Little John: Erie on the Park a bold exercise in design, echoing the Hancock Center
Chicago Tribune, October 10, 2002
By Blair Kamin
There are so many monuments to mediocrity rising into the sky west of Michigan Avenue these days that it is easy to miss bright spots such as Erie on the Park, the gutsy but elegant new condominium tower whose skeletal exterior bears an unmistakable likeness to the John Hancock Center, the X-braced giant called
“Big John.”
This is a bold exercise in bone-beautiful design…easily superior to the drab condo high-rises that are turning the blocks west of the Boul Mich into an urban dense-pack of unmitigated ugliness.
The tower’s vigorous modernism is all the more remarkable because its architect, Chicago’s Lucien Lagrange, has made his reputation as an anti-modernist— a designer of nostalgic, Beaux Arts dwellings like the soon-to-be-completed 65 E. Goethe St., a Gold Coast midrise with a sumptuous stone facade and a mansard roof right out of fin-de-siecle Paris.
To look at that building and Erie on the Park, with its frankly industrial vocabulary, is to wonder if two architects with entirely different design philosophies are simultaneously inhabiting the body of the 61-year-old Lagrange (or are, perhaps, vying for his soul)…
A bigger question: Should architects stick to —and meticulously refine—a single aesthetic approach in the manner of Ludwig Mies van
der Rohe, who famously said: “We don’t invent
a new architecture every Monday morning,”
or do these times, when no style reigns supreme, demand greater flexibility?
Lagrange clearly has taken the second road, and Erie on the Park, which is at 510 W. Erie St… bolsters his choice.
The 272-foot-tall, 125-unit tower, developed by Smithfield Properties of Chicago, soars above surroundings that are anything but Gold Coast—warehouses, grain elevators, water towers,
a newspaper printing plant along the Chicago River’s north branch, and a motley assortment of new condo towers and rowhouses. A Beaux-Arts building would have looked as out of place in this hard-edged part of town as a ball-gowned Lake Forest matron on the blood-stained floors of the old Chicago stockyards.
The project, which gets its name from a planned riverfront park, consists of a 27-story tower and, in back of it, a six-story parking garage. The tower is a narrow parallelogram that is sandwiched between brick office and warehouse buildings and occupies a railroad-right-of-way that once sliced on a diagonal through the site.
You might even dub Erie on the Park “Little John” for its resemblance to the…Hancock at 875 N. Michigan Ave.
On the high-rise’s northeast and southwest faces, diagonal steel braces - each three stories tall, painted white and shaped like an upside-down “V” or chevron - are stacked atop one another, much like the big X-braces of the 100-story Hancock…(The tower is framed and clad in steel because the building boom drove up concrete prices, causing the design team—which had planned on concrete—to consider steel instead).
The chevron braces are the most visible expression of a structural system, devised by Chicago engineers Thornton-Tomasetti, that holds down the tower’s cost and forms a rigid frame in its midsection. Additional diagonal braces are hidden in the walls between apartments, stiffening the building against the force of the wind. The system is smaller than the one at the Hancock, where the entire exterior —columns, beams and cross braces—forms a wind-bracing tube. (All 125 apartments are sold, according to developer W. Harris “Bill” Smith,
at prices ranging from $240,000 for a studio to $1.2 million for a penthouse).
Very Chicago
All this sounds very rational and very Chicago and, perhaps it should come as no surprise, despite Lagrange’s penchant for traditional forms. He is, after all, an alumnus of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the Chicago firm that produced the Hancock and Sears Tower. At Skidmore, he worked directly with architect Bruce Graham and engineer Fazlur Khan, the duo responsible for the structurally expressive giants…
Shaped in collaboration with Lagrange’s senior designer Michael Karlovitz (another Skidmore alum…), Erie on the Park is an instant landmark, an eye-grabber for drivers on the nearby Ontario and Ohio Street expressway ramps. It is…
a pleasure for pedestrians to behold as well.
Its big chevron braces and dramatic setbacks enable the tower to make the kind of powerful design statement that completely eludes much taller condo high-rises, like One Superior Place,
a 52-story cracker box at State and Superior…
The building’s 30-foot-tall entry along Erie turns out to be a welcoming outdoor plaza. And even the garage, despite its brutal street presence,
is a plus because it is tucked behind the tower…
It allows Erie on the Park to soar continuously upward, culminating with chevron-braces that open to the sky at the tower’s summit. That flourish, another example of Lagrange’s relaxed rationalism, at once celebrates the steel frame
and gives the tower a skyline signature…
The balconies simultaneously make the exterior of Erie on the Park more sculptural and more syncopated. Like the high-rises of the Swiss-born modernist Le Corbusier, they suggest a beehive
of activity within and set the tower apart from the monolithic Hancock, where the condominiums have no balconies.
This interplay between inside and outside is what ultimately distinguishes Erie on the Park. Lagrange has not only designed the shell of the building. He has planned the apartments, too, which turns out to be a blessing because he brought to them his traditional sensibility.
The apartments are not simply cubes of space, bloodless and rational, but dramatic interiors where movement is boldly choreographed to achieve maximum visual impact with minimal square footage.
The best example comes in a duplex on the 19th and 20th floors where the entry gives onto a staircase along the windows that has a drop-dead view of the downtown skyline. Yet it also can be found in smaller apartments, like the one-bedrooms where the sleeping area is placed near the building’s core, allowing the living room to stretch magnificently along the facade.
Satisfied Customers
There are more than a dozen types of apartment layouts, and residents seem quite satisfied with their quarters…
On the whole, Erie on the Park is a striking, provocative addition to the skyline—one of the finest buildings, along with the new Hotel Sofitel, to emerge from the current building boom.
The boldly modern structure indicates a new direction, both for its tradition-minded architect and for the sorry state of condominium design
in Chicago.
More broadly, it suggests that architects with
a split aesthetic personality just might do OK,
as long as they play different sides of the stylistic divide with the same panache Lagrange has summoned here.
