click images for large view
When our indefatigable correspondent Bob Johnson sent us the above photograph of the progress of VOA's stunning new 32-story. 469-feet-tall, glass walled "
Vertical Campus" (naming rights
still available) for Roosevelt University, we were reminded that a minor bit of history has just been rediscovered. And it's already living on borrowed time.
For the last forty years, the Vertical Campus site was taken up by the late, unlamented
Herman Crown Center, an infelicitous 19-story high design by Mittelbusher & Tourtelot, a firm perhaps best known locally for their work on the
Krannert Art Museum at the U of I, Champaign/Urbana. The Crown Center completely covered the north wall of Adler & Sullivan's 1889 Auditorium Building.
Over eight decades earlier, however, on Bastille Day, 1887, developer William Giles entered into an agreement with the fledgling Chicago Auditorium Association working out the details for the party wall that his 1875
Giles Building, a six-story, mansard-roofed structure designed by architect Otis L. Wheelock, would soon be sharing with the Association's massive new, Adler & Sullivan designed home.
With the Crown Center demolished, we're now able to see - for a brief period of time - a bit of architectural archeology. The Auditorium's north wall is now exposed. Most of it, that part butting up against the Giles, is alley brick. At the top however, above what was then the roofline of the Giles, a section of the Auditorium's north wall has a full finish, topped by a mini-loggia which mirrored that of the Auditorium tower, from which Adler, Sullivan, and Frank Lloyd Wright in their offices could look down - probably on multiple levels - on the Giles.
Soon this facing will again disappear, this time behind the new VOA Vertical Campus, which has its own, pre-made party wall. While the renderings of the new structure almost all emphasize the shimmering glass walls on three of its elevations . . .
. . . the northern elevation is quite different, and far more utilitarian, with what appears to be a shear, blank concrete wall rising for half the structure's height.
Obviously, this is anticipating future development to the north, on what is now a surface parking lot. Let's hope that the economy revs up fast enough so that we won't have to be staring at that towering mass of bare concrete for the next few decades.
I won't claim it merits a special trip, but if you happen to be in vicinity of Wabash and Van Buren, it might be worth looking up to grab a time travel glance at a Adler & Sullivan remnant that's again about to vanish into the steel and glass mists.
