In Chicago, Three Architects Rise: With Big Names Tied Up, They Seize Opportunity
The Wall Street Journal, July 10, 1998
By Alexia Vargas
A building boom is beginning to erupt here in the cradle of American architecture, creating opportunities for a new generation of talented designers. The city’s most famous architects – Helmut Jahn, Adrian Smith and Dirk Lohan – are focused mainly overseas just as their hometown enters a new era of high-rise construction and renovation. Their absence is providing lesser-known architects with an opening to design some big and notable projects.
Getting that chance in Chicago is something special. This is where Frank Lloyd Wright created the Prairie Style and where Ludwig Mies van der Rohe pioneered the steel and glass box.
The modern, if less-loved, successor to those architectural giants is Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, whose Sears Tower and John Hancock Center stand like muscular sentries to the city’s skyline. The firm, the nation’s largest, is also a training ground for young and ambitious architects. Today, three of these Skidmore alumni are now out on their own, enjoying the largest commissions of their careers.
Economic Disarray
The opportunities come, in part, because the early 1990s recession brought new construction here to a near standstill. Mr. Smith, the design partner at Skidmore, and Messrs. Jahn and Lohan, whose firms bear their names, headed overseas to keep busy. When new construction revived here again in the mid 1990s, thanks to the strong economy, the smaller firms were able to fill a vacuum.
In the meantime, once-booming Asia has fallen into economic disarray, stalling many projects there.
Skidmore’s Mr. Smith, who designed the late 1980s, granite-clad AT&T building here, particularly rues not being more aggressive in chasing down business of residential developers in Chicago. Old downtown skyscrapers are converting to luxury-loft and condominium buildings, and across the city, big residential projects are replacing shuttered factories and other old buildings. “We’ve been overseas for a while,” Mr. Smith says. “We lost touch with residential developers.”
That is to the benefit of Lucien Lagrange. A stonemason’s son from a village just outside Paris, Mr. Lagrange came to the U.S. and joined Skidmore in 1968. Mr. Lagrange, now 57 years old, moved up to associate partner at Skidmore. Before leaving the firm in 1985, he designed the home for the Midwest Stock Exchange and Chicago Board of Options Exchange, crowned by a 40-story office building. It all straddles
the expressway at the south end of Chicago’s downtown Loop.
Starting out on his own without support employees wasn’t easy. His former co-workers at Skidmore rode a 1980s building binge. Filling in the skyline between Sears and Hancock, Skidmore built a much-praised Chicago home for NBC that evokes the Gothic Tribune Tower. Near the end of the boom, it built headquarters for Heller Financial Inc., an international commercial financial services organization.
For Mr. Lagrange, there wouldn’t be any 40-story towers those first years. During this period, Mr. Lagrange designed a downtown parking structure and a Michigan Avenue retail store for Escada, the pricey dressmaker. In the early 1990’s he did some design studies related to suburban hotels for Hyatt Development Corp., owned by Chicago’s wealthy Pritzker family. Smaller stuff, to be sure, but his work was getting noticed, and he was paying the bills.
Public Places
As the boom ended in the early 1990s, the big names went to Asia and Europe. Skidmore’s Mr. Smith began building a business in China, Malaysia and Singapore. Mr. Jahn, known for both daring successes, such as O’Hare International Airport’s United Airlines terminal, and his failures, most notably the oddly hued, spaceship-like State of Illinois building, spent increasing amounts of time in his native Germany. The size of the firm’s Chicago staff fell to 65 from 120. Mr. Lohan, grandson of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, also won commissions in Europe and Asia.
When the Chicago market began to stir again in the mid-1990s, Mr. Lagrange and some others were in good positions. Diane Legge Kemp, another former Skidmore architect, saw her new firm, DLK Architecture, capture co-designer work for the new Goodman Theater. The two-theater project aims to help re-establish the Loop as a major theater district.
DLK also is benefiting from a boom in public-sector building. Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley has spent mightily in recent years to spruce up the city’s public spaces, including parks, boulevards and schools. DLK managed sidewalk and street-light renovation along Michigan Avenue, for instance, that makes the entrance to downtown’s lakefront Grant Park more inviting. The firm is also handling an expansion and renovation of Northwestern University’s graduate school of business downtown.
Ms. Kemp, 49 years old, principal and president of DKL, says the firm has grown to 50 employees and that one of the biggest challenges today is finding staff to handle the workload.
James DeStefano, 60 years old, is also a former Skidmore architect. He was managing partner in Skidmore’s Chicago and London offices before starting his own firm in 1988. It now has 115 employees.
DeStefano & Partners snagged as a client developer Dan McLean, who has lead the way in recent years in building middle and high-end residential projects in the city of Chicago. Those projects have helped attract residents back to the city from the suburbs. DeStefano & Partners is architect on Mr. McLean’s biggest venture, the 13-acre, and $1 billion project along the mouth of the Chicago River, known as River East. It includes hotel, entertainment, retail and residential buildings.
Mr. Lagrange earned what arguably is the highest-profile assignment in Chicago’s latest boom, the 67-story Park Tower, a hotel and luxury condo project by Hyatt. The tower replaces a much smaller Hyatt that was torn down and faces the historic Chicago Water Tower and Pumping Station on Michigan Avenue, one of the few structures to survive the Great Fire in 1871. Mr. Lagrange “is more of a classic-style architect, and that fits better with the environment,” says John Ryden, Hyatt’s vice president of design and construction.
Many of the city’s most interesting retailers, hotels and restaurants surround the project. Hyatt chose Mr. Lagrange because of his earlier work for the firm. The assignment, begun in 1994, helped put his firm on the map. He has also won commissions to design Lakeside Square on the near South Side, a hotel, office, retail and residential project, and Sony’s Metreon in the touristy River North area, a hotel and movie-house development.
Mr. Lagrange is also working on the hotel conversion of the 1929 Carbide & Carbon Building, an ornate, 38-story office tower on Michigan Avenue.conversion of the 1929 Carbide & Carbon Building, an ornate, 38-story office tower on Michigan Avenue.
