A tale of two cities – Chicago

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 11/06/2005 (7619 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

CHICAG0 — This midwestern metropolis has restaurants, shopping, sports, theatre, art — all swell things, don’t get me wrong — but we picked the city for its architecture: This is a town where buildings really matter.

The romantic side of Chicago sees architecture as an expression of its brash, broad-shouldered spirit. The pragmatic side realizes that it’s a dollars-and-cents tourist draw, and there are lots of options for “archi-tourists” here, from casual rubbernecking to structured tours.

Setting the tone for the weekend, my architect dad books us into the Hotel Burnham. He can’t resist.

Daniel Burnham was one of Chicago’s leading architects at the end of the 19th century and the force behind the 1893 World’s Fair. He’s also one of the main characters in Erik Larson’s historical page-turner The Devil in the White City, which becomes compulsive bedside reading for my father after we pick it up at the nearby Borders bookstore.

The Burnham is a perfect home base — and not just because of its downtown location. The hotel began its life as the iconic Reliance Building: started by Burnham and partner John Root in 1890 and finished up by Charles Atwood in 1895, it was the first comprehensive achievement in what would become known as the Chicago style of construction, in which a structural steel skeleton is covered with a light skin of plate-glass windows.

The creamy glazed terra-cotta cladding may hearken back to the 19th century, but the structural developments anticipate the modern skyscraper.

Located in the Loop right across from Marshall Field’s — another Burnham project that became the prototype for many of the world’s great department stores — the Reliance was viewed as a gravity-defying miracle when it was built, but by the 1980s had become rundown, reduced to some grotty street-level shops and a grubby exterior. Carefully restored by the city in 1996, it was converted to the Hotel Burnham in 1998 and is now a luxe establishment, with a plush lobby and rooms as gloriously over-decorated as a Gilded Age men’s club.

Great buildings are so thick on the ground in Chicago that you’d do fine just walking out of your hotel and wandering aimlessly around the Loop or along Michigan Avenue. The DIY approach requires only comfortable shoes and a good guidebook. (The Pocket Guide to Chicago Architecture by Judith Paine McBrien is a handy reference, available at the bookstore at the Art Institute of Chicago.)

For a more structured approach, consider one of the guided walking tours from the Chicago Architecture Foundation. Bus tours are a good choice for buildings in distant or slightly dodgy neighbourhoods: The CAF can take you west to Oak Park to view Prairie-style houses by Frank Lloyd Wright, south to the Illinois Institute of Technology and the University of Chicago campuses to see recent works by Rem Koolhaas and Helmut Jahn, or north to check out newly hip neighbourhoods like Bucktown and Wicker Park.

Several companies offer boat tours that take off from the Navy Pier and cruise around the Chicago River, covering a range of architectural periods and styles, from the welcoming white plaza of the Wrigley Building to the 110-storey swagger of the Sears Tower or the sleek, dark minimalism of Mies van der Rohe’s IBM Building.

On a brisk Saturday afternoon, my parents and I take a one-hour open-boat tour with a wonderfully opinionated guide, who delivers a colourful history — architectural and otherwise — of a city he clearly loves.

From an account of Chicago’s tenacious comeback from the 1871 fire to stories of crazy engineering ingenuity — including a typical Windy City tycoon who decided he needed to jack up his hotel by three metres (while patrons were asleep in their beds!) — the docent sums up the can-do attitude of Chicagoans when it comes to planning and building their city.

These terrific tales take on special meaning for Winnipeggers. There’s a reason we passed for Chicago in the movie Shall We Dance: A lot of our Exchange District gems are Chicago School buildings.

Back in our turn-of-the-20th-century heyday, Winnipeg was called the Chicago of the North. We share with Chicago a history as a transport hub, and we have similar building conditions, enduring the same weather extremes and working with the same thick clay soil that confounds architects and engineers.

Chicago’s daring, dynamic, deeply affectionate approach to its built environment offers some lessons for our own city, as we deal with current architectural projects and urban development (albeit on a more modest scale).

As our docent tells us, the Chicago River was originally a “backdoor” river, a transport route and convenient dumping ground for garbage, sewage, dead horses, whatever. A concerted clean-up campaign in the late 1980s, along with tightened-up zoning regulations concerning water access and pedestrian walkways, and the ingenious “adaptive reuse” of old warehouse buildings and factories have revitalized the river and its banks.

For decades the city has made a concerted effort to get people living there, from residential projects like Bertrand Goldberg’s Marina City in 1967 — dig those groovy circular shapes! — to Harry Weese’s more recent small-scale river “cottages.”

Whatever our city’s current controversy about waterfront condo projects, Winnipeg has got to get more people gazing fondly at the Red River — preferably from the balconies of their cool urban apartments.

The remarkable transformation of the Hotel Burnham from office building to dump to luxury hotel proves that good architecture is enduring and flexible. Chicago happily combines 21st-century hustle with 19th-century buildings, and the Loop is full of restoration projects. The historic arcade of the Carson Pirie Scott store — built by Burnham’s sometime rival Louis Sullivan — is currently dressed in scaffolding, while crews are doing some meticulous buff-up work on the Rookery, the building that once housed Burnham’s offices.

With our own downtown development on the increase, Winnipeg needs to keep an eye on heritage concerns. Walking tours of the Exchange District and the recent Doors Open project, which gave average citizens a peek into 35 vintage buildings in the downtown area and St. Boniface, remind us of the value of our historical architecture.

“Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s minds.” Burnham’s words concerning the World’s Fair still hold true today.

When it comes to current architecture, Chicago seems to avoid easy compromises, safe options and halfway measures. Recent public projects either succeed beautifully or fail spectacularly, but they don’t just stand there.

Take the Harold Washington Library (1991). A frightful piece of postmodern historicism that features a 756,640-square-foot mass capped at the four corners with giant gargoyley owls, it looks like a computer-generated set for the new Batman flick.

This cinematic quality is shared by the Soldier Field expansion, in which looming metal curves seem to be landing on the old neoclassical colonnades, making for an undeniable resemblance to a B-movie space invasion.

Frank Gehry’s music pavilion in the Millennium Park, part of a large-scale landscape plan for Chicago’s lakefront, billows out in striking stainless-steel arcs.

These are big, bold, visible projects that grab attention and get people talking. Architecture is part of the public discourse in Chicago. Two relatives driving us around feel compelled to apologize personally for Soldier Field, and even chatty cabbies are happy to weigh in on the strengths and weaknesses of new constructions.

Winnipeg is currently making big plans and taking big chances. The Hydro building, which will use green construction and maintenance methods, the new library project, and the Canadian Museum for Human Rights will be landmark structures for our city.

I’m excited, anyway. A weekend of walking around Chicago has got me hepped up on the power and possibility of good architecture, and I’m ready to take that feeling home.

Alison Gillmor is the film critic for the Winnipeg Free Press.

Visiting Chicago

Getting there

United Airlines has several daily non-stop flights from Winnipeg to Chicago. Expect to pay around $550 Cdn, return, taxes included. (Chicago is considered a short-haul flight from Winnipeg, so you can go for as few as 15,000 Aeroplan points.)

Staying there

Hotel Burnham –1 West Washington, Chicago, IL 60602, 1-312-782-1111. Rooms and suites from $209-$249 (US).

Touring

* Shoreline sightseeing: 1-312-222-9328, info@shorelinesightseeing.com

* Boat tours from Navy Pier: $20 weekday/$22 weekend for adults; $17 weekday/$18 weekend for seniors; $9 weekday/$10 weekend children under 12.

* The Chicago Architecture Foundation, 312.922.3432, www.architecture.org The CAF offers a variety of tours by foot, bus, boat and even elevated train, covering everything from Frank Lloyd Wright to Mies van der Rohe to emerging Chicago architects. Schedules and prices vary.