WBEZ | Mies van der Rohe

The modernist suburban bank that pays homage to Mies van der Rohe

Tue, 18 Sep 2012 11:00:00 -0500

Villa Park's best known building might be the Odeum Expo Center, where — in just a matter of weeks, in fact — you can see "The Greatest Ferret Show on Earth" or experience the largest haunted house in Chicagoland. Take your pick.

But here's something else worth seeing: an iconic and beautifully-maintained BMO Harris bank at St. Charles Road and Villa Ave., designed by a disciple of architect Mies van der Rohe. Indeed, the midcentury bank's design was inspired by an unbuilt work by Mies.

Built in 1964 as Villa Park Bank, the flat-roofed, single-story bank has floor-to-ceiling glass walls and an open floor plan. The building is supported by a pair of exposed trusses running parallel to each other across the roof. A drive-up facility was later added (you can see it to the left of the photo above), borrowing on the same architecture and engineering principles as the main building.

The bank is a spectacular piece of modernism, particularly for a could-be-anywhere business strip with the usual run of fast-food places, dollar stores and the like. The bank was designed by architect Peter Roesch, who studied under Mies at IIT in the 1950s. His scheme for the bank was inspired by an unrealized Indianapolis drive-in restaurant Mies designed for theater chain owner Joseph Cantor in 1946.

Here is a model of that unbuilt restaurant (and, man, do I wish they'd built this):

The concepts behind the unbuilt restaurant would manifest in full in 1956 with the completion of Mies' world-famous Crown Hall on the IIT campus. There, four visible overhead steel girders attached to eight steel exterior columns support the structure and create open "universal space" inside the glass-walled structure.

Roesch is now 83 and retired. He has vivid memories of designing the bank in Villa Park.

"After it was built, they all thought it was a refreshing new idea and that made it something of a landmark in Villa Park," he said.

Roesch said the use of trusses was a way to overcome the poor and "trashy" soil conditions on the site. With the building's weight supported by something akin to a bridge structure that touches the ground in just four points, the expense of drilling numerous caissons through the bad soil was eliminated. Roesch studied Mies' 1946 restaurant as part of his masters' thesis at IIT and said he was able to improve a bit on the four exterior columns to make the design work better.

He also liked the idea of an all-glass bank.

"The critics said, 'What is that all-glass building?' I said 'It is a safe bank. You can see inside.' "

You can. As this vintage photo shows:

Like Mies, Roesch was born in Germany and was an architect there before moving to the United States.

"I am a modernist and a minimalist," he said. "When I got to Mies, my whole life changed. He was the kind of person I thought didn't exist: He built what he thought. I held on to him and learned from him."

Roesch had a long career as an architect and professor at IIT. With his firm Hammond & Roesch in the 1960s, he designed the notable Episcopal Church Center at 65 E. Huron.

Mies died in 1969, five years after the Villa Park bank was completed. Did the student ever take the master to see his work?

"I never took him there," Roesch said with a hint of regret. "I never knew if he saw it on his own. He was a very busy man — up to the end."

Roesch himself hasn't seen the building in decades. "It's the same with any good architecture. You have to photograph it the day it was built and keep your fingers crossed," he said. "I hope they didn't mess it up."

Nope. Not at all.

***

One last thing: A look at the unrealized house Mies designed for Joseph Cantor in 1946.

Famous architects step in to save the Prentice building

Thu, 26 Jul 2012 18:22:00 -0500

More than 60 architects, educators and historic preservationists are betting their famous names might help prevent demolition of the old Prentice Women’s Hospital.

Northwestern University owns the building and plans to tear it down for a research facility. Prominent architects, like Jeanne Gang and Frank Gehry, intervened on Wednesday and submitted a letter to Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

The architects called the clover-shaped building by Bertrand Goldberg a “breakthrough in structural engineering” and asked for landmark status.

Goldberg is a Chicago native who spent much of his career here and is best known for his Marina City towers. He studied under Mies van der Rohe at the Bauhaus in Berlin.

“The legacy of Bertrand Goldberg’s Prentice Women’s Hospital is unmistakable,” the letter says. “Chicago’s reputation as a nurturer of bold innovation and architecture will wither if the city cannot preserve its most important achievements.”

But on Thursday, Northwestern said it has not changed its plans to demolish the building. A spokesperson said that it’s “unsuitable for the kind of modern biomedical research building the University needs to build on the site.”

The university says a feasibility study showed the Prentice wouldn’t be adequate as research space and would cost too much to convert.

Listen to an extended excerpt from the interview with architect Dirk Lohan:

One of the well-known architects who signed the letter asking for landmark status, Dirk Lohan, doesn’t buy that argument.

He’s the grandson of Mies van der Rohe. Lohan’s legacy in Chicago involves the restructuring of classic old buildings like Adler Planetarium, Shedd Aquarium and his controversial addition to Soldier Field. He’s a fan of Goldberg’s building.

“These are the kinds of things that I think our city needs to think about, to rejuvenate older buildings that may not meet their original functions exactly the way they were meant to be,” Lohan said. “And I have a hard time believing that another use cannot be found to work within that structure.”

“Goldberg’s work was singular and idiosyncratic,” Lohan said. “He was a creative talent that worked in a way in contrast to the predominant modern direction that was popular at that time.”

Lohan said Goldberg’s distinctive use of cement helped him stand out during this period when many modernist architects, like van der Rohe, were working primarily with glass and steel.

The Prentice building’s concrete shell has been likened to a cloverleaf or flower petals.

“You could read all kinds of things in it,” Lohan said. “I think the building also has a very sinuous quality, and it was a women’s hospital. So to me, it expresses something about women’s bodies that I find attractive.”

The National Trust for Historic Preservation has joined the fight. It added the Prentice to its list of most endangered buildings last year.

The path not taken led to Frank Lloyd Wright

Sat, 16 Jun 2012 06:00:00 -0500

Y.C. Wong was extremely disappointed by his son’s choice of profession – even though the apple didn’t fall far from the tree.

He was hoping his son would follow in his footsteps and become an architect. Instead that son, Ernest C. Wong, grew up to be a landscape architect. He admits he didn’t tell his father what he really wanted to be: a park ranger or a social worker.

The career the younger Wong ultimately chose fulfilled what he describes as “a combo” of his interests: a love of the outdoors, a passion for social justice and a fascination with public space.

“It’s kind of his fault,” Wong says, referring to his late father. As a child, Ernie discovered The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces by William H. Whyte in his father’s home library. He was fascinated by the scholar’s 1980 study of what made New York’s parks and public squares successful or not, right down to how people chose their favorite park benches.

“It all started to come to fruition with me when I started to take my lunch breaks at the First National Bank Plaza,” Ernie says. “I would watch people during my lunch hour – how they would interact in these almost festival-like performances.”

The younger Wong pursued his interests and took Whyte’s work to heart. The portfolio of his firm, Site Design Group Ltd., includes some of Chicago’s most interesting and recently renovated public parks, including Palmisano Park (Stearns Quarry) in Bridgeport and Ping Tom Memorial Park in Chinatown. Wong currently has a bid in with several teams to work on the 28,000-square-foot field house scheduled to be built in the latter park by 2013.

Going back to Wong’s father, though, Y.C.’s disapproval of his son’s career choice is all the more ironic when you consider his particular pedigree.

According to his son, Y.C. Wong came to the U.S. from China in 1947, having received a scholarship to study with Frank Lloyd Wright at his Taliesin studio in Spring Green, Wis. But Y.C. never made it to Spring Green. Instead, he was waylaid in Chicago by another architect, who persuaded him to stay in town: Mies van der Rohe.

In the audio above, Ernie Wong offers up the fascinating story of how his father became a disciple of one of America’s most important architects, and how that enabled him to leave his own architectural legacy to the city of Chicago.

Dynamic Range showcases hidden gems unearthed from Chicago Amplified’s vast archive of public events and appears on weekends. Ernest C. Wong spoke at an event presented by the Illinois Humanities Council in May. Click here to hear the event in its entirety.

Gene Summers, architect of McCormick Place, dies at 83

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 02:39:00 -0600

Architect Gene Summers, whose flat-roofed lakeside McCormick Place building has been one of the city's most powerful expressions of modernism--and a target for open space advocates and a former mayor--since its completion in 1971, has died. He was 83.

The San Antonio-born Summers got his big break working with Mies van der Rohe from 1950 to 1966. One of the projects, Berlin's National Gallery completed in 1968 owed a debt, design wise, to Mies' Crown Hall at IIT. But as the next photo shows, the National Gallery--a dark, glassy building with a cantilevered roof--was also a near dress rehearsal for Summers' much larger McCormick Place, a building he'd design after leaving Mies' office and joining the Chicago firm C.F. Murphy Associates:

The McCormick Place project remains among the most controversial in history; a spectacular structure built in the wrong location. Summers' design replaced an earlier McCormick Place built in 1960 on the same site and designed by Edward Durell Stone.

Stone's cinderblock of a building burned down in a five-alarm fire in 1967:

C.F. Murphy Associates was hired to design the replacement hall. But to save money, the new building to be constructed on the foundations of the old. Summers came up with several schemes, including an unbuilt scenario in which the Arie Crown Theater and the conventional hall were two separate buildings on the site. What was built--an overhanging, structurally-expressive roof atop a dark glass box---was a far cry from the previous McCormick Place. Summer's building was graceful, forceful, modern, and Chicago.

But it was still on the lakefront, earning the unofficial title "The Mistake on the Lake." In an Art Institute of Chicago oral history, Summers said he tried to get Mies involved in the building's design, but architect told him, "Gene, I wouldn't touch that thing is the site was the Acropolis and the building were the Parthenon. Controversy I don't need at this time in my life." A young Helmut Jahn worked on the design. He'd later run the firm Charles F. Murphy started.

While in office, Mayor Richard M. Daley publicly ruminated twice about tearing down the convention center, calling it a "Berlin Wall" that created a barrier along the lakefront. And it does, although a more public use for the structure--now that McCormick Place has expanded into a series of larger buildings to the west--would alleviate that.

Summers led the design of Malcolm X College, 1900 W. Van Buren, before leaving C.F. Murphy Associates in 1973. He would wind up doing a range of things including develop real estate, restore Los Angeles' Biltmore Hotel, move to France, then return to Chicago to head IIT's College of Architecture from 1989 to 1993--the position his mentor Mies held 40 years earlier--before moving to California.

In that Art Institute of Chicago oral history, Summers said McCormick Place was the building of which he was the most proud. "[I]t was done under such trying conditions," he said. "To have pulled it off under those conditions, that was something." Even Mies, not long before his own death at age 83, sent a good word to Summers about the building taking shape on the lake.

"The structure was up and he was sick," Summers said. "He had [his companion] Lora Marx call. Lora called me one Monday and she said, 'Mies asked me to drive him by McCormick Place. We did, and he just wanted me to call you to say he thinks its a good building.' "