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| Chicago Old and New: A View toward the River from State Street (JWB, 2009) |
Aside from the architecture, the great thing about living in this city is the space one
finds to appreciate its world-class buildings. This is especially true as one approaches the river, where
the narrow channel provides just enough elbow room to admire the
view.
Pay attention . . .
look up once in awhile . . . and you often come across a setting such as the
one in the above photo. The old
and the new – a clash of styles, philosophies and cultures as Frederick
Dinkelberg’s 1926 Jewelers’ Building faces off against Adrian Smith’s Trump
Tower.
The classically
influenced Beaux Arts style was nearly over in Chicago when Dinkelberg designed
what is now 35 East Wacker. But
Dinkelberg had worked for the Burnham firm for his entire career, and Beaux Art
was the style that made Burnham and his crew the greatest, most prolific
architects in the world.
So it was that
style that Dinkelberg, working on his own in the 1920’s, chose for the building
that was to consolidate all of the Wabash Avenue jewelers in one grand
location.
It was an
innovative building with interior parking for hundreds of cars around its
core. But tenants were slow to
make the switch, and the Depression dimmed the building’s prospects even
further.
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| Detail from Dinkelberg's Flatiron Building (JWB, 2010) |
Poor old Frederick
Dinkelberg, designer of this great building that drew the curtain on an era of
grand, classically inspired design in Chicago, who drew the plans for the
Railway Exchange Building and the Heyworth Building, whose reach went as far as
Lower Manhattan where his Flatiron Building still stands.
Poor old Frederick
Dinkelberg . . . he made a fortune working for the greatest architectural firm
in the world and invested all of it in utilities stocks that were worthless
after October of 1929. As Alice
Sparberg Alexiou points out in The Flatiron, Frederick and his wife, Emily, were forced
to sell their spacious Evanston home and move to a small apartment on Kendall
Street in Chicago. The great
architect died in his sleep after the two had shared a coffee cake that Emily
had prepared to celebrate their fiftieth wedding anniversary. With no money to bury him, Emily turned
to the American Association of Architects, the members of which chipped in to
pay for the burial.
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| Trump Tower looks to the future (JWB, 2009) |
Across the river
it’s a far different story, for there stands the tallest reinforced concrete
residential building in the world, gleaming in the sun, ushering in a new era
of super-tall buildings. Its
architect, Adrian Smith, working for the Chicago firm of Skidmore, Owings and
Merrill, has gone on to design the tallest building in the world, the Burge
Khalifa in Dubai. And the rumor
mill has it that he has plans for a mile-high building on the drawing board.
No utilities stocks
for Mr. Smith or for the building’s developer, Mr. Trump, either. It’s into the future, straight up.
Walking down State
Street or standing on the DuSable Bridge, you can see these two great buildings
facing each other. One, the dream
of a Chicagoan who designed one of the great buildings in New York City and went
broke. The other the creation of a
New Yorker developer who asked a Chicagoan to build one of the great towers in
the Windy City and is pretty well-fixed for the time being.
Chicago. Old and New. Together.
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