary for landmark status. Their report waxed eloquently about the significance of Goldberg's building, presenting it favorably in the context of other major works of international architecture inluding Le Corusier's sublime Notre Dame du Haut, in Ronhamp, France, Frank Lloyd Wright's Gugenheim Museum and Eero Sarrinen's TWA Flight Center, both in New York City, among others. Then the commission voted to adopt

the Preliminary Summary and make a preliminary landmark recommendation concerning the Building in accordance with Sect. 2-120-630 of the Municipal Code.

The vote was unanimous, the Commission would recommend landmark status for the building. Fantastic. But wait, there's more:

The commission then presented a report from the Department of Housing and Economic Development for the City of Chicago which congratulated the Commission for its careful and professional work in recommending the landmark status but added: heck, the building is in the way of Northwestern's plans so it should go, landmark or not.

The Commission apparently was so moved by the report and no doubt by Mayor Emanuel's OpEd piece in the Tribune this week in favor of the demolition, that it voted 6 to 1 to rescind the recommendation they made just minutes earlier.

Heads in the room must have been spinning quicker than pardon the expression, lager turns to piss.

The Landmarks Committee in effect declared that the work they allegedly do for the city is irrelevant. What after all is the point of declaring a building a landmark, then refusing to protect it? Spineless is too kind a description of their actions yesterday. Unless of course this was all part of the plan, which turns out to be the case. In his blog Lee Bay posted the agenda one day before the meeting took place. The events of the following day followed the script line by line.

It turns out the fate of Prentice at the hands of the Landmarks Committee was a fait accompli, it had no chance. The meeting in the words of Christina Morris of the National Trust for Historical Preservation was a farce. Jonathan Fine, the executive director of Preservation Chicago said this:

We asked for a day in court, instead we got a show trial.

Much more distressing than the refusal to protect the Bertrand Goldberg building is the ease in which the commission gave in to the forces behind its destruction. What they're saying is that no matter how important a building may be, there can always be a legitimate cause that trumps protecting a building. In one fell swoop they did away with decades of hard work of preservationists and concerned citizens who feel that the city's architecture matters. It is a terrible precedent that may very well have dire consequences for every significant building in this city. Suppose Roosevelt University campaigns to demolish the Auditorium Building because it cannot effectively teach its students (tomorrow's leaders) in the "out of date" landmark? What if the forces driving the La Salle Street Financial District insist on their need to expand onto the site of the Rookery Building and propose to demolish it to build a state of the art "world class" trading center? What if somebody discovers oil underneath the Wrigley Building?

Those admittedly far fetched scenarios would potentially result in windfall profits for the city, but at what cost? Northwestern Memorial Hospital paints a very attractive picture of what they would do with the site in terms of benefits to the city. I have no quarrel with that. But I have a serious problem accepting their assertion that all their plans, the money made for the city, the jobs created and the lives saved would vanish if they don't get their way and turn old Prentice to dust. The truth is that patch of ground upon which Prentice stands represents a tiny fraction of the property owned by the hospital in their Streeterville campus, much of which is currently unoccupied. There are lots of very talented architects and designers in town who could create a solution that would satisfy everybody's needs, the hospital's and the preservationists' alike.

So why is the hospital so intransigent?  I don't have an answer but looking around at the brand spanking new hospital buildings on the campus all bearing the names of wealthy donors, I have a sneaking suspicion. I have a little experience with big institutions and know that people like to put their names on big spiffy and above all new projects. Turning old Prentice into an office or teaching facility would be very feasible, but not very sexy. Could the morass over old Prentice be really be about ego, power, money, control and prestige, rather than jobs and lives? I wouldn't be at all surprised.

The mayor in his Tribune OpEd piece acknowledged Bertrand Goldberg as an important architect whose buildings are worth preserving. Then he added that we have other Goldberg buildings in town so losing this one won't be so bad. As I pointed out last week, the exact thing could have been said about the Garrick and Old Stock Exchange Buildings, two Louis Sullivan masterpieces that were lost decades ago. It would be difficult to find any reasonable person in town today who would support the demolition of those buildings so long ago.

So in fifty years what will they be saying about us? My guess is they will say this:

"Didn't those people learn anything?"

Climbing off the fence

We've been through this before.

In 1960, protestors showed up at the the Garrick Theater in Chicago's Loop to challenge its imminent destruction. Although the building was granted landmark status, its owners felt the site could be put to more profitable use as a parking garage. So they applied for a demolition permit and after a court battle, got their way. In reality, few people cared about saving the great Louis Sullivan building that had seen better days and in the subsequent years, dozens of other important Chicago buildings were lost, with barely a peep from the general public. A few more protestors showed up in 1972 at the corner of LaSalle and Washington as the scaffolding marking its doom consumed the old Stock Exchange Building, another Sullivan gem, perhaps his finest. The relative few who expressed their concern and outrage over the destruction of our architectural heritage were voices crying out in a desert of indifference; the fact is, hardly anyone noticed those buildings back then, let alone cared about them. To the general public, they were just grimy old buildings that had outlived their usefulness.

Then something terrible happened during the destruction of the Stock Exchange Building. The de facto leader of the small band of brothers and sisters who fought for the buildings was killed as he was trying to salvage fragments from inside the old Sullivan building as it collapsed around him. His name was Richard Nickel, and his life's work was documenting the entire body of work of Louis Sullivan as it disappeared before his eyes.

In the end, Nickel's tragic death and the loss of the Garrick and Stock Exchange Buildings, galvanized Chicago's architectural preservation community. After the Stock Exchange Building came down, people in this city woke up and realized that architecture did in fact matter. Today, Chicagoans, the haughty and meek alike boast about their city's architecture and the city's official boosters use it as a selling point to lure potential residents and visitors.

Chicago is best known for its innovative commercial buildings from the turn of the last century whose form clearly expresses their structure, a style that slavishly adhered to Louis Sullivan's famous dictum: "form ever follows function." Much of "Modern" architecture in the fifties and sixties, especially the work of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and his followers, can trace its roots back to the architects of "Chicago School." It would be heresy today to suggest knocking down any of these buildings.

But Chicago is an architecturally diverse city and unfortunately, the buildings that don't trace their roots back to Sullivan, Daniel Burnham, John Root, William Holabird and Martin Roche, are fair game.

The former Prentice Women's Hospital by Bertrand Goldberg,
awaiting its uncertain fate, October 20,  2012

One of this city's important architects who marched to the beat of his own drummer was Bertrand Goldberg whose work broke free of the constraints of the traditional Chicago style box. Goldberg's most famous works are the iconic corn cob towers of Marina City which typify his work, radiating around a central core, from the inside out rather than outside in. His egalitarian spirit let him to be a radical pioneer in the design of space, which in turn out of necessity led him to be an innovator in materials, predominantly reinforced concrete. His other residential works in Chicago run the gamut from the Astor Tower in the city's tony Gold Coast, to the Raymond Hilliard Homes on the near south side, Goldberg's attempt to humanize low income housing.

Goldberg, like his predecessors Frank Lloyd Wright and the French architect and planner Le Corbusier, was a utopian. He believed that architecture could be re-invented in order to change society for the betterment of people's lives. River City, built on the former approach to the long gone Grand Central railway station, was Goldberg's scaled down dream of building a city within a city, a mixed use complex of homes, shops, venues for entertainment and more.

Bud Goldberg applied his concepts of radial space in other areas, especially buildings devoted to health-care. Prentice Women's Hospital of 1975 was a ground breaking approach to hospital design. In the words of Michael Kimmelman, the architectural critic for the New York Times, Prentice:

...translated new ideas about hospital “villages” of care into unobstructed floors around a central nurses’ station.

The hand responsible for the design of Prentice is unmistakable; four cylindrical concrete towers containing the patients' rooms are bundled clover-like around a central core. The towers with their signature elliptical porthole windows, death defyingly cantilever over a more conventional steel and glass base which housed the hospital's other functions. It was a bold design for the era, stunningly different from anything else at the time, except other Goldberg buildings.

Northwestern University which owns Prentice, built a new women's hospital, closed the old one and plans to demolish it to make way for a research facility.

Again we're faced with the aspect of losing another architectural landmark, an important building that may have outlived its original intent, but could easily be adapted for any number of uses. Apparently however, not the use that Northwestern has in mind. The institution vehemently opposes any proposal to retrofit the thirty seven year old building to fit into their plans, including an 11th hour submission from the distinguished Chicago architect Jeanne Gang who, (at the suggestion of Michael Kimmelman) has proposed to build a tower above Goldberg's building.

Earlier in this space I stated the opinion that Prentice was no slam dunk for landmark status. But I have since come around to believe that the destruction of Prentice would be a tremendous loss, possibly rivaling that of the Garrick. Why the change of heart? Well I've listened to both sides of the argument and frankly, it's the "let's demolish Prentice" argument that has swayed me the most, negatively of course.

Ample land surrounding Prentice and its environs

Take the university hospital and their disingenuous campaign to convince the public that preservationists are hijacking the creation of thousands of new jobs, millions of dollars of revenue into the city and life saving treatments, all to save an old building. The truth is the hospital has no immediate plans to build the new facility; it wants to level the Goldberg building and leave the site empty until the time when and if ground is broken for the new building. In other words, Northwestern wants to replace a perfectly good building with a vacant lot. If you've visited the neighborhood in which old Prentice resides, you know that it is filled with many empty lots. I'd compare it to the East Berlin I visited just after the fall of the Berlin Wall. By the way, since there are all those empty lots in the the vicinity, most of which owned by Northwestern, why is it not possible to build their research facility somewhere else, directly across the street for example?

Even more compelling are the voices of people whom I know to be passionate about all things Chicago and its history, including its architecture. They are unmoved by the proposed demolition saying things such as: "We have other examples of Bertrand Goldberg architecture in town that are not in any danger of coming down." Or: "The building's only thirty odd years old, it hasn't been around long enough to have earned the distinction of being a landmark." Or this catch-all phrase: "We need to be more concerned about people than buildings."

I'll give you that Goldberg's Prentice is not an eminently lovable building; it's too old to be modern and too new to be charming. It hasn't aged all that well and it's been partially altered so the arches that lead dramatically up to its towers have been obscured by the extension of the glass and steel base.

It dawned on me this morning as I listened to more arguments in favor of demolishing Prentice, that those same arguments were leveled in favor of demolishing some of Chicago's greatest buildings forty and fifty years ago. The Garrick and Stock Exchange were not the only Sullivan buildings in town when they came down. They hadn't aged very well either, were disrespectfully altered, not maintained properly, and covered with a patina of grime. Mostly they seemed irrelevant, memories of a bygone era for which we had little use. Like Prentice today, there was a contingent of folks back then who thought the old Sullivan buildings were eyesores. The comment I heard this morning: "let's tear it down and put up something new" has a familiar ring to it. Yet many of the folks who don't care about the fate of Prentice would no doubt look upon the loss of those earlier buildings as nothing less than wanton destruction.

Despite years of neglect, old Prentice still has
 a dramatic presence in the Streeterville neighborhood

The handful of buildings that survived the dark era of wholesale destruction of our architectural legacy, have been lovingly restored and in some cases today are as beautiful as the day they were built, in some cases even more. It breaks my heart to think how much greater this city would be if some of the buildings we destroyed over the course of about fifteen years, had been allowed to stand, restored to their original splendor.

No I don't believe we should save everything. A city that does not build and grow, dies. Not all old buildings are great or even good for that matter; not everything deserves landmark status. Nor are all new buildings bad, (I'm old enough to still consider old Prentice a new building). In general, we have a bad taste in our mouths about the seventies, especially its architecture and design. Much of that derision is unfortunately deserved, virtually all of the great buildings lost during that time were replaced by unadulterated crap.

Prentice is an important perhaps even great building that was designed by an architect who cut through all that crap. Bertrand Goldberg was an innovator, an experimenter committed to the idea that through the practice of his art and craft, he could benefit humanity. Although many of his utopian ideas have long been discounted (as have Le Corbusier's and Wright's), we can't blame him for trying. Plus he built some pretty wonderful buildings to boot, and Prentice may very well be one of his best.

Let's keep it around until we can begin to appreciate it again, just as we appreciate Sullivan today in ways we could not comprehend fifty years ago.

Do I believe the philistines are knocking at the door? Hardly. Just the short sighted and the indifferent, a much more formidable adversary.

Point, counter point

Point one: Northwestern University owns the building that used to house its Prentice Women's Hospital. That building was a ground breaking design by the famed Chicago architect Bertrand Goldberg which revolutionized the design of hospitals and along with it, patient care. The building has been replaced by a more up to date building that the hospital believes better serves the needs of expectant mothers and their new born children. They would like to tear down the thirty seven year old building in order to build a state of the art research center, which they say would serve their needs better than converting the old building to such a purpose. Not only that but the University contends the new building would bring in billions of dollars and thousands of jobs to the city, not to mention save countless lives through the research that would take place within its doors. All of this would vanish the if University were prevented to build their new building while old building remained. This view was articulated in an editorial in this week's Tribune.

Point two: Liar liar pants on fire. Lynn Becker blasts the Tribune and Northwestern in a post you can find here.

As the rhetoric heats up, it's interesting to look at the images the two articles use to illustrate their relative points.

The Tribune photograph of old Prentice illustrating their editorial is little more than a snapshot showing the now shuttered building in unbecoming flat light, emphasizing the dinginess of the building's concrete facade.

Becker uses an architectural rendering of the Goldberg building which employs dramatic lighting; the picture's vertical format emphasizes the building's eccentric cluster of tubular forms that resemble a giant rocket ship soaring toward the sky. The more traditional steel and glass facade of the base of Prentice is also rendered beautifully, gleaming with a reflection of the sky and the Chicago skyline. The building looks truly spectacular in this illustration, a one of a kind work of art, what kind of Phillistine would dare knock it down?

Unfortunately as is usually the case, the actual building does not quite live up to the rendering. Here is a photograph from Chicago's premier architectural photography firm Hedrich Blessing, that shows a more realistic, yet also flattering view of the building.

To make his case against the Tribune, Becker dug out a markedly unattractive photograph, also from Hedrich Blessing, of the first McCormick Place (developed by Tribune publisher Robert McCormick) behind a jammed parking lot. The Trib's support of Northwestern in this battle is in Becker's words:

...what you expect from those wonderful people who gave you McCormick Place on what should of remained open lakefront.

Becker's caption to the photograph reads: "Chicago Tribune urban planning at work"

Clearly given its track record, the Tribune according to Becker, has no idea what's best for the city.

I have to say my sympathies lie with the preservationists on this one. While old Prentice is no slam dunk candidate in my opinion for landmark status, I truly believe that it is an important building, one well worth saving. As I have heard Becker point out numerous times and I agree, a green building is an existing building, not one in a landfill. Northwestern University is being disingenuous when it claims there are no practical alternatives to destroying old Prentice. Their stated short term plan all along has been to build their prospective research center in the near future, meaning that once the Goldberg building is gone, its site would sit vacant for an undetermined period of time. Things change and it is very possible that they might indefinitely table their plans to build a new building. This city may need a lot of things, but what it most definitely does not need is another vacant lot. The gargantuan vacant lot at the site of what was once the Michael Reese Hospital on the near south side proves that in leaps and bounds. The University owns a great deal of property in the Streeterville neighborhood, and much of it now is vacant. It's very hard to believe that viable alternatives cannot be found. A plan for creative reuse of the old Prentice would be a win win situation for everybody.

Still there are no easy answers and once again we are faced with the struggle over community rights versus owner rights. Here I think Northwestern as primarily an institution of higher learning, has the wherewithal and the obligation to take it upon themselves to come up with a solution that would benefit the entire community, not just their own bottom line.