A battle over a proposed condo tower on South Wabash raises a basic question: How do you strike a balance in architectural preservation? Compromise too much and you wind up with an entry arch standing in a park beside the Art Institute, a forlorn remnant of Louis Sullivan’s demolished 1894 Stock Exchange Building. Compromise too little and you wind up protecting irrelevant buildings.
At the permit-review meeting the battle lines were drawn in the usual way. In one corner were the developer, 42nd Ward alderman Burton Natarus, and some of the city’s planning bureaucrats. In the opposite corner were representatives of Preservation Chicago, the Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois, and community groups such as South Loop Neighbors and Friends of Downtown.
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“We see this as a real slippery slope,” David Bahlman, president of the Landmarks Preservation Council, told the committee. “We have no objections to the quality and the design of the building . . . [but] we can find no instance in Chicago or the U.S. where a new building has been permitted to be constructed in a local landmark district that is so completely out of scale with the heights of the surrounding historic structures. The landmarks commission’s own rules and regulations state that new construction in a landmark district must respect the ‘general size, shape, and scale of the features associated with the district.’ We therefore find it difficult to imagine how a 72-story building can be considered respectful of the urban fabric of an historic district . . . [where] all but one of the tallest structures in this district are less than 280 feet high, or about one-third the height of the proposed condo tower.”
The sole dissenting vote came from Phyllis Ellin, a National Parks Service historian. “What I’m being asked to do today,” she said, “is not to give my opinion of whether I like it or not as a matter of taste, but whether I think it meets the standards and guidelines of the commission. And I have to say I can’t say that I feel that it meets the standards. . . . It’s not in keeping with the size and scale of this particular district.”
The second major issue is whether the new project would be out of scale with the other buildings in the landmark district. When he said the proposed 816-foot tower would be three times that of the surrounding buildings, Bahlman was excluding both the 551-foot Pittsfield Building and the 438-foot Willoughby Tower, though he did say the Pittsfield and Willoughby were too slender to be intrusive. But Mesa’s building would be a marked improvement on recent towers such as the Heritage at Millennium Park, a massive slab of concrete and glass set on a north-south axis that looms over the Cultural Center. Mesa’s new tower would have a glass curtain wall, and it would be oriented east to west, tapering to a narrow profile where it faces Michigan Avenue, leaving a lot of blue sky to the north and south of it.
