Towering Ambition
The Chicago Spire aims to be the tallest skyscraper in North America. But will it get built? The twisting tale so far
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SANTIAGO CALATRAVA'S GREATEST HITS The 56-year-old architect from Valencia, Spain, has won numerous awards and ranks among the world's elite modernists. Four notable recent works:
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That was nearly six years ago, and things have changed. Carley is out and a brash new developer from Ireland is in. The design has been through four or five iterations. Scheduled for completion in 2011, construction began last summer under the cloud of imminent recession and without the security of a guaranteed bank loan for a project that is now estimated to cost $2 billion. And in spite of economic uncertainty, or perhaps because of it, the target buyers for the Spire's 1,200 luxury condominium units are not Chicagoans at all but rather an invisible jet set.
What hasn't changed is that this building—for a site at Lake Shore Drive and the river—has all the marks of a classic work of architecture. The Spire, in its current version, would rise seamlessly for 150 stories or so, with multiple helixes spiraling around its cylindrical profile, akin to an elongated, upside-down, perfectly formed twister. State-of-the-art reinforced concrete makes up the design's strong but invisible core. Steel outriggers around the perimeter would support a "unitized exterior wall system," which will appear to drape the building with an almost gossamer veil. At dawn, the tower's metal-and-glass exterior would gleam in the blaze of the reflected sun. By dusk, its silhouette, lit from within, would mark the edge of the city with a column of light, tapering gradually for all of its 2,000 feet until it reached its vanishing point in the sky.
"It must be every inch a proud and soaring thing, rising in sheer exultation . . . without a single dissenting line," wrote Louis Sullivan of the ideal skyscraper in his essay "The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered." That was in 1896, when builders were straining to reach 15 or 16 stories. The Calatrava building would be ten times taller, of course, and it's a condominium tower, not an office block. But as a "proud and soaring thing," the unbuilt Spire appears to be the work of a true believer.
If you were contrary, you could say that the extravagantly elegant form of the Spire goes against the big-shoulders Chicago tradition of Sullivan's most timeless decree: Form follows function. After all, what's functional about a whirling dervish of a building that doesn't quit until it reaches uncharted heavens? The easy response is that buildings are costly, celebrity sells, and this is the high-rise that its starchitect, the dashing and urbane Santiago Calatrava, would appear destined to build. Carley naturally branded his building the Fordham Spire. But in the flush of press stories written when the design was unveiled, the developer admitted: "Everyone is going to call it the Calatrava anyway."
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Calatrava has insisted that he didn't intend at the outset to design the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere. Nor did Carley, for that matter, who was evidently surprised if not shocked when he first saw the model in the architect's studio in Zurich. But Calatrava, who had studied briefly in Chicago after university, believed the site deserved such a thing. "It's where Lake Michigan meets the Chicago River, a kind of foundational place," Calatrava told me in a recent interview. So he created something "heroic," in keeping with the John Hancock and Sears towers. "These are all buildings that arrived at the limits of their time," he said. "Now we are trying to extend the Chicago model into the 21st century."
The glamour and the romance of the project were certainly Carley's strongest pitch in a meeting between the developer and the powerful Streeterville Organization of Active Residents (SOAR). Shortly after the project was announced, Carley invited the group's most influential members to his office, the first minuet in the dance to drum up the community support needed for any major new building in Chicago but especially for one of this scale. These meetings are usually a recitation of traffic flow and neighborhood impact—and normally as boring as the buildings that get built. Not this one. Carley spoke rapturously about the architect and his famous structures around the world, including the Milwaukee Art Museum, whose sun-shading screens, affixed to giant masts, move up and down like a seagull's wings.
"You could tell he was incredibly passionate about Calatrava and this whole design," said Gail Spreen, then an officer and now president of SOAR. With gorgeous renderings of the Spire tacked to the wall, Carley then launched into specifics: The building would house a luxury hotel on the lower floors with condominiums above, a total of 600 living units in all—which was, remarkably, fewer than allowed by the existing zoning. The garage would have a terraced garden as its "green roof," and a broadcast aerial, topping out at 2,000 feet in the sky, would make the building the tallest in North America, handily dwarfing the Sears Tower at 1,730 feet.
"I thought it was tremendous," said then alderman Burton Natarus, who met privately with Carley and Calatrava for a similar presentation. Natarus, whose blessing was desired for any project in his ward, was considered pro-developer to a fault over much of his 36 years in office; needless to say, he was enchanted, asking Calatrava to sign a book during their meeting and expressing admiration for the architect's bridge in Buenos Aires. As the project progressed, Natarus did due diligence as alderman—mainly addressing traffic issues, such as asking for access ramps on and off Lake Shore Drive to keep excessive traffic out of Streeterville—but it would be clear sailing for the Spire as far as the city was concerned.
"The financing was nebulous," admitted Natarus when I interviewed him much later. "But because of the magnitude of the project and who was involved and the notoriety of the project, we had to do everything we could to pass it." Which the plan commission and then the city council did for Carley's plan in a series of public meetings in March 2006.
Of course, the shadow of nebulous financing did not go away, and after a few months of public speculation about the project's future, a Crain's Chicago Business story on July 19, 2006, broke the news that the Fordham Spire had changed hands. Suddenly, the fantastic skyscraper's future was, for the moment, in grave doubt. Onlookers speculated that Carley had failed to secure financing in part because the site was too far from Michigan Avenue to attract a five-star hotel. The new owner—a little-known Irish company called Shelbourne Development—had bought the land (for a reported $64 million), which seemed like very bad news indeed.
Spreen, SOAR's president, was stunned. "Oh, my gosh!" she remembers thinking. "After this beautiful building, now what are we going to get?" In place of the Spire rose the specter of yet another hulking condo tower atop a massive windswept parking ramp.
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Photography: (World Trade Center Transit Hub) Santiago Calatrava, Courtesy of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey; (Turning Torso) © Palladium Photodesign for Santiago Calatrava; (Milwaukee Art Museum) © Alan Karchmer for Santiago Calatrava; (Alamillo Bridge) © Andrew Dunn
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