By Joe Frey
Michigan Avenue’s stuck-in-time streetwall will soon have a window to the present. Running from Randolph Street south to 11th Street, the Historic Michigan Boulevard District contains certified gems - and some cubic zirconia - designed by the architectural elite of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Yet this fall, in the first new building constructed on it since Landmark status was bestowed upon it five years ago, the district will also be able to boast a 21st century jewel, designed by a Chicago firm steeped in but not slave to Modernist tradition.
At a contextual ten stories, the Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies’ new $55 million, 155,000 sq. ft. building, nearing completion at 610 South Michigan Avenue, will nearly double the space of its existing facility next door. In addition to the museum, a library, classrooms, a 400-seat auditorium and a kosher cafeteria, the design also includes a rooftop garden, which most certainly contributes to its Silver level rating by the U.S. Green Building Council. But what will surely garner more attention for the Spertus Museum is how it will look as the newest brick in that vaunted streetwall that serves as the backdrop to the city’s front yard of Grant Park. Not everyone will be pleased.
Like the shards of a broken window imperfectly glued back together, the Michigan Avenue façade of Krueck + Sexton’s Spertus Museum is an irregular curtain wall that, to mix a metaphor, doesn’t look so much undulating as crumpled and coarsely flattened out. Its polygon facets, made up of 720 individual panes in 250 different shapes, are set at chaotic angles, each surface reflecting light differently, thereby creating a dynamic effect. Yet like a cracked jewel box, the Spertus Museum presents a glorious - and oddly contextual - contemporary counterpoint to its immediate neighbors, specifically, and to the entire streetwall and its greater environs in general.
To the north, Columbia College’s Alexandroff Campus Center (originally the Harvester Building, 1907, Christian A. Eckstorm) is one of the district’s lesser buildings, yet it’s emblematic of the era’s design ethos that Landmark designation is intended to preserve. Almost postmodern in scale, the brackets supporting the unrestored cornice exuberantly express the Classicist architectural taste the city became so devoted to in the wake of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition held in Jackson Park.
To the south, Spertus’s existing facility, though built in 1906, has for years been decorated in a façade that’s an uninspired and pedestrian exercise in glass-and-steel Miesian Modernism, similar to the Borg-Warner Building (1958, A. Epstein and Sons) a few blocks away at the southwest corner of Adams Street. While themselves inconsistent with the district’s dominant aesthetic, they too are illustrative of an era when architecture was held in thrall by a single style, albeit not the one that spurred preservationists to lobby for the district’s Landmark status. (Its fate uncertain, Spertus’s future former building is to be purchased by Columbia College, adding to its already substantial holdings of South Loop properties.)
Inserted between these two fixed points on an architectural timeline, the Spertus Museum is equally irreconcilable to them both, and this is what perversely provides it with much of its context, favoring neither but forcing each of them to make equal concessions. Still, its place in respect to a prominent recent design nearby could prove even more jarring.
Because of both its nontraditional appearance and its relative proximity to Millennium Park, just north on Michigan Avenue, where Krueck + Sexton led the design and engineering team that executed Jaume Plensa’s crowd-pleasing Crown Fountain, the Spertus Museum will no doubt also be compared to Frank Gerhy’s less-than-conventional Pritzker Pavilion. It’s a risky proposition. Not exactly the B in subtle, the Pritzker Pavilion lacks the quiet dignity possessed by the Spertus Museum. Whereas the curling steel ribbons of the former are as frivolous as the 1980s Valley Girl bangs they seem inspired by, the facade of the latter encloses, in effect, a series of cantilevered bays, affording sightlines up and down Michigan Avenue, not just across it. Transparent to reveal the activity behind it, the façade is at least as compelling as the Pritzker Pavilion’s best feature - namely the Web-like trellis that defines a canopy that isn’t there - yet is not forced to play second fiddle to a showboating first chair.
But aside from the spectacular effect of the design itself and how well it plays off the buildings around it, what could prove even more entertaining about the Spertus Museum is that it’s sure to piss off the purists. Thing is, though, it’s going to piss off purists with convictions often in conflict, and who may find themselves odd bedfellows in their mutual distaste for the Spertus Museum.
Fundamentalist preservationists will decry the anachronistic intrusion of this finely proportioned bit of understated decontructionism to Michigan Avenue’s not-quite pristine streetwall of Classicism. On the other hand, cultists still devoted to the stricter sects of Modernism will be blind to its homage, driven instead to apoplexy by the imagined apostasy of what they can only perceive as a maddeningly imprecise curtain wall.
They’re both crazy. The Spertus Museum only enhances the Michigan Avenue streetwall, by both respecting it and defying it. While its sympathetic scale blends harmoniously, this piece of architectural ice simultaneously puts a contemporary fissure in the streetwall so many want kept cryogenically frozen. But indeed, there really is no time like the present and the Spertus Museum will be a constant reminder of that. Well, at least for a few years, after which it will be a distinctive keystone in the Michigan Avenue streetwall, as much a product of its time as the other bricks that comprise it.