Lagrange Leaving Imprint on Chicago
Chicago Sun-Times, December 10, 2001
By David Roeder
In Chicago, where architects are often cast as brash and heroic figures, the man to see if you want to build high-rise condominiums and have rich people buy them is a 61-year-old native of France who can barely make himself heard above the noise of traffic outside his Boul Mich office.
Soft-spoken but self-assured, Lucien Lagrange is the architect of choice for residential developers chasing the demand for living near downtown.
Lagrange believes in designs that project elegance and welcome. “Architecture has to send a message,” he said, and for the condo trade, that usually means an entranceway and facades that bring a Parisian aura to Chicago.
Some have said Lagrange’s work is too much of a throwback. He denies that the criticism wounds him, but pokes at the hypocrisy of architects who push avant-garde glass and steel, yet recline in homes of terra cotta or stone.
“You have to tune in to people’s lifestyles, and how they want to live,” he said. That attitude means he’s quite capable of modernist work, such as projects on the Near West Side where he and his developers figure buyers want an edgier look. One of his buildings under construction at 510
W. Erie proudly shows its steel skeleton.
“I think I’m a designer and, as such, I’m not just stuck in a style,” he said.
Right now, he has six major projects under way in Chicago, and three more are expected to have a 2002 launch. Lagrange designed a high-rise going up at 840 N. Lake Shore Dr., an exclusive eight-story building nestled in the Gold Coast at 65 E. Goethe, and his renovation of a Daniel Burnham-designed office building at 175 W. Jackson is nearly complete. Next year’s docket includes construction of a 49-story building at 21 E. Huron that starts with a Gothic base, out of respect for St. James Episcopal Cathedral across the street, then switches to glass with metal detailing. Also scheduled is the start of his renovation of the Blackstone Hotel, 636 S. Michigan, into the highest-priced condos on
the market.
Lagrange is shaping the city in a way he couldn’t have imagined when he first arrived in the turbulent summer of 1968. He was early in his architecture studies at McGill University in Montreal, having earned an undergraduate degree in engineering at Sherbrooke University, and was a passing acquaintance of Joseph Fujikawa, an associate of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. With the jauntiness of youth, he wrote to Fujikawa about getting summer work in that fascinating Chicago.
That led to his resume getting passed to Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP with a note that Lagrange was a “Mies-recommended person.” Doors opened for a series of summer stints at SOM.
He completed his studies and worked on his own in Montreal before returning to Chicago and SOM in 1978. At Chicago’s pre-eminent skyscraper firm, he was involved in the One Financial Place office tower that stands between two financial exchanges; the Dearborn Park residential complex and other jobs before heading out on his own in 1985.
Lagrange took no clients with him. “It was just me and my drafting table,” he said. But plenty of developers remembered both the aesthetic and engineering skills he brought to his work, and they sought him out. Today, his firm Lucien Lagrange and Associates employs 70 people.
He’s best known for his work on behalf of the Pritzker family and the late developer Bruce Abrams on the Park Tower at 800 N. Michigan, a 67-story combination of condos, retail and the Park Hyatt hotel. Scorned by many for height that’s equivalent to an 80-story building because of high ceilings, the tower doesn’t feel massive on street level. It bends gracefully, and balconies flow smoothly from the stone facade.
Buyers loved it; the top two floors are a penthouse that sold for $8 million as raw space, without even dry wall, and that’s believed to be
a record price for a Chicago residence.
“Everybody who bought into that building loves it,” Lagrange said before his eyes darkened.
“The critics were vicious about it, but that didn’t bother me.” It’s a testament to the value of reputation that Lagrange doesn’t consider Park Tower as his “breakthrough project.” The critical assignments of his firm’s early years, he said, were two proposals that were never built on the scale envisioned. One was a plan by U.S. Equities Realty LLC to add twin towers atop Union Station and the other a previous version of the Park Tower planned for 840 N. Michigan.
Go past that address today, and you’ll see a five-story building that includes FAO Schwarz and other retailers, a sculpted stone building with a clocktower in its corner frontage. It opened in 1990, but looks like a classic rehab. “It has aged very well,” Lagrange said. “There’s a certain warmth about it.” Designs had to be done and redone because it was to have been a 30-story building until financing vanished.
U.S. Equities Chairman Robert Wislow turned to Lagrange after deciding to pitch the Union Station plan to the owner, Amtrak’s board. Lagrange’s deadline was oppressive because he and Wislow had discovered just before the presentation deadline that the station was built
to accommodate two 22-story towers. He had only from a Friday to the next Monday to draw a plan for 1.5 million square feet. “I worked the whole weekend,” he said. “It was just like I was back in school. Fortunately, that’s where my training came into play. I can draw pretty fast. And when I was done, I looked at it and thought, ‘Hey, this is pretty good.’’’
The towers haven’t been built, but his toil got him the job to redesign Union Station’s corridors, adding food courts and improving passenger flow. But Wislow still remembers his work on the proposed towers with awe. “I have never seen an architect do what he did in such a short time,” Wislow said. “It was a sad thing that the market turned the way it did.’’
Developers like Lagrange’s aesthetic sense, but they hire him because of a reputation as a problem solver, which in their world usually means contriving how to wring revenue out of tight or oddly shaped spaces. “He’s a developer’s architect,” Wislow said. “He thinks of the space, and then he wraps it with design.”
“We have used Lucien on some very difficult small projects, and we have great respect for his abilities,” said Forrest Bailey, president of Draper and Kramer Inc. A Lagrange competitor, George Pappageorge, principal of Pappageorge & Haymes Ltd., praised his creativity and said he’s “capable of working with many different styles.’’
But a few in real estate observed that developers have a “herd mentality” and that hiring Lagrange might just be a fad. One prominent executive said Lagrange is far too fond of “neo-classical Parisian stuff that doesn’t exactly fit” in Chicago.
Lagrange insisted he has staying power and that his repeat business draws on results. Satisfaction comes, he said, when his units quickly sell out.
“I could make a lot more money if I didn’t insist on being careful about design. But I want to do what’s right for each particular location,” he said. “People who hire me get someone who remains closely involved in a project. It’s not like I attend one or two meetings and then you’re just dealing with an associate.”
He doesn’t apologize for his inclination toward classical forms, his defense giving a hint of the beams within his placid carriage. “Look around you. This is not a steel and glass city,” he said, while declining to boast about his contributions to it.
Had he done so, he might have asked what’s wrong with respecting the past, or with giving market-driven shelters a sense of class and friendliness. There’s something very Chicago about that.
