Perkins+Will Dumps Mies; Heads to Wrigley

Perkins+Will, Chicago's largest architecture firm, with over $400 million in revenue, announced this morning that they're switching from one architectural icon to another.  Early next year, they'll be vacating their long-time home at Mies van der Rohe's IBM Building, now known as AMA Plaza, for new offices in the recently refurbished Wrigley Building, the classically-styled  that's been a floodlit icon at  the foot of North Michigan Avenue and the River since its opening in the 1920's.  Perkins+Will, established in 1935  has been at the IBM since 1992, when it announced it was moving its 330 employees into nearly 50,000 square feet of space.  The firm currently occupies the 35th and 36th floor at IBM/330, the last skyscraper designed by Mies before his death in 1969.

In making the move, the firm will be trading in Miesian minimalism for the ornately ornamented, glazed terra-cotta grandeur of Graham, Anderson, Probst and White's design, the first tower built north of the Chicago River.  The annex opened in 1924.  The original 425-foot-high south tower, completed in 1921, is dominated by the 20-foot-high clock at its apex.

After being acquired by Mars Candy, Wrigley sold their landmark building and in 2012 moved its last employees to the company's research facility on Goose Island.  The complex has undergone a major rehabilitation, including a rehab of the plaza between the two buildings that has seen the opening of a two-level story Walgreen's, Peet's Coffee, and, most recently, a two-story Ghiradelli Chocolate store opening along the plaza.

Perkins+Will will occupy over 60,000 square feet in the "top floors" of the north tower annex, configured into open-space offices, with employees also having access to a new rooftop terrace.  The firm moved up from fifth position on Architectural Record's just-published list of top U.S. architects, with its revenue approximately 2/3 domestic and 1/3 international.

Full text of this morning's press release after the break.

The Wrigley Building Chronicles 

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An Affectionate Last Look at a Building Not Worth Saving: Wreckers descend on the Downtown Court Club

Mies Goes Soft: At the IBM Building, The Langham Chicago Pushes Against the Envelope

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Can Mies be bent without breaking?  “Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space,” he said, and in his buildings he sought to capture the truth of his time, with God him(her)self lurking in the details.  Is there an expiration date to that kind of truth?  How well can Mies's vision endure nearly half a century after his death?  We're about to find out. 

Rendering courtesy Langham Hotels

Wednesday, July 10th, is the big day, the opening of The Langham Chicago in the 52-story IBM Building, at Wabash, State and the river, the last skyscraper designed by Mies. As we've related in the previous two parts of this series, Apotheosis of the Skyscraper, and How Do You Get to AMA Plaza?, it's been a long road from the 1972 dedication of a state-of-the-art skyscraper for IBM, a state-of-the-art tenant, to a very different, stripped-down kind of economy that saw IBM abandon its namesake tower and the building largely empty out.

In 2006, the IBM was set to go residential, first with condos, and then, two years later, with a hotel.  After the 2008 crash, after pouring in millions, the developer decided the Chicago market couldn't support another 300 rooms of hospitality.  Work stopped until 2010, when the property was bought out by Langham Hotels, who had apparently decided there might be room for another big hotel, after all. 

Chicago will be the latest outpost of a burgeoning global chain that began with the acquisition of what was then the Langham Hilton in London's Portland Place.  The Langham was one of the first ultra-luxury hotels.  Constructed in 1866 for the astronomical sum of £300,000 sterling, it was declared open by no less than the Prince of Wales, with a guest roster down through the decades including everyone from Mark Twain to Princess Diana (regrettably, not together.)

Langham Hotel, London - image courtesy Langham Hotels

During World War II, the hotel became offices for the military and, later, for the BBC, which hatched a plan in 1980's to raze the historic structure for an office block designed by Norman Foster.  Instead, it underwent a £80,000,000 renovation and re-opened as the Langham Hilton in 1991.  In 1997, the hotel was acquired by the hospitality division of Hong Kong's Great Eagle Holdings Limited, the real estate powerhouse run by legendary developer Victor Lo.

In 1980, Lo persuaded his brother Dr. Lo Ka Shui to give up a career as a cardiologist to join the Great Eagle board, and since 2003 he's been the Executive Chairman of the Langham Hospitality Group, heading up an ambitious expansion plan to open 50 hotels in the next 5 years, predominantly in Asia.  In the U.S. the chain bought up existing properties and set up outposts in Boston, Pasadena and, in May of this year, New York.

Now it's the Chicago's turn, with 316 upscale rooms - the smallest over 500 square feet- and over 15,000 square feet of event facilities at The Langham Chicago.

When Langham acquired the property, some of the heavy lifting - including carving out multi-story public spaces - had already been done by the previous developer before they put their project on ice.  [Or maybe not - see the comments below.](Goettsch Partners has remained the local architect of record.) “It's amazing,” said architect Dirk Lohan, ”they managed to take beams out and make two story [spaces].  They ripped everything out, the steel beams, and then reinforced when necessary.  I remember we did that years ago in the Dirksen Building, to make more federal courtrooms.”

Rendering Courtesy Langham Hotels

“Of course we never thought it would become a hotel one day, but it is interesting that, because of the modularity of the building and it's five foot module, the rooms all are based on the 15 foot width - the minimum room is three windows, which is wider than almost all other hotels." Ceiling height is a generous nine-and-a-half feet.

John Rutledge of Oxford Capital, which retained a minority interest in the hotel after the floors were resold to Langham, told Crain's Chicago Business that the cost of building out the former office space was half the cost of new construction.   In addition, the previous developers got the IBM designated an official Chicago Landmark - the newest building to be so listed.  The Trib's Karoun Demirjian reported that nearly 75% of the estimated $139 million cost of the renovation will qualify for ‘Class L’ incentives that will reduce property taxes over the next 12 years.

First floor lobby, Rendering Courtesy Langham Hotels

With designation comes oversight.  The landmarking ordinance for the IBM includes protection for the ground floor lobby, so the Langham brought in  Lohan, Mie's grandson, to work on the design, and he strikes a balance that respects Mies's original even as it changes it.  The uninterrupted sweep of the lobby is gone, but an inferred permeability remains. “There are actually two walls,” says Lohan.  “Where you come in, there is a vestibule first, which has a glass wall to the office lobby and another glass wall to the inner lobby, with glass doors.”  

In the vestibule, there's a big clunky wooden cabinet for storing guests' luggage.

In the Lohan-designed lobby, itself, the bronze beaded curtain along the east wall seems much more insistent installed than it appeared in the renderings, but the lightly framed glass of the separator wall passes the ‘almost nothing’ test.

Images Courtesy Langham Hotels

The lobby's art, selected by Lohan and Catherine Lo, include a head by Jaime Plensa (left), the artist behind Millennium Park's Crown Fountain, and a large painting by Enoc Perez (right).  Eventually, a work by Taiwanese sculptor Ju Ming is slated to be the first permanent artwork ever placed on the building's south plaza.

The Landmarks Commission allowed one change to the building's protected exterior, and it's an unfortunate one.  A sub-canopy has been added beneath the wider one of the original design.  The stated reasoning was to provide better protection  for guests waiting for cabs, but since the arcade that wraps the lobby already affords that, it's much more likely the actual objective was for a visual marker for the hotel's entrance.  Polished bronze, it's very, very bright and shiny.  With fussy scoring on the sides and a phalanx of light bulbs beneath,  it looks a bit like a flattened game token in an overpriced Monopoly set.

“The design of the upper floors,” said Lohan, “is very soft, very non-Miesian . . . probably based on the understanding of the British firm Richmond.  Very much a continuation of the Langham brand identity and feeling.  And that's what people who go from one of their hotels to another expect, a certain level of design.”

And this is crux of the matter, the tension that comes from inserting a 21st Century luxury hotel into a 20th Century Mies van der Rohe box. The glory of Mies is in his mastery of form.  While few would emulate his love of luxurious materials, his concept of universal space found favor in innumerable cheapened knock-offs, not for its poetics, but for the way it dovetailed with the demands of a supply chain economy to transform everything possible into an interchangeable commodity.   In the hands of others, Mies's elegant towers became the massive floorplates of buildings like Sears Tower, where workers are buried deep in the bowels of the building, far away from any window.

The IBM Building worked because, whether you were talking about open floors of cubicles,  extruded workbenches, or perimeters of executive offices, the standardized spaces flowed unobtrusively behind the perfect Miesian curtain wall. For a high-end hotel, such reticence is not practicable.  A grand hotel like The Langham is theater.  “I don't want realism” Blanche Dubois once famously remarked, “I want magic.’

Image Courtesy Langham Hotels

Enter Richmond London, “Over 45 years ago, we set the benchmark for international hospitality design and have been at the forefront ever since.”  Unlike Lohan's lobby, Richmond's design of the hotel floors was unencumbered by Landmarks Commision oversight.

The one great carry-over from Mies is how the hotel's floor-to-ceiling windows open up the guest rooms to dramatic views, especially those overlooking the river across the south plaza.   The trick of a grand hotel, however, is transforming what is, in reality, a prolific extrusion of largely standardized guest rooms into an illusion of individualized, high-end domesticity, complete with 55" flat-panels.  And so all the useless things Mies stripped away - the mouldings and closets and bathrooms with more marble than a royal tomb - become essential symbols of the luxury experience.

I asked Lohan what his grandfather would have made of it all.  “I think he maybe would have chuckled a little bit, but I also feel that we would have accepted it because it is not visible to the outside . . . Despite of all of this the outside of the building remains as is, because the windows are tinted.  You can't see that there is a real change inside.  The only visible part that's different is the ground floor lobby that I'm doing.  The rest you don't see.”

With all due respect, I would have to suggest that Lohan may have miscalculated a bit here.  To me, the changes brought by the Langham have changed the IBM's appearance from the outside, without disturbing so much as a single I-beam mullion.

Even the guest room floors read differently from the office floors they replaced.  Instead of the continuous strips of lit windows, emphasizing the flowing space, the guest rooms appear to light up on the facade as isolated pixels, breaking up the visual sweep. And then when you come to public amenity floors just above the entrance lobby,  the visual difference, most especially at night, spills past the curtain wall to upset the subtle balance of Mies's original conception.

In that design, Mies followed Louis Sullivan's concept of the parts of a skyscraper corresponding to the components of a classical column.  In the case of the IBM, the base of the column is the recessed lobby. Just above it is the tall shaft, one identical office floor after the other, rising continuously to the top the building, where the visually distinct mechanical floors comprise the capital.  Three parts, all in one unifying 695-foot-high wrapper.

Now all those often double-height spaces a hotel requires - the check-in lobby, the ballrooms, Chicago's first Chuan spa, the 67-foot swimming pool, the open-kitchen restaurant designed by David Rockwell - have changed how the outside of the building reads. One of the basic conceits of a Mies skyscraper - the dark tower resting atop a pillow of light - is subverted.

Now the the glow of the tall lobby floor must compete with floors of double-height spaces with ornate chandeliers and pink accent lights.

According to Langham Managing Director Bob Schofield, a continuous 30-foot-long, 18-inch-high video screen is designed to be “a beacon, if you like, in our second floor where our restaurant is located and the lounge is located.  It's on Wabash.  So if you're coming over on the bridge, you're going to see that light up on the second floor and it's hopefully going to track people in.”

Treatment Room, Chuan Spa - Image Courtesy Langham Hotels

The irony is that, with the AMA and other banner tenants moving in, if the developer had just held on, it might well have filled up floors 2 through 14 (actually 13, but you know the superstitions) without any recourse to a hotel.  But what's done is done.  It's not unsubtle, and it's not a crime.  It's reversible.  But for the forseeable future, the Langham is stretching Mies's aesthetic in ways that will be debated for a long time to come.

Lohan, for one, thinks Mies would have been accepting.  “I asked him,” said Lohan, “what he felt should be done with his buildings as time goes on.  Because even then there were people who were so enamored that, if you touch a Mies building, they go to the barricades.  I don't feel that way, because he said, ‘this is not for me to decide, whether you and the future generations feel these buildings are worthy of preservation.  Some of them are and others are not.’  And I think he's absolutely right.  I feel that same way.”

Read More:

• The Langham Chicago official website
• IBM Building Landmarks Designation Report
  
  
• Part One -  Apotheosis of the Skyscraper:  The Rise of Mies van der Rohe's IBM Building.
• Part Two -  How Do You Get to AMA Plaza? High-tech, decline and revival at Mies van der Rohe's IBM Building.
• Five Things I Learned from Dirk Lohan about Mies van der Rohe's IBM Building

• The Ninotchka of River North: George Schipporeit's IBM Self-Park

How Do You Get to AMA Plaza? High-tech, decline, and revival at Mies van der Rohe's IBM Building

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The second of what now looks to be three parts.  Read Part One - Apotheosis of the Skyscraper: The Rise of Mies van der Rohe's IBM Building 

The Cutting Edge Technology behind the IBM Building

Functionally, Mies van der Rohe's IBM Building was ahead of its time, and to a large degree, it was because of the client.   By the time construction began on its new Chicago Headquarters in 1969, IBM was booming.  Over the previous decade, its workforce had doubled to a quarter-million people, and sales had nearly quadrupled, to over $7 billion. With profits of nearly a billion dollars, there plenty of cash for a trophy tower like the one they hired Mies to design, which consolidated its 4,500 Chicago area employees from 15 different locations into one structure. 

After suffering criticism over how, in the glare of the sun, the almost floor-to-ceiling glass at the two towers of his path-breaking 860-880 North Lake Shore Drive heated up the apartments like ovens, Mies wondered aloud in who-will-rid-me-of-this-troublesome-priest fashion why someone didn't come up with a solution.  By the time IBM got going, they had.

At the IBM, the windows were bronzed-tinted both to color co-ordinate with the facade's bronze-anodized aluminum and to filter out UV rays.  Instead of the then standard single-glazed, metal

curtain wall, which leaked unwanted heat and cold into the interior, windows at the IBM were double-glazed, an insulating air pocket between the panes.  A plastic PVC thermal barrier was

photograph: Commission on Chicago
Landmarks Designation Report

inserted between the exterior and interior layers of the curtain wall, blocking the radiation of heat or cold along the metal.

One of the great enemies of all buildings is moisture.  Skyscrapers compounded the problem. As high winds rush along the facades, air pressure rises along the surface relative to the interior, forcing water through the countless tiny imperfect gaps.  At the IBM, the small holes were made  a deliberate part of the design, engineered into the curtain wall to direct the air to flow into the voids of the panels, equalizing  pressure and minimizing condensation.

The HVAC system, designed by co-architects and structural engineers C.F. Murphy, was equally innovative.  The IBM was all-electric, including the boilers.  Working with Carrier Corp., a state-of-the-art air conditioning system was developed that captured and recycled heat generated by workers and computers - including two full floors of mainframes in IBM's data center - and redirected it where needed.  A weather station on the roof and a series of monitors throughout the building streamed data to a central IBM 1800 series computer that continuously analyzed the feedback to optimize conditions floor-by-floor and space-by-space.  The series 1800 also ran the IBM's security system, described admiringly, if a bit anxiously, as ‘practically Orwellian.’

None of this came cheap.  “The building was . . . fairly expensive at that time,” recalls Dirk Lohan, who as Mie's grandson had come from Germany to Chicago in 1957 to work in his grandfather's office.  “I think it cost $33.00 a square foot.”  (The gold - bronze? - standard was Mies's Seagram Building in New York, which a decade earlier had come in at $45.00 per square foot.)  The curtain wall alone cost 35 to 50% more than typical single-glazed facades of the time.

It quickly paid off, however, especially after the 1973 Oil Embargo sent energy prices soaring.  In the three coldest months of the winter of 73-74, the IBM used 42% less energy to heat than the average of a sample of 13 comparable buildings.  The structure won the Federal Energy Commission's first Midwest Excellence Award for Energy Conservation.  The aluminum cladding proved much more durable than the painted steel of the Federal Center, which required expensive rehabs over the last decade.

In 2002,  the IBM found way to become more sustainable when Thermal Chicago Corporation constructed their P5 water plant under the plaza, a 15,000 ton capacity facility that's part of what's described as the ‘world's largest interconnected district cooling system’.  Thermal Chicago provides a constant supply of 34 degree water to over 45,000,000 square feet of space in 100 buildings, via a 14 mile system of pipes connected to five different plants throughout the Loop and River North.  Heat exchangers are used to transfer the cold from the Thermal Chicago system to the pipes of the water systems of the served buildings.  Unlike the other four plants, which cool water with ice generated in the middle-of-night when energy charges are at their lowest, the 1,600-ton Trane chillers in the P5 facility under IBM Plaza pull chilly water from the Chicago River.

map courtesy Thermal Chicago Corporation

The final working drawings for the IBM were finished in July of 1969.  The following August 17th, Mies van der Rohe died at Wesley Memorial Hospital, aged 83.  On October 22, 1971, the first of 2,100 IBM employees began to move into the new building.   Less than a year later, September 20, 1972, a band played and a fireboat shot streams of colored water as a large crowd that included IBM Chairman T. Vincent Learson and Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley gathered on the plaza for the IBM Building's formal dedication and the unveiling of sculptor Marino Marini's bust of Mies, which remains on display in the lobby to this day.

IBM got away with not including the minimum of 402 parking spaces Chicago zoning required for a  new building the size of their's by developing a garage on a smaller site just across Kinzie to the north, originally purchased for a possible second future tower.   The resulting $3.5 million, 12-story IBM Self-Park, designed by architect George Shipporeit of Lake Point Tower fame, may be the perfect bustle - detached by a cross street. As we've written previously in The Ninotchka of River North, the structure, with its facade of closely-spaced strips of Corten steel, is reviled by many.  During the day it can look a bit monolithic.  At night however, when the Corten strips dissolve under the back-lighting into a delicate cage animated by the moving headlights, it becomes a stunning backdrop to the IBM.  As Mies hides structure behind an I-beamed curtain wall, Schipporeit reveals it framing voids of light.  To me, the artistry and the counterpoint makes this one of the most magical places in Chicago.

The Agony of Real Estate and the Years of Decline

In 1996, IBM sold the building to Blackstone Real Estate Advisors for $120 million.   In 2009, Blackstone turned around and sold it to Prime Group Realty Trust for $239 million.  Between then and now, Prime has been through a succession of actions  - some successful, some abortive, often accompanied by heated litigation - to sell, buy back or take back the company that make a fascinating story that's simply too dizzying to recount here.  Prime's continuing control of the IBM is the only constant.

At the dawn of the new Millennium, a negotiation between two of the new century's more energetic scoundrels saw Conrad Black, a/k/a Baron Black of Crossharbour,  a/k/a federal prisoner number 18330-424, capping his looting of the Sun-Times by selling its building to Donald Trump, who wasted little time in pulling it down to dust.

Chicago Sun-Times Building catching on fire during demolition

Suddenly, IBM tenants were facing the prospect of no longer gazing out their windows past the low-slung Sun-Times structure towards the gleaming, cream-colored elegance of the Wrigley Building, but into the rooms of and residences of the telescoping Trump International Hotel and Tower, soaring 40 stories and nearly 500 feet above the IBM's rooftop.  Before an office component was dropped from the Trump project, it was reported it was being marketed to IBM tenants by reminding them how the Trump would be blocking their views.

Gradually, IBM's presence at its namesake building declined.  In 2005, the last 700 employees relocated to the new Hyatt Center on Wacker, leaving behind 280,000 square feet of vacant space and a building now renamed after its address, 330 North Wabash.   Shortly thereafter, mega-law firm Jenner & Block, at 325,000 square feet 330's largest tenant, announced they would be leaving for a new skyscraper at 353 North Clark designed, ironically enough, by the firm of Dirk Lohan.  A deal with Mesirow Financial to become the IBM's new anchor tenant and assume naming rights also fell through when Mesirow decided instead to join Jenner & Block at 353 North Clark.

Prime Group, visions of doom dancing in their head, went through a succession of unsuccessful fixes.  First it toyed with selling off the building in pieces as office condos.   When that went nowhere, the plan became converting floors 3 through 14 into 275 condominiums, and switching more floors to residential as they became vacant.  When that went nowhere, Prime teamed up with Oxford Capital to turn the floors into a hotel.  In the fall of 2007, they launched an effort to get 330 North Wabash made an official Chicago landmark in order to qualify for the lucrative Class L  incentives, offering a partial 12 year holiday from property taxes.  Despite intimations from Landmarks Committee Chairman Alderman Anthony Beale that he would block designation until he received assurances that the hotel would be unionized, official designation was approved February 6, 2008, making 330 North the newest building in Chicago to ever become a landmark.

In March of 2008 it was announced that a joint venture between LaSalle Hotel Properties and Oxford Capital was paying $46 million to acquire floors 2 through 13 plus a portion of the first floor for a ‘super-luxury’335-room hotel, which they expected to spend $185 million in creating.

You have to wonder.  Was the name the partners chose for their joint venture - Modern Magic Hotel LLC - a kind of Freudian slip betraying their actual appraisal of their prospects?  Modern Magic wasted no time in getting to work on the building, removing beams to create two-story public spaces for the hotel.  It was a time of record occupancy and room rates, but Chicago's hospitality industry was already working feverishly to remedy that prosperity with 9,000 planned, under construction, or proposed new hotel rooms.  The hotel at 330 was already late to the party, and when the great crash came, the development was put on ice.


So, are you still with me on all this?  Anyway, that's how things stood until December of 2010, when Langham Hotels actually thought they could see the magic in Modern Magic, and bought out LaSalle and Oxford for $58.8 million, an $8 million loss from what the joint venture had already spent on the purchase and build-out.  Oxford retained a minority interest.

And within a year, everything was coming up roses at 330 North Wabash.  Law firm Latham & Watkins LLP announced they were leaving Willis Tower to take up 160,000 square feet at IBM 330 North Wabash, and another 100,000 square feet was leased by association management firm SmithBucklin, leaving the Equitable Building at 401 North Michigan.

Then, in December of last year, le bon temps really started to roulé, when the American Medical Association announced it would be abandoning its namesake 1990 skyscraper designed for them by noted Japanese architect Kenzo Tange to take up to 300,000 square feet at 330 North Wabash, encompassing much of the space Jenner & Block had left empty.  When they officially move in this coming September 3rd, the building will take on its third name:  AMA Plaza.

The AMA may be the frosting on the cake, but the starting point for the turnaround at IBM Plaza, 330 N. Wabash, AMA Plaza was the Langham.  That's another great story, and it will be the third and final - we promise - installment in this series. With lots of pictures.  We promise.  And if you're thinking this series is really, really long, remember that War and Peace, in the Pevear./Volokhonsky translation, comes in at 1,273 pages.

Next: The Apotheosis of the Skyscraper - How Mies's Spartan IBM Gained New Life by Going Soft

Read Also:

Part One -  Apotheosis of the Skyscraper:  The Rise of Mies van der Rohe's IBM Building.

Apotheosis of the Skyscraper: The Rise of Mies van der Rohe's IBM Building

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Destroy them.  Destroy them all.

Do you think glass box skyscrapers are the devil's spawn?  Do you just want to drive a stake through their Miesian heart?  Well, you may be in luck.  A  new report from ‘green’ consultants Terrapin Bright Green proposes demolishing and replacing pretty much every Manhattan skyscrapers erected from 1958 to 1973.  (Maybe keep a couple like Seagram and Lever House as souvenirs, charms on a cheap bracelet.) Terrapin says all those modernist towers constitute a lost generation, too energy inefficient to ever be made environmentally responsible.  And it must be true because they're not only ‘Green’ but ‘ Bright Green’.  They say you can replace all those buildings with 44% more square footage and expend 5% less energy.  Developers - not to mention architects contemplating those juicy replacement projects - are salivating.  And all that embedded energy that would be lost in the carnage?  Fuggaedaboutit!  It'll be recovered by the replacement buildings in just a decade-and-a-half.  Or maybe three.  Just in time for a new generation of hucksters to discover how all those structures the Terrapin report is shilling for harbor defects so offensive to public morals that they, too, must be consigned to the chopping block.

Given how Chicago seems increasingly to judge itself on how close we ape New York (see streets turned into canyons and forward-facing subway seats), is it only a matter of time before we can rid ourselves of all of our own Miesian towers?  Illinois Center?  Equitable and Metcalfe?  The Daley and Federal Centers? Dump 'em all in the lake and let 'em sink like Crown Hall in Stanley Tigerman's The Titanic.

Only don't expect the IBM, the Mies van der Rohe skyscraper now known by its address, 330 North Wabash, to be anywhere near the beginning of the line.  Not only, as we wrote previously, is it much more energy efficient by virtue of being one of the first curtain wall designs in Chicago to include a thermal break, the building is adapting to its times in ways previously unimagined.  Conceived as an office building, a large chunk of floors are in the finishing stages of conversion into the Langham Chicago hotel, set to open in July. (More in Part Two)

The story of the IBM is a case study of how the confluence of design, technology and real estate create a great skyscraper, and how it is used, abused and adapted it over time.

In the 1950's, no corporation said ‘modern’ more than IBM.  Making its Chicago home a 1913 building at 618 South Michigan, it replaced the Burnhamesque classical facade with a flashy glass curtain wall.  By the mid-60s, in the throes of explosive growth, IBM was looking both for more space and to make a architectural statement.

In 1967, the company entered negotiations to buy 1.5 acres at Wabash along the north bank of the
Chicago River.  It then hired the most famous architect in Chicago, Mies van der Rohe, for what would be his last skyscraper design.  When the 80-year-old Mies was taken to the location in his wheelchair, he gazed down at what was originally a crowded railyard and then an abject surface parking lot, and was said to have remarked “Where's the site?”

The challenges were many.  The site was pinched in at the center by the angled right-of-way of Wabash Avenue.  The IBM property had been acquired from Field Enterprises, then the owners of the Chicago Sun-Times, which  in 1957 had opened a new headquarters building, designed by Naess and Murphy, just across the street. As part of the sale, the Sun-Times retained the right to use below-grade space on the southward portion of the IBM site as a storage facility for huge spindles of newsprint, making it impossible to address the river in any meaningful way.  The new building would also have to be constructed so as to not disturb the below-grade train tracks that brought in the newsprint.

photograph: The Chuckman Collection

To accommodate the part of Wabash avenue that cut into the site, Mies had originally come up with a very un-Miesian design, reduced at the center and wider to the north and south.  “We of course rebelled,” said architect Dirk Loan, Mies's grandson, who had come to work in his office.  “We said why don't we go and talk to the city about IBM acquiring it.  And in the end, they did.”  And so the tantalizing idea of a Mies ‘U-shaped’ building faded forgotten into history.  The standard central elevator core was, in the IBM, split into two to accommodate the rail tracks running beneath the building.  Along the river, a shear wall drops from the plaza to the river, with a desultory staircase leading downward close to the bridgehouse.

The building that Mies created tends to be ranked by historians in a category below New York City's Seagrams or 860-880 North Lake Shore Drive, but the IBM remains an urban masterwork, taking command of the site with grace and proportion - 275 feet by 125 feet by 695 feet high, set back from the river by a generous plaza. 

Mies liked to put his buildings on a plinth, but at the IBM, that plinth is almost mannerist, dictated by the strange surface conditions of downtown Chicago, where much of the city was raised up out of the muck over a century ago.  As it runs past the IBM, Wabash Avenue, like Michigan Avenue to east, is raised a full story above the natural level of the city, and it's flush with the IBM's ground floor.  State Street, however, to the IBM's west, starts off closer to natural level, and gradually rises up to meet the level of the State Street Bridge. 

At the IBM's south plaza, State Street is a few steps up from the street, but by the time it gets to the to the north edge of the building's site, it's a full level lower.  A grand granite staircase rises from street level up to the building's smaller north plaza. 

The story that the IBM was deliberately placed to block views of non-Miesian round towers of Bertrand Goldberg's Marina City from Michigan Avenue was countered by project director Bruno Conterato, who said the IBM's placement was designed to relate both to Marina City and the Sun-Times Building.  “By going well back on the site,” he told Inland Architect, “we in effect set up a line of three towers, since the Marina Towers are canted on their site, with the east structure farther north than the west one.”

The lobby floor is a soaring 26 feet high. “We could have attempted to alter the lobby's height,” said Conterato, “to achieve a perhaps more human scale, but that would have ruined the overall scale of the building.  It would have looked like a sawed-off building if we had designed a lobby less high.”

As in other Mies skyscrapers, the effect of that open, clear lobby is to ‘dematerialize’ the building.  The curtain wall stops at the lobby's ceiling.  The outer columns descend to the ground, forming an open arcade around the recessed, glass-enclosed lobby.  At night, the dark tower seems to float above a pillow of light.

The elevators are faced in travertine, with Conterato traveling to marble quarries near Rome to supervise the cutting of the stone so that the grain would match perfectly across the panels mounted in the lobby.  The same granite and gridlines of the lobby flooring extend under the glass and out onto the plazas in a continuous flow.  All standard Miesian touches.

Left: Federal Center; Right: IBM Building

There are a couple things, however, that are a bit different about the IBM.  The cladding is not the bronze of the Seagram or painted steel of the Federal Center, but bronze-anodized aluminum.   At the Federal Center, the window frames are recessed from the spandrels; at the IBM, it's the spandrels that are recessed and the window frames that are raised, providing a more articulated facade, especially when embroidered with snow.

Even so, the IBM could be said to be the apotheosis of the Miesian skyscraper.  It's perfectly autonomous - no bustle like at Seagrams or offset towers as at 860-880.  It's set on its own hill, like the Acropolis.  Although now hemmed in by the Trump Tower to the east, the open view along the river is inviolably powerful.  Base, shaft and capital (mechanical floor) all in one volume, a perfect grid both in plan and section.  Windows, taller than wide, in continuous ribbons between brawny spandrels that lock in the horizontal even as the trademark Mies i-Beam mullions, rising from top to bottom in unbroken sweep, proclaim the vertical like a hundred arrows pointing heavenward.

Has any other architect  - including even Louis himself - ever bested Mies in realizing Sulivan's vision of the tall building as ‘every inch a proud and soaring thing, rising in shear exulation that from bottom to top it is a unit without a single dissenting line.’?

NEXT:  The IBM Goes from Lost to Soft