Winds of change blow in Chicago

16 Aug 2005

Chicago is a city from which we can learn a lot. Despite shifts in the world economy the city remains as ambitious and dynamic as it appeared to be at the turn of the century when it was considered at the centre of all of the most important development in international business and technology.

Six nights in Chicago is not long enough to get to grips with the city, but it’s enough to visit some world-class buildings and get a flavour of the place and the way it works. I visited the city as part of a professional training programme provided by Glasgow City Council with financial support from Europe. The council brought together a dozen design professionals, mainly architects, to visit the US’s third largest city, make business contacts and learn from the experiences of the Americans. As we flew out the trip had already been dubbed a “council junket” by one of Scotland’s redtops in search of a story. Admittedly the visit was very pleasurable, but it was no jolly.
Encouraging local professionals to meet directly with highly successful and productive individuals across the world is exactly the kind of thing local authorities should be doing, and where better than Chicago, a dynamic city in which competitiveness is second nature? From the 1890s when Chicago built the World Columbia Exhibition with the clear intention of outshining both Paris and New York, the city has made a virtue out of creative one-upmanship. The heroic struggle by Daniel Burham to create the World Exhibition on time is brilliantly described in the novel Devil in the White City by Erik Larson and that electric fusion of architectural aspiration and scientific inventiveness can still be sensed today. The city also continues to operate a very liberal planning regime, which helps to foster a ‘can-do’ development culture. Chicago, birthplace of the skyscraper (1884), city of Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies Van der Rohe and a model for contemporary city centre regeneration, is an obvious candidate for such an architectural fact-finding exercise.
For Glasgow, Chicago is also an ideal partner because there are such strong links between the two cities, as far back as the Great Fire (1871) Glasgow’s Lord Provost sent money to help Chicagoans and today there are plenty of contemporary connections like the fact that Tony Jones, the president of the Art Institute of Chicago, is a former director of the Glasgow School of Art.
Flying into Chicago it looks from the air like the ultimate American city, an enormous sprawl of ‘single-family’ suburban homes climaxing in a discrete high-rise downtown. At the heart of the city is the Sears Tower, which was built for a mail order company and was the world’s tallest building at 1,500 feet until 1996, when it was overtaken by the Petronas Towers. There is something so uncompromisingly American about Chicago. It is the birthplace of McDonald’s and a heartland in which core American values, the free market and individual freedom, find physical expression. Despite the association with the Mafia and pork barrel politics it exudes an ambitious, inventive and generous attitude that forces enthusiasm from the most embittered European cynic. The city was built upon the development of the railways and as a result became the cattle centre of the US. The history of the development of the place is mind-blowing: it was a village of 350 people in 1833, but by 1850 the population was 30,000, and had risen dramatically to 334,000 by the year of the Great Fire, and 1.7 million by the turn of the century. In the post-war period, like so many other cities, Chicago had to come to terms with a changing global economy, and since the 70s the city has also had to deal with the so-called ‘white flight’. By 1990 Chicago dropped in the rankings to become second largest city in the US. Los Angeles being the first. Throughout the 80s and 90s however there were serious attempts to regenerate through redevelopment, most notably Millennium Park, the clearing of a central area associated with ‘panhandlers’ or the homeless and the marketing of the city through events. The incredible architectural assets of the city, the work of Frank Lloyd Wright at Oak Park, the work of Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe at Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) and the incredible skyscrapers by Burham and Sullivan among others, make Chicago a unique city. The Chicago Architecture Foundation is heralded as one of the best architecture centers in the world; it runs a strong programme of exhibitions and events and a docents initiative, a scheme by which local volunteers with a knowledge of architecture will take visitors on architectural walking.
Millennium Park, the $475million (£260million) redevelopment of an old goods yard, is regarded as the city’s greatest recent triumph. The 24-acre site is more like a cultural theme park than a traditional quiet green space. Gardens by a selection of leading landscape designers including Kathryn Gustafson are eclectic and artworks by Anish Kapoor and Jaume Plensa give the park an expo-like character. At the centre sits Frank Gehry’s Jay Pritzker Pavilion, a flurry of naturalistic forms. The park project is regarded as a personal triumph for the Mayor of Chicago, Richard M Daley. Last year Daley was the headline speaker at John Prescott’s Urban Summit, in Manchester. His determination to drive through the park project and give a sense of civic pride to Chicago’s population is held up as an exemplar for good regeneration practice.
Most Brits gape with awe at the story of the private donors and how Daley personally oversaw some of the demolition to make way for the park; his ‘can-do’ approach looks very attractive to local authorities and architects. Daley has also made friends by making public statements about the mediocre character of much of the contemporary development (an undeniable truth) and through his campaign to green the city’s roofs. However, there is concern that Daley’s desire to raise the architectural game may lead to one-off ‘starchitect’ commissions and business as usual. That said there are a number of local and international practices producing interesting work in the city. Renzo Piano is extending the Art Institute, and a new student centre by Rem Koolhaas has lifted the rather weary campus at IIT. This building sings out with colour and energy. The metro system comes crashing through its roof, and a labyrinth of highly-charged connected, cave-like spaces nestle beneath. Pictures of Mies are etched into the glass, and although Koolhaas’s building does not connect very comfortably to the Mies designed dining hall it is not our of place.
Chicago is not without its more serious problems. In his entertaining book on the history of the city, The Pig and the Skyscraper, Marco d’Eramo describes how Lake Michigan, which occupies the entire Eastside of the city, distorts the standard pattern of urban development of the rich to the west and the poor to the east. Historically the city was divided on a north–south axis with the slaughterhouses and factories to the south with a string of affluent development along the lake. However, the west of the Magnificent mile is the Cabrini-Green housing project, an area populated entirely by African Americans in which the average family income is forty times lower than those in the most affluent areas of the city. D’Eramo believes that housing policy has created a segregated state and city: “Of the 11.5million people who live in the state of Illinois, 1.7million are black, of these, 1.4million live in the city of Chicago itself. Blacks thus account for 12.7% of America’s population, 16 per cent of the state’s, 29% of the county’s and 40% of the city’s,” he writes. Chicago Housing Association took us to Cabrini-Green, under police escort, to show how it was redeveloping the area, pulling down high-rise blocks and replacing them with mixed-tenure family houses. It is halfway through a ten-year redevelopment programme to create 6,200 new units and refurbishing almost 20,000. According to our CHA hosts persuading private homeowners to buy into one of the US’s most notorious areas, in which several children lose their lives in shootings each year, is a challenge. But it operates a draconian policy towards tenants to reassure homebuyers. For example, a drugs testing regime takes place on an annual basis, and if any tenant fail the test their family is evicted. As we toured one of the blocks locals were campaigning to keep the old blocks, but our CHA host found it incomprehensible that residents were hostile to plans for a brave new mixed-tenure world.