CITYSPACE: IN CHICAGO, GENIUS WITH A TWIST

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The colossal success of the 24.5-acre Millennium Park, with its Frank Gehry performance pavilion, distinguished by a bed head of titanium curls and graced by a lawn vast enough to seat 7,000 people, has sparked a worldwide interest in Chicago. The streets are clean, the roofs are green. It is intriguing people more than New York these days. And, what’s this? Something that curves? Not only Calatrava’s Spire, but the 82-storey Aqua tower by Jeanne Gang, formerly of OMA/Rem Koolhaas in Rotterdam, midway through construction. Gang is a woman whose firm has been catapulted onto the world stage ever since it started sculpting towers with solar panels. Aqua’s architect of record, Loewenberg & Associates, assigned Studio Gang to overturn the “deadly Soviet qualities” of Loewenberg’s previous attempts at towers, in the words of Benet Haller, the city of Chicago’s director of urban design, who met with me at Chicago city hall last week.

To walk through Aqua in the pouring rain the other day with project architect Mauricio Sanchez was to experience a shift of significant proportions to the classic Chicago tower. The glass-curtain wall appears as an organic pattern, with vertical islands of highly reflective glass next to clear glass. Many of the windows are operable. Balconies, often 3.7 metres deep, are generously curved not only as a stylistic trope but in order to reduce the harshest angles of the sun. Depending on where you are standing in the city, the $300-million Aqua can look like a mostly slender rectangle, while, from some angles, it becomes a highly sculptural tower.

With the exception of the corn-cob-like Marina City complex (1964), the curve in Chicago is a relatively new idea. We know it, of course, as home of cities in the sky. The John Hancock Tower (1969, 100 storeys), the hulking, stepped-back Sears Tower, (1974, 110 storeys) and the Amoco Building (1974, 82 storeys) pay strict homage to the straight line. A celebration of the right angle. Strictly Cartesian.

The question is whether Calatrava will ultimately do for the curve what Mies van der Rohe did for the straight line. The answer is: He already did, pre-Chicago. Not so long ago, Calatrava’s work was primarily concerned with the creation of light spaces. It’s impossible to enter the BCE Place atrium (1992) in downtown Toronto without being zapped by Calatrava’s good karma. Even on the bleakest winter day, the light descending from the glass roof into the six-storey Allan Lambert Galleria is instantly energizing. In these spaces, the focus is on a kind of imperial space-making – dictated from on high. And yet melodrama has no place in his work. His training as both an engineer and architect has seen to that.

Look for it if you like, but there is no pathos in Calatrava’s work. It is built, beautifully articulated reverie. Perhaps he is a utopian wearing the clothing of a realist. Or he might be a realist disguised as a utopian. What determines his status as a genius? It’s impossible to know.