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Locals versus imports. Old versus new. Midwestern versus cosmopolitan. Chicago's architectural landscape is a study in not-so-gentle contrasts, by Edward Keegan
In spite of Chicago's reputation as a first city of architecture, its practitioners have often lapsed into periods of provincial sleepiness. Recent projects, some very high profile and others more local in appeal, point to a renewed awakening of creative energy that might signal an important new chapter in the city's illustrious architectural history.
The at-times rancorous reception accorded to the renovated Soldier Field during its nationally televised Monday Night Football debut in late September was a microcosm of the current debate within Chicago's architectural community. The stark contrast between the seven-decade-old, classically ordered stone colonnades and the asymmetrical glass-and-steel seating bowl by Wood + Zapata, with Lohan Caprile Goettsch Associates, drew howls from preservationists and conservative viewers who painted it as a worstcase example of adaptive reuse. But progressive practitioners lauded it as a breath of fresh air in a city that has long promoted traditional aesthetics in its public projects.
Opening almost simultaneously was Rem Koolhaas's first completed U.S. building, The McCormick Tribune Campus Center (see page 102) at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT). Constructed beneath Chicago's fabled elevated train line, the broad single-story structure with bright orange glass and a lozenge-shaped tube on its roof is an overheated party crasher on the coolly modernist campus that features more than 30 seminal buildings by Mies van der Rohe.
Multiple architectural legacies form the template for Chicago's current situation. Daniel Burnham's 1909 Plan of Chicago-which envisaged the early-twentieth-century city as a Parisian paradise of well-mannered traditional structures and formal parks and boulevards-is the traditionalist's model. This has often been countered by the advocates of innovation, whose local pedigree is strengthened by the esteemed examples of Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe, Harry Weese, and Bertrand Goldberg.
RISE OF THE IMPORTS
Despite its perceived predilection for tall buildings, Chicago's 225 square miles remain relatively low in scale, filled mostly with twoand three-story structures with the exception of the downtown Loop and the high-rent zone along Lake Michigan's shoreline. It's a decidedly Midwestern city that has long...