It’s time someone called “bullshit” on this catastrophic waste of time and materials that developer Garrett Kelleher and architect Santiago Calatrava are trying to foist on Chicago. The “Chicago Spire,” a 2,000-foot drill-bit condo on the lakefront is an af-front to sensible planning and good architecture.
The fact that all the renderings of the Chicago Spire are from the same impossible perspective, suspended 1,500 feet above Lake Michigan, a mile offshore, tells you all you need to know about how poorly this project has been conceived. Buildings are about more than how they look in the skyline; they are about how they relate to the street, and to the buildings around them. This building doesn’t fit.
Let’s leave aside the practical obstacles Kelleher has to overcome, such as, oh, say, financing, and concentrate on it as a design exercise. Calatrava is one of these new “starchitects,” men whose projects elicit knee-jerk knob-slobbing reviews by architecture critics the world over, including here, based more on the name on the drawings than the substance of them. Sure, the Tribune’s Blair Kamin got huffy with Calatrava and Kelleher after a meeting of the Grant Park Advisory Council. There was some dispute as to whether the developer and the architect were showing the public the most recent renderings of the building, and whether Kelleher had changed the design and was now trying to ram it through the plan commission without allowing for a proper airing of this most public of projects.
Subsequent to that meeting, Kelleher and Calatrava sat down with Kamin and showed him the latest drawings, which Kamin deemed a huge improvement over the last renderings, proclaiming it “skyline sizzle.” Please, someone get that man a towel.
This thing is ridiculous. Kelleher wants to put 1,300 condominiums on a spit of land just west of Lake Shore Drive, in a neighborhood that until recently didn’t even have a decent grocery store. It is an insanely oversized project of exactly the type that will suffer the greatest hardship in a post-cheap oil economy. “Gee, honey, the power is out again today. Third time this week. Guess we’ll have to walk up to the 150th floor.” And I wonder how the water pressure will be up there during the rolling blackouts. . . .
Well, that all sounds vaguely doomsday, eh? Let’s be more practical. It is totally out of scale with anything around it. It fails to respect anything about its location. It’s twisting shape is a gimmick; Kamin writes that it whirls “into the sky with the same exuberant energy as the beloved, romantic skyscrapers of the 1920s.” BullSHIT. It still looks like a giant silver Twizzler stick. In fact, why not just paint it red and be done with it. They could even paint a Twizzler wrapper on it and call it advertising. A capitalistic move like that might even bring in enough advance money to start building the thing.
It’s out of proportion. And for those of you who tempted to say, “Yeah, well then so was the Hancock when it was built,” you’re right. It was. But that was another era, when super tall buildings took your breath away, and everyone was reaching higher. Now on the eve of a permanent energy shortage, projects like the Chicago Spire, and Taipei 101 and the new thing in Dubai seem more like last, wheezing grasps at a brass ring that’s moving a hundred miles an hour away from us.
What we need are not mega-tall structures with 1,300 luxury condos; we need to replace the affordable housing that’s been torn down by the Chicago Housing Authority and the reasonable rental units and housing being lost to creeping gentrification. (Not that gentrification is bad from the standpoint of improving neighborhoods, but the poor have to live somewhere—isn’t it better for them to be scattered among us than concentrated in pockets of poverty? That generally hasn’t worked out so well in the past.) And we need buildings that relate to the street and to the people using those streets.
The Chicago Spire does none of those things. Its sole attribute is that it looks cool in computer simulations of the skyline. People don’t live in the skyline, though. They live on the ground, and that’s where this building fails unforgivably.
The Indignant Citizen
The fact that all the renderings of the Chicago Spire are from the same impossible perspective, suspended 1,500 feet above Lake Michigan, a mile offshore, tells you all you need to know about how poorly this project has been conceived. Buildings are about more than how they look in the skyline; they are about how they relate to the street, and to the buildings around them. This building doesn’t fit.
Let’s leave aside the practical obstacles Kelleher has to overcome, such as, oh, say, financing, and concentrate on it as a design exercise. Calatrava is one of these new “starchitects,” men whose projects elicit knee-jerk knob-slobbing reviews by architecture critics the world over, including here, based more on the name on the drawings than the substance of them. Sure, the Tribune’s Blair Kamin got huffy with Calatrava and Kelleher after a meeting of the Grant Park Advisory Council. There was some dispute as to whether the developer and the architect were showing the public the most recent renderings of the building, and whether Kelleher had changed the design and was now trying to ram it through the plan commission without allowing for a proper airing of this most public of projects.
Subsequent to that meeting, Kelleher and Calatrava sat down with Kamin and showed him the latest drawings, which Kamin deemed a huge improvement over the last renderings, proclaiming it “skyline sizzle.” Please, someone get that man a towel.
This thing is ridiculous. Kelleher wants to put 1,300 condominiums on a spit of land just west of Lake Shore Drive, in a neighborhood that until recently didn’t even have a decent grocery store. It is an insanely oversized project of exactly the type that will suffer the greatest hardship in a post-cheap oil economy. “Gee, honey, the power is out again today. Third time this week. Guess we’ll have to walk up to the 150th floor.” And I wonder how the water pressure will be up there during the rolling blackouts. . . .
Well, that all sounds vaguely doomsday, eh? Let’s be more practical. It is totally out of scale with anything around it. It fails to respect anything about its location. It’s twisting shape is a gimmick; Kamin writes that it whirls “into the sky with the same exuberant energy as the beloved, romantic skyscrapers of the 1920s.” BullSHIT. It still looks like a giant silver Twizzler stick. In fact, why not just paint it red and be done with it. They could even paint a Twizzler wrapper on it and call it advertising. A capitalistic move like that might even bring in enough advance money to start building the thing.
It’s out of proportion. And for those of you who tempted to say, “Yeah, well then so was the Hancock when it was built,” you’re right. It was. But that was another era, when super tall buildings took your breath away, and everyone was reaching higher. Now on the eve of a permanent energy shortage, projects like the Chicago Spire, and Taipei 101 and the new thing in Dubai seem more like last, wheezing grasps at a brass ring that’s moving a hundred miles an hour away from us.
What we need are not mega-tall structures with 1,300 luxury condos; we need to replace the affordable housing that’s been torn down by the Chicago Housing Authority and the reasonable rental units and housing being lost to creeping gentrification. (Not that gentrification is bad from the standpoint of improving neighborhoods, but the poor have to live somewhere—isn’t it better for them to be scattered among us than concentrated in pockets of poverty? That generally hasn’t worked out so well in the past.) And we need buildings that relate to the street and to the people using those streets.
The Chicago Spire does none of those things. Its sole attribute is that it looks cool in computer simulations of the skyline. People don’t live in the skyline, though. They live on the ground, and that’s where this building fails unforgivably.
The Indignant Citizen
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