Tree Studios

Just imagine:

Walking down the streets of River North in Chicago, you feel swallowed by a sea of metal and glass skyscrapers.  Looking down the block, you see a break in the wall.  Who is offering that view of the sky?  A low-rise brick building is the answer. It’s a thing of beauty.  It’s elegant and thoughtful.  It’s a breath of fresh air in the concrete jungle.  It’s the Tree Studios on State St.

Sounds of champagne bottles popping, haunting aroma of fresh coffee, and perfectly framed scenes of window shopping greet you on the sidewalk.  The cast iron detailing of the first floor facade is reminiscent of the Louis Sullivan-designed Carson Pirie Scott building, just a few blocks down State St.  The roman brick at the second floor provides a warm contrast to the first floor ornamentation.  Above, the chimneys reach out beyond the roof line, projecting symbols of domesticity and hearth.  The lush, green courtyard behind beacons to be celebrated. It’s a well-mannered building, unassuming in its elegance and unrelenting in its charm.

Tree Studios, Image Courtesy of Friedman Properties

Following the 1893 World’s Fair, Judge Lambert and Anne Tree hoped to entice artists (particularly European ones) back to Chicago.  They lived in a mansion at 94 Cass St (what is now Wabash Ave), and they enlisted Parfitt Brothers, an architecture firm based out of Brooklyn, NY to help them build a community in their backyard.

The English Queen Anne main building, running along State St, was built in 1894.  By 1912 and 1913, the English Arts & Crafts annexes (the additional buildings to the north and south) were finished, creating a U-shaped courtyard in the back. (My understanding is that the mansion was on the east portion of the block, but has since been replaced by the Medinah Temple.) Also, the comical irony of a Chicago-based couple attempting to lure people back to their city by hiring a New York based architect to design an English style building cannot be ignored. But, so goes the classic story of wealthy people trying to show how wealthy they are and thinking everyone else cares about how much wealth they have. Anywho, all of that aside, the end result is, like I said, a thing of beauty.

Nestled in River North, which is at times an odd combination of commercial skyscrapers and surface parking lots, Tree Studios is a treat. The neighborhood is truly an urban setting - buildings are eclectic in form, function, and scale. High rises welcome office workers, condo owners, and apartment renters. Mid risers host big box stores, street level retail, and a collage of restaurants (we’re talkin’ Michelin star Spiaggia, T.G.I. Fridays, and everything in between ).

Exploring the context, you stumble across a historic single family home that is unwavering in its commitment to withstand the test of time (although, those survival stories usually involve a transition to a museum or retail). You hear the “L” rumbling past old industrial warehouses that have been chopped up into “sexy” industrial loft offices. You see a movie theatre sitting next to a boutique jeweler. A church, a university, and a luxury car dealership create a motley corner - just a few blocks from your newfound favorite building.

Tree Studios, Image Courtesy of Friedman Properties

With a story of neglected use and maintenance, the buildings of Tree Studios have been heroically restored and brought back to life (by Friedman Properties). It’s a great tale of old meets new. Sweetgreen and Framebridge, trendy companies of the 21st century, have found a home with remarkable history. But, the building is much more than its retail tenants. It continues to promote a creative community, with many studios occupied in the upper levels by painters, sculptors, designers, and more.

Just like different artists sharing studio space, distinctive buildings juxtaposed together create a world of contrast and harmony. Tree Studios is a testament to how that in-between condition can forge a thing of beauty in the city. And, it’s a reminder for all of us to keep searching for that.

Railroad Remnants

Knee deep in one of my Google Maps adventures (it’s a black hole), I came across a weird angled street that doesn’t exist.

YOU: A street that doesn’t exist? You mean, like, an alley? Or the L?

ME: Ehh not really, kinda. It’s N Lakewood Ave, so it’s a street. But, then suddenly at Belmont Ave, the street ends, but the buildings make it seem like it keeps going. Let me explain.

It’s show-and-tell in class today, so I brought visual aids.

Image courtesy of Google Maps

Do you see what I’m saying? That weird, angled void of building traveling southwest to northeast, basically running into the bottom of Wrigley Field. I guess it sort of looks like a street at this scale. Not doing myself any favors. Let’s zoom in.

Hopefully this helps. So, after seeing this and being confused, I decide to investigate on foot. It isn’t much of a trek, since I live very close by. Nonetheless, I threw on the trench coat and grabbed the magnifying glass. At street level, it looks like some developer or architect just wanted to put a funky angle on some of the building(s). But, I know that I saw a greater pattern when looking at the bird’s eye view. There’s more to this story. As I walk south, a set of old railroad tracks emerges in the middle of the street! Ah-ha! A break through. Just call me Sherlock. With more information at hand, I go back to my place to dive deeper.

It turns out that N Lakewood Ave is an old railroad track. (Should I have said spoiler alert earlier? Oh well). I found an old Rand McNally map of the Chicago Railroads from both 1901 and 1921. (Look at the North-South railroad line that has the “Belmont” station).

This isn’t some great revelation of history. I didn’t find the catacombs of Chicago, nor did I find the true source of the Great Chicago Fire. But, this is a small example of how design legacy is shown in our urban fabric. Our actions - our designs - can and will impact the future. The folks who laid out the network of railroads inevitably had an impact on where and how current Chicagoans live. In this instance, history allowed us (maybe forced us) to break the grid - creating an exciting and fun twist in Chicago’s latticework.

Schiller & Larkin

This past weekend, I went to Wrightwood 659’s Romanticism to Ruin: Two Lost Works of Sullivan & Wright. In a truly serendipitous fashion, this exhibit works really well with last week’s post. It’s a similar theme of temporary vs permanent architecture but shed in a different light. Let’s dive in.

Dank Adler & Louis Sullivan (Adler & Sullivan) and Frank Lloyd Wright (FLW) designed buildings that were seemingly permanent. (FLW was actually working for Adler & Sullivan in the time of Schiller, but that’s for a different history lesson). The respective clients had every intention, at the beginning, to build something that would stand the test of time. Schiller Building was a beautiful auditorium with offices above, breaking the ceiling of what a skyscraper should look like (height joke). The Larkin Building emerged with innovative building technology and reimagined interior office environment, including a new-to-the-time open floor plan. But in short, both buildings met the same fate with a wrecking ball. The permanent quickly became temporary. (Larkin was replaced by a surface parking lot, which is twist of the knife).

Both of these buildings mark a sad time in preservation history. Activists weren’t able to sway the decisions of the city nor private developers. However, the seemingly guilted retrospection of the Schiller Building did lead to a preservation movement here in Chicago that is still active, and successful, today (yay Thompson Center!).

With all of that said, I want to examine how this exhibit, in particular, has brought the buildings back into the permanent realm, after they had both been prematurely stripped of that identity, over 60 years ago. What are the tools that resurrected the Schiller and Larkin buildings’ permanence?

Documentation

The Schiller Building is a unique example of this because the city allowed a small team to document ‘existing conditions’ before the building was torn down. Extensive notes and photos documenting color, texture, material, etc all funnel into a fascinating, albeit sad, story of the dismantling process. The Larkin Building is a different tale. Photos of the finished product, both exterior and interior, circulate the architecture community, but not much was documented for the actual demolition. But nonetheless, all of this documentation becomes permanent, which breathes new life into the legacy of these buildings. (I’ll save you the philosophical debate of what these images represent and whether they themselves are a different entity of permanence)

Primary Sources

In the exhibit, original sketches, architectural details, and engineering drawings are displayed. As a 21st century draftsman (read: I use a computer), I am completely in awe of the craft behind these drawings. Every single drawing is a work of art. But I digress…. These drawings, like documentation, are permanent! Even if the building itself is not there anymore, these drawings communicate important design ideas and spatial details, at times better than what I think they would be in person.

Contemporary Fabrication

With the help of documentation and research (maybe those are one in the same), students and professionals were able to create replicas of various details from the Schiller Building. A full scale replica of some of the ornamental friezes (lights and colors included!) hung on the walls. A beautiful scale model of the entire Schiller building allows the temporary to become permanent (although, I am not sure of the future of the model). The interior space was 3D modeled, allowing for rendered fly through of the space. It was a great way to allow people to place themselves in the space, but I do wonder if their imagination could have done that for them. But, I think I am biased since I work and think that way all day long.

The exhibit was a great example of how to celebrate and honor a building’s legacy, even if the structure itself is not here anymore. It also highlights the importance of documentation and research. The Schiller portion of the exhibit was exhaustive (in a good way). The Larkin portion was lacking (they told more of the tale of the company than the building), but I imagine that’s just due to lack of resources. In short, recognizing the history of architecture (and how it is communicated!) is an important part of our architecture dialogue. With that foundation, then, we can start to understand how it impacts our present and future projects.

Devil in the White City

I just finished reading Devil in the White City (DWC) by Erik Larson. I know, I know. I am really late to this. With my passion for architecture and my connection to Chicago, I have been recommended this book many a time. I’m not really sure why it took me so long to finally pick it up. For fear of this becoming a personal journal entry, I’ll just quickly say that I had quite a dry spell of reading. But, I am getting back into it.

DWC is a fascinating book of two parallel stories - one of civic and cultural triumph; the other of psychopathic darkness and deceit. At this point, I think these stories are pretty well known, so I am not going to give a Spark Notes version (do people still use that?). However, I have a few thoughts after finishing the book.

Image courtesy of eriklarsonbooks.com

For the World’s Fair, it’s amazing to think how a temporary event with temporary structures can have such a long lasting impact on our society. Traditionally, we think of capital A Architecture as very permanent buildings. Residences, government offices, civic halls, and public infrastructure are all built to last for various financial and social incentives. Fortunately, the conversation around architecture is shifting towards recognizing temporary structures (i.e. transitional housing, art installations, etc) as equally important as the permanent structures. And DWC is a great example (although, it’s not really a contemporary one, but still relevant right?).

As an architecture nerd, I geeked out as Larson explicitly explains how the World’s Fair buildings were built. Instead of using the traditional stone, steel, and brick of the time, they opted for wood frames covered in staff (a mixture of plaster and jute that could stick to wood and be shaped to create the illusion of stone - p. 120) due to financial and time constraints- they were given a mere 6 months! But the impact of the event was lasting. For architecture, and in particular civic architecture, this revitalized an interest in neoclassicism leading to buildings across the country, showing off their columns and capitals.

With the uniformity of style, yet uniqueness of each building, the fair also introduced the idea that a city could in fact be a celebration of beauty, both at the building scale and the urban scale. After the fair ended, Daniel Burnham became one of the first modern day urban planners, working with many cities, including Chicago, Atlanta, etc.

I love this. It’s exciting to think how your impact can come from temporary things. You don’t need to build a building to make an impact. You don’t need to invent something to make an impact. In Burnham’s case, it was a heroic undertaking in scale and time. But still, he just needed to be crazy enough to have a vision and see it through, even though he knew this fair, nor the associated structures would stick around.

But with great power, comes great responsibility. Personal impact can also be dangerous and scary. H.H. Holmes, unfortunately and grotesquely, impacted many people’s lives. And he used architecture to do it. He created a labyrinth inside his “castle.” In this way, architecture is the supporting cast in a rather dark and twisted crime thriller. His castle was built with purpose, but it also was inevitably town down,

I hate to put a damper on the mood, but I feel like I needed to bring that up. It’s one of the main themes of the book; there is black where there is white; there is darkness where there is light. That’s life. But hopefully, we can shine that light a little brighter with architecture - temporary or permanent.