Chicago Sun Times
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Skyline could have a brave new look
Latest design of Spire similar to birthday candle
March 27, 2007
BY KEVIN NANCE Architecture Critic
Forget the drill bit. Forget the dancing lady and the twisting tree trunk and the curl of smoke. The new visual metaphor for Santiago Calatrava's Chicago Spire -- the latest and "final" design of which the Spanish architect presented at two public meetings on Monday -- ought to be that of a birthday candle. The twisting, 2,000-foot tower on the lakefront near the base of Navy Pier is once again as skinny as a birthday taper, topped off after dark with a shaft of light.
But the candle metaphor isn't appropriate just because that's what the tower design looks like. If built as currently envisioned -- and that remains a big if, with everything depending on developer Garrett Kelleher's ability to pull off this gargantuan project -- the Spire will mark nothing less than the birth of an entirely new Chicago skyline.
In his public comments on Monday, Calatrava suggested that his tower will fit organically into the existing skyline. It will not. Jutting up at midpoint of the north-south line between the Sears Tower and the John Hancock Center, the Spire will reinvent, as those great skyscrapers did in the 1960s and '70s, the way we visualize Chicago. This is both because of its awesome height -- 549 feet taller than Sears and a whopping 873 feet taller than Hancock -- and its uniquely poetic form.
Change is jarring, of course, but Calatrava's latest design makes this brave new world a welcome prospect. The new iteration retreats from the fattish, stubby, clumsy version offered late last year as a response to Kelleher's demand to add more units and do away with the antenna-like spire, which he saw as financially unfeasible. Spire 4.0, as we might call it, returns instead to the more slender, elegantly tapering form of the first two versions, resolving almost to a point at the top.
The twisting effect created by a gradual rotation of the floorplates, which had stalled well short of the summit at about 270 degrees in the previous design, has been restored to a full 360 degrees.
While the new version lacks the physical spire that topped the early designs so satisfyingly, the renderings unveiled at a meeting of the Grant Park Conservancy show that magical nighttime lighting effect, a 21st century answer to the great Art Deco spires of the 1920s and '30s.
In an interview, Calatrava was openly skeptical about this ghost-spire feature but seemed to recognize that it may be necessary to pass regulatory muster with the administration of Mayor Daley, who is famously fond of spires. "I think it's unnecessary," Calatrava told me, "but if that's what Chicago wants, I'll do it."
My guess is, Chicago wants.
And like the third version, 4.0 keeps the parking underground, offering instead an adjacent plaza that could become a small but signature public space. The plaza, which the renderings show featuring an abstract sculpture (with, naturally, a spiraling shape) by the architect himself, is shielded by a stand of trees from Lake Shore Drive, and transitions easily into the planned DuSable Park just east of the drive.
The renderings also depict the tower's soaring four-story glass lobby at its base, in which the building meets the ground with seven steel columns circling the concrete inner core. The lobby's transparency is important to Calatrava, obviously, in part because the Spire won't be in any substantial sense a public building. It will be primarily a residence for millionaires, but the architect wants the rest of us to be able to approach it, peer into it, dream ourselves inside it as much as possible.
He needn't worry. Even for Chicagoans who never set foot in it, which is to say most of us, the Spire will be the stuff of dreams. Open your eyes anywhere in this city and there it will be. Close your eyes and it'll be there, too.
