2016 Selected Writings

Edward Keegan Selected Writings 2016

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Gordon Parks Arts Hall Chicago, IL Valerio Dewalt Train Valerio Dewalt Train Associates’ Gordon Parks Arts Hall sails onto the University of Chicago’s Hyde Park campus like a 21st-century luxury liner: its block-long bulk carefully crafted with a sleek profile whose expression meshes with the surrounding buildings, while still illustrating compelling forms driven by ideas about architecture and education.

The building anchors the northern end of a multibuilding subcampus that houses three of the four grade-based “units” that comprise the university’s pre-K–12 Laboratory Schools, which were founded

by John Dewey as an experiment in precollegiate education.

Gordon Parks Arts Hall (GPAH) is the most recently completed portion of a comprehensive master plan for the Lab Schools that clocks in at more than 539,000 square feet, including new construction of an off-site early-learning center and renovation of the existing buildings (now nearing completion).

Chicago-based Valerio Dewalt Train Associates’ (VDTA) principal Joseph Valerio, FAIA, clinched the commission for the plan in 2008, when he gave the school’s high-powered board a one-word answer for where to start their architectural explorations. “Research,” he said.

“Joe went into great depth, contacting futurists and educators,” says the school’s director emeritus David W. Magill. The result was a six-volume 2009 report called “Future of Education: Research.” The “Lab+” master plan positions GPAH as the principal new structure on the school’s two-city-block campus. The “front” door for the complex

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has always been Blaine Hall, which faces the Frederick Law Olmsted–designed Midway Plaisance. Gothic limestone-clad structures to the south, east, and west, added piecemeal since 1903, are an ensemble of dormered and gargoyled buildings that form a piece with the university’s larger campus, dubbed the “Gray City.” But the north end of the Lab Schools’ block always had a distinct role: Dewey built it at the outset, and conceived of its workshops as a “maker place.” “We saw the opportunity to honor this legacy by creating a building for the ‘makers’ of the 21st century,” Valerio says.

As a whole, the university (of which the Lab Schools are a part) has actively sought a more contemporary look to complement its older Gothic structures.

Recent projects by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects | Partners (Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts), Rafael Viñoly Architects (Graduate School of Business), Diller Scofidio + Renfro (David M. Rubenstein Forum, in design), and Studio Gang (North Residence Hall and Dining Commons, under construction) all nod to this forward-looking initiative.

GPAH’s three-story plan is based on a double-loaded corridor, with the large spaces of the Assembly Hall—a 750-seat theater-in-the-round that sits just inside the entry—and the black box theater on the south side of the structure and learning spaces along the north. First- and second-floor teaching spaces are devoted to music, with the third floor set aside for arts and media. The theaters, which rise the full height of the building, are clad in a simple vertical metal panel system and face a courtyard and the Lab Schools’ 1962 International Style addition by Perkins+Will.

The building’s palette is quite simple, limited to five materials: an exposed

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concrete frame, a VS-1 glass curtainwall system, metal panels (used as a return on limestone faces), metal roof decking, and limestone (requested by the client) that matches the complex’s original Collegiate Gothic buildings. “We used limestone the least, but we wanted to get the most out of it,” Valerio says. And whether it’s the unusual pattern of three openings within the gabled entry façade or the vertical wall-mounted lighting throughout the corridors, seemingly random spacings are, in fact, based on the Fibonacci sequence: “We didn’t want a random pattern,” Valerio says. “It’s a hidden number sequence that kids could discover.”

VDTA’s six volumes of research on contemporary education revealed the importance of the classroom as the fundamental space for structured learning and the need to foster eye contact between teacher and student.

These are central to the program, with a series of generous spaces along the north edge of the building. But the classroom’s pre-eminence doesn’t downgrade the role of less structured interactions. The team’s research notes that the most creative moments happen within the interstitial spaces.

Magill recalls that it was a conscious decision not to provide designed seating or otherwise structured spaces in the halls. “Kids will find these places, and then we can add accoutrements,” he says. Valerio is particularly pleased with the role the western fire stairs have begun to play. The egress stairs are tucked within a glass-enclosed gable that faces a limestone dormer in the 1904 Belfield Tower, creating a bright space that visually connects old and new, inside and outside—and draws groups of students between and after classes.

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At Gordon Parks Arts Hall, VDTA has reconceived Gothic for the 21st century.

“A Collegiate Gothic building doesn’t feel open and accessible,” Valerio says. But by drawing upon elements loosely derived from its Gray City environs, including Indiana limestone, gabled forms, solar chimneys that mimic high Gothic piers, and delicate glazing that accentuates the vertical, Valerio has crafted a structure that feels of its time and its place, and offers a road map for the integration of diverse—and functional—architectural forms.

Published January 2016 ARCHITECT Magazine

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Zurich North America Headquarters Schaumburg, Illinois Goettsch Partners “Welcome to the future,” Schaumburg Mayor Al Larson said as he greeted a gathering at yesterday's ribbon-cutting ceremony for the new Zurich North America Headquarters in his suburb.

But is the future, embodied in the 11story-tall, 783,800-square-foot complex at the northwest corner of Meacham Road and Interstate 90 all that different from the recent past?

On a stretch of well-traveled and muchreconstructed roadway between such distinctive architectural landmarks as the kitschy Medieval Times and the bright neon-blue-and-yellow big box of Ikea, Chicago-based Goettsch Partners has produced a shiny new corporate retreat with offices and related amenities for almost 3,000 employees of the insurance company that's been in the same northwest suburb since 1980. The Switzerland-based insurer chose to eschew the recent trend to downtown headquarters, and its architects tried to capture a bit of that intent in their design.

“We didn't want it to be too trendy or fashionable,” Goettsch Partners Design Principal Paul De Santis says.

The building's overall 11-story height is generally consistent with the taller buildings scattered throughout the nearby suburbs, but its composition of three interlocked horizontal volumes wrapped in a glimmering glass skin give it a distinctive presence. It doesn't read as particularly tall, since its tallest volume is only six stories. Nor is its 500-foot length unusually long for its environs, yet the architects' deft manipulation of the volumes makes the most of this relatively simple kit of parts.

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The main block floats six stories above the landscape and is 100 by 500 feet long. It's at an angle to the streets, the highway and the two building wings beneath it—but it points directly towards the Loop, and the executive offices and boardroom sit atop the east end with focused views of the city (as well as Ikea in the near distance). The block is structured as a bridge that spans between the lower wings—and this is the complex's big move.

Five-story-tall trusses sit just inside the glass skin and support the span of more than 150 feet, as well as dramatic cantilevers at each end. The bold diagonals are reminiscent of the structural gymnastics of the John Hancock Center, but because the structure is entirely internal to the glass cladding, it ranges from subtle when the lighting is optimal to nonexistent under less fortunate conditions. It's an example of the architects somewhat contradictorily striving to be bold and subtle at the same time. It's a laudable goal, but it's a missed opportunity that's largely a result of the glazing's relatively high reflectivity.

This opacity is a result of the building's high-performance enclosure, which is necessary to make the all-glass structure earn LEED Platinum certification.

It's here that the building's contradictions catch up with its better intentions. The LEED Platinum certification is the highest standard of energy efficiency available from the U.S. Green Building Council.

But the complex is in a generally unsustainable suburban context— represented most clearly by the fact that a building that serves some 3,000 workers has almost as many parking spaces. Any energy that might be saved by the building's sophisticated systems will most assuredly be expended by the

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inefficient daily occupants.

commutes

of

its

Zurich is bucking the recent trend of Chicago-based firms moving their headquarters activities to downtown locations, but De Santis points out the company has now been in Schaumburg for three generations and that its 3,000 employees are generally content with their locale. Alas, the more sustainable infrastructure needed to efficiently link home and office in this sprawling area of the Chicago suburbs remains a seemingly far off need that's not part of the current conversation.

The building's unusual configuration has several notable advantages. The narrow floor plates keep workers close to natural light and views, which should enhance usability and productivity. The three volumes protect a courtyard space along the south side of the building that extends the building's central indoor space and is adjacent to a full-service cafeteria. The landscaping, which is quite pleasant, extends throughout the 40-acre campus and gives the dramatic structure

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a parklike setting that can be actively used by Zurich's employees for rest and recreation.

Chicago architects have spawned a lot of architectural innovations, but even the John Hancock Center's brawny exposed framing can't compare to the 21st century's hair-on-fire escapades like the Rem Koolhaas-designed CCTV building in Beijing, which provoked Chinese President Xi to decry “weird architecture.”

The new Zurich North America Headquarters bears some familial relation to the Jenga-like contortions of Koolhaas, but in a more discreet and polite Midwestern way. It may not really be the future, but its mix of simple and bold forms, tempered by the practical and sensible, points to a future that might be interesting without being disagreeable and dystopian.

Published September 29, 2016 Crain’s Chicago Business

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theMART Chicago, Illinois A+I Beginning with NeoCon® in June, visitors to the Merchandise Mart in Chicago have been pleasantly surprised by new public spaces that address the building’s evolving tenant base.

Since its 1930 debut as the largest building in the world—originally a wholesale center for Marshall Field— visitors have arrived in a tidy, symmetrical three-bay-by-five-bay double-height Art Deco lobby with terrazzo floors, travertine columns, and mosaic murals that define the era’s architectural aspirations through classical tranquility. Much of the original lobby remains intact today, but the real difference is immediately adjacent: a new reception area, as well as a grand staircase that leads to a social hub and food hall on the second level. Here, visitors and workers have new options for simply hanging out.

New York–based firm A+I, with Chicagobased Valerio DeWalt Train Associates as architect of record, designed the series of strategic interventions to help, in part, rebrand the venerable 4.2 millionsquare-foot building as theMART. The renovations, which cost approximately $40 million, address the needs of those who inhabit the building year-round.

What was once primarily home to showrooms and wholesalers has now diversified to include many workplaces for companies—including Motorola Mobility, Yelp, Razorfish, ConAgra Foods, and Braintree—as well as coworking spaces for startups such as 1871 and Matter. The interior renovations were designed to appeal to young, techsavvy employees.

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“It’s about accommodating knowledge economy workers,” says A+I Principal Brad Zizmor. “The shoeshine stands and newsstands of the 1950s are not meaningful anymore. We needed to provide a 24-7 lifestyle amenity.”

The biggest design intervention is the 5,600-square-foot grand stair, which runs counter to the lobby’s primary axis, connecting the formal Art Deco space with the new casually disposed lounge on the second floor. Most of the stair is actually bleacher seating. “The last thing that it is about is getting from one level to another,” he says.

With the interior changes, the architects riffed on the building’s original repetitive, geometrically derived Art Deco ornament, albeit using more contemporary means that relate directly to the tech industry firms that now call theMART home. For the stair and the reception desk beneath it, travertine and bronze are the primary surface materials. Behind and above the desk, the architects installed 566 unique bronze panels—each just 1/64-inch thick—with varying embossments, debossments, and perforations derived through parametric and computational design means. The surface deformations give the panels the rigidity required to maintain their shape while the perforations open up to felt that covertly provides sound absorption.

The interior of the second-floor lounge and renovated food hall area is treated like an excavation, revealing the building’s tightly gridded concrete frame.

“It’s a beautiful structural system, meant to support furniture,” Zizmor says. In the lounge, the floors and ceilings are exposed, with comfortable seating areas, and a barlike countertop provides multiple ways for workers to relax

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throughout the day. Somewhat temporary for the time being, more hospitalityfocused interior adaptations are planned for the lounge.

“At 86 years old, theMART is still prominent in the marketplace,” says Myron Maurer, chief operating officer of theMART. “That’s unusual.”

The marketplace now responds to a generation that respects theMART’s history but has new, inventive uses for its interiors. The thoughtful design by A+I honors the past while accommodating contemporary demands.

Published August 2016 CONTRACT Magazine

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University of Chicago Saieh Hall for Economics Chicago, Illinois Ann Beha Architects At the University of Chicago, free market beliefs often seem more religion than science. So there was some irony when the school’s department of economics and associated institutes moved to a complex that was originally constructed for the Chicago Theological Seminary.

The seminary was subsequently relocated to a distant corner of the campus, demonstrating the place of actual religion within the free market of today’s university.

For the economics department, a thoughtful mix of old and new has been stitched together by Boston-based Ann Beha Architects, with the Chicago office of Gensler as associate architect. “Our old quarters [in the University of Chicago’s Rosenwald Hall] did not promote collaboration,” says John List, chairman of the department of economics. “The new building maximizes cohesiveness through its common areas.”

The handsome red brick and limestonetrimmed Collegiate Gothic style buildings, designed in the mid-1920s by architect Henry Riddle, comprise three interconnected structures, including the Hilton Chapel, a dormitory on the east side of the site, and an L-shaped academic building to the west. Adjacent to the 162-foot-tall Lawson Tower that dominates the original ensemble, Beha and her team inserted a new main entrance within an archway opening that once allowed an alley to pass through the building.

“What once divided, now connects,” says

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Philip Chen, a principal with Ann Beha Architects, in reference to the opening.

“Let’s make the biggest challenge an opportunity.” A new stair, daylit with fivestory- tall glazing, is located at the north end of the entry, with a new threestory, 48,920-square-foot building tucked along the eastern edge of the old alley.

Stitching together the new and old required some spatial gymnastics that Beha exploits and makes seamless in spatial flow. The “colonnade” is a glassy circulation space that connects the first floor main entry to the east wing office suite of the Beckman Institute. This new one-story addition to the old seminary routes users around a grand, woodpaneled room that has been repurposed as the faculty lounge. On the north side of the west wing’s second floor, a similar strategy with a new glass-enclosed corridor allowed the seminary’s library space to be reimagined as a seminar room without intrusion. A 90-person classroom is tucked below grade, under the exterior accessible ramp, which creates a varied pattern of diagonal skylights that bring natural light into the space.

The seminary’s most significant interiors have been thoughtfully reimagined for contemporary secular needs. The 50person seminar classroom that had been a library incorporates audio-visual and technical requirements within the ornate framework of the existing shell. The former Hilton Chapel, an architectural gem that was the seminary’s first structure, is now what Chen describes as “a ceremonial presentation space.” The original exposed limestone walls have been covered with insulated wood paneling that conceals presentation equipment and warms the space both literally and metaphorically.

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The second-floor main chapel is now the Graduate Commons, a soaring space with a flexible floor plan, which allows for easy reconfiguration during various student-driven events. Graduate students have individual study spaces in the previously unused attic of the original buildings. “[The former attic is] a found space that turned out to be a great space,� Chen says.

Ann Beha Architects, which has extensive experience with higher education academic facilities, implemented numerous high-tech teaching aids throughout. The specific needs of the economics department influenced certain features of the design.

For example, whiteboards and chalkboards are prevalent in classrooms and public areas, as well as in stairwells, because economics instruction and casual dialogue require problems to be worked out in writing.

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Interior finishes are kept simple, allowing the richly detailed brick and limestone of the original buildings to be at the forefront. New wood accents are understated and defer to the carved wood of the historic fabric. The new stairs exhibit the most modern implementation of finishes, with metal panels and glass prevailing. For lighting, a combination of restored and renovated fixtures contrast with new fixtures that feature bold geometries. “You want to make alterations compatible, yet differentiated,� Chen explains.

Beha and her colleagues have breathed new life into an almost century-old facility. Spaces designed as prayerful and contemplative to serve the needs of a seminary have now been rendered as thoughtful and quiet, providing spaces for a school that has produced many of the University of Chicago’s Nobel Prize winners.

But now that the moneychangers have taken over the temple, it seems fair to ask: Is anything sacred?

Published March 2016 CONTRACT Magazine

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Maple and Ash Chicago, IL Studio K Chicago’s chefs have built an international reputation for inventiveness in recent years, but the Gold Coast neighborhood near the convergence of Rush and State streets has long been better known for fairly standard fare. In this context of stodgy restaurants and tired bars, the Studio K–designed Maple & Ash breaks through with a surprising take on the traditional steakhouse genre.

Designer Karen Herold founded Studio K in Chicago two years ago. Her recent portfolio—completed for Studio K or as part of the firm 555 International— includes a number of the city’s hotspots, such as The Betty, GT Fish & Oyster, Girl & the Goat, and Cafe Spiaggia.

Herold’s background is as eclectic as her projects: The Amsterdam native trained in fashion and textile design in the Netherlands before coming to the United States 15 years ago.

Maple & Ash is a joint venture between owners David Pisor and Jim Lasky. The menu showcases the craft of cooking with live fire, using the 12-foot wood-andcoal hearth that is the kitchen’s focal point. Maple & Ash primarily occupies the top floor of a new three-story structure on Maple Street, overlooking the active nightlife in the vicinity, along with a portion of the first floor. The building’s configuration required an extended entry sequence via a long, narrow interior on the ground level, leading to the elevator in the rear.

Herold took advantage of the groundfloor space to create an elegantly appointed bar that draws on the feel of iconic early 20th-century cocktail

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lounges. With crystal light fixtures reflected in wall-mounted mirrors, translucent glass panels, a stone-topped bar, and glossy Venetian plastered walls, the bar is bright and inviting. Booths of varying sizes line the wall opposite the bar, with blue leather upholstery lending a cool air to the room. The elevator is not immediately noticeable, which furthers the bar’s speakeasy appeal. “The design is meant to feel timeless,” Herold says, describing her approach and philosophy, which is not fixed on one particular look.

“The bar’s basic vocabulary is from the 1920s, but you have to add your own thing. You need to have the guts to reach backward and forward.” After alighting the elevator on the third floor, patrons see the maître d’ station, a wood podium with a wine cellar behind it. The spatial openness and dark palette, in contrast to the first-floor bar, immediately establish the fine-dining tone upstairs.

In plan, the restaurant is organized in a nine-part grid, with a private dining room in the center that is separated from the rest of the dining area by tall glass doors.

On nights without a private event, the doors are opened, making the full restaurant available to guests. The tall ceiling allows for clerestory windows and a necklacelike LED crystal light fixture that Herold conceived as the lyrical heart of the dining area.

The open kitchen, visible from most of the floor, takes up one of the nine sections, and the activity here animates—literally and figuratively—the design. “Chefs are my muses,” Herold explains.

Keying off the hearth, Herold developed a succession of detailed finishes associated with fire and its related

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themes. A smoke-inspired mural hangs behind the third-floor bar, and the bar top is clad in black leather. Dark, ashy tones are seen in the wood paneling and wood ceilings.

At Maple & Ash, Herold has created a timeless series of experiences, offering quiet elegance that is both serious and refined yet tempered with a bit of wit that engages the food and its preparation.

“It’s authentic but with a wink,” Herold says. “We shouldn’t take ourselves so seriously.”

Published June 2016 CONTRACT Magazine

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White Walls Nicosia, Cyprus Atelier Jean Nouvel For Pritzker Prize–winning architect Jean Nouvel, Hon. FAIA, there’s neither a typical nor an ordinary project. From the luminous double-walled, glass-andconcrete Torre Agbar in Barcelona to the subtly battered Hôtel de Police in Charleroi, Belgium, he has consistently brought surprising formal inventions to the high-rise genre. Paris-based Ateliers Jean Nouvel’s latest exploration in the type is no less memorable: White Walls is a 220-foot-tall, white-painted concrete structure in Nicosia, Cyprus. The 107,639-square-foot trapezoidal tower, which includes two floors of retail, six floors of offices, and 10 floors of apartments, cuts a memorable figure on the skyline with pixelated cut-outs on the east and west façades (above) that offer glimpses of gardens within.

The structure’s south façade (opposite) is angular and hard-edged, in contrast to the softer, rounded balconies, rendered in white-painted concrete, of the north façade (opening spread). Vegetation bursts from each balcony, covering roughly 80 percent of the south face and providing substantial shade during the summer while still allowing sun to penetrate to the interior during winter months. Nouvel subverts the standard structural logic of the tall building by constructing concrete piers at the east and west ends—which contain standard core elements such as stairs and elevator, and more private programmatic functions such as meeting rooms and bedrooms. These piers are joined by column-free spans that serve as open offices in the lower floors and open-plan living areas in the residences above. The architect plays with the nature of a

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concrete wall though the varied perforations (above), which make the vertical surface appear in some instances to be a simple screen, at other times a protective shell. The larger openings are filled with verdant gardens that overflow their containers and sprout lush green foliage from the building’s envelope.

Both apartments and offices feature substantial outdoor loggias (opposite) that allow all building occupants to enjoy Nicosia’s temperate climate. Voids and windows in the concrete walls are designed to a module of 0.4 meters— almost 16 inches—square.

This dimension gave the architects freedom to pattern the building’s east and west façades with various scales of these apertures, making it nearly impossible to differentiate between single- and doubleheight spaces from outside. The perforations blur—in ever so digital a manner—any meaningful sense of scale among the building’s 18 floors. The balconies to the north and south ensure that every room, even the apartment kitchens (above), has an outdoor connection. A duplex apartment (top) caps the tower; its central courtyard layout is based on Cyprus’ traditional architecture, with sloped louvers providing shade while retaining views to the sky. In Nicosia, Nouvel integrates tower and landscape while employing the white walls of the island’s vernacular, rendered larger, and in formally inventive and surprising ways.

Published October 2016 ARCHITECT Magazine

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Xixi Wetland Estate Hangzhou, China David Chipperfield Architects The set of stone-and-concrete boxes carefully arrayed on a plinth in the midst of a wetland near Hangzhou, China, hew precisely to the crisp, minimalist aesthetic one would expect of David Chipperfield Architects. The landscape was created as a park more than a millennium ago by a forward-thinking Chinese emperor who seemingly foresaw what would be most attractive to 21st century ecotourists and residents.

The residential development, Xixi Wetland Estate, is located within the larger Xixi National Wetland Park, which encompasses 1,150 hectares (2,800 acres) a few miles west of Hangzhou’s city center. About 70 percent of the park is covered in water, but that hasn’t precluded its use for many different activities over the centuries. In recent years, developers have hired some wellknown architects, including Arata Isozaki, Hon. FAIA, and Steven Holl, FAIA, to design an assortment of structures within a small corner of the park. Chipperfield’s contribution lies at the center of those modern interventions, but is largely protected from the growing visual cacophony by an inward-looking landscape design strategy that builds on the park’s historically manmade natural forms.

The complex is constructed of three materials—basalt stone, concrete, and dark timber, calibrated to the specific context. “We wanted a strong material presence,” says Mark Randel, a founding partner of the firm’s Shanghai office, which worked with the Berlin office on the project.

Xixi Wetland Estate comprises 20 two-

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story apartment buildings set on a concrete platform that masks an underground parking structure while evoking traditional stone plinths used for historic structures in the park. Entry to the complex is from the east, where a small communal structure offers a meeting room for residents and a station for the security guard.

The residential buildings are designed in two sizes, with each containing two single-floor apartment units. The larger offers two three-bedroom apartments, the smaller a pair of two-bedroom units.

Living spaces are located on the buildings’ southern sides, according to prevailing feng shui practices. Bedrooms, kitchens, baths, elevators, and stairs all face north.

There’s a timelessness to Xixi Wetland Estate that reaches beyond its particular place in a quiet corner of a rapidly expanding city in the world’s most populous nation. Its elemental forms and simple, even ancient, materials set atop placid waters underscore relationships that exist across cultures. By creating buildings and spaces that are deeply entrenched in their unique landscape, the architects have poetically, and paradoxically, transcended cultural specificity.

Published April 2016 ARCHITECT Magazine

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Grow Box Lexington, MA Merge Architects More than 12 years ago, an MIT professor bought a modest Cape Cod house on a corner lot in Lexington, Mass., and began planting an extensive garden. Not satisfied with the relationship between inside and out, he hired Bostonbased Merge Architects to enlarge the structure and create a stronger connections between house and landscape. The result of the iterative design process was no simple addition focused on views, but rather a new twostory, 1,975-square-foot suburban villa whose interlocking volumes combine garden and house in one entity.

Dubbed the Grow Box by Merge principal Elizabeth Whittaker, AIA, the rectangular mass of the new house contains six recessed gardens, all but one of which are primarily experienced from the second floor. “You feel like you’re in a tree house,” Whittaker says. Only a single garden penetrates to the ground level, and the rest of the house unfolds around that 30-square-foot, glassenclosed space, which holds a single Japanese elm emerging from a floor of moss.

The main entry is tucked inside a blank recess facing the street and leads through a foyer into a double-height, clerestory-lit living area, a kitchen, and a dining space, all of which open onto the central glass-enclosed garden. Upstairs, the gardens divide the second floor into quadrants—occupied by the master bedroom, an office, another bedroom, and the upper portion of the living area.

This configuration emphasizes the role of the garden within the house while providing sufficient distance for privacy within the relatively small footprint.

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The house’s Cor-Ten steel rainscreen is punctuated by several interventions. At the first floor, shallow insets denote entries on each elevation. At the second level, the roof gardens are carved into the metal volume. Below each recessed garden, a horizontal scupper projects from the façade and drains water away from the plantings. And on each face, steel troughs convey rainwater to the ground.

Finishes are rendered in a minimal palette, a contrast to the house’s spatial complexity. The interior is predominantly white: “It’s clean, but not too stark,” Whittaker says—noting that white oak floors and millwork add warmth. Much of the cabinetry is from IKEA, with modest customization by the architects. Outside, the Cor-Ten was left raw and mottled, giving it “a handmade quality that is unpredictable in a beautiful way,” Whittaker says.

Grow Box posits a very specific relationship with nature based on textures, colors, and rhythms found in the natural world. But unlike the previous house on site, it’s a carefully designed object that encourages the contemplation of nature and its own place within it.

Published July 2016 ARCHITECT Magazine

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Newberg Residence Newberg, OR Cutler Anderson Architects Jim Cutler of Bainbridge Island, Wash.– based Cutler Anderson Architects first saw the site for this single-family residence in Newberg, Ore., when the clients were still planning to build their new home on a wooded hilltop on their farm in Oregon’s wine-growing region.

On his visit, Cutler wanted to see more of the land and kept walking until, “I saw a glint of light,” he says. Following that twinkle, he found a scenic opening in the forest where loggers had mostly filled in an old bog, which prompted him to ask: “How about here?” What had been a contest between several firms became Cutler’s commission. The resulting, 1,440-square-foot residence comfortably houses the couple, and a 550-squarefoot guesthouse on the site accommodates visitors.

Cutler kept the basic outline of the clearing and dug out the bog as a new pond that’s both formal and casual; the house spans the water between two concrete piers at its north end. Cor-Ten steel columns and beams support the shed-roof and wood framing, and the taller south wall is fully glazed to capitalize on the view in the main spaces. The north side of the house is predominantly solid and is clad in rotresistant cedar and zinc—part of a carefully wrought entry sequence. Guests park 75 yards away and approach through the forest in what Cutler calls “a three-part piece of dance”: first, a compressive, narrow, wooded path, which then opens to a clearing with the guest­house, and, finally, over a wooden bridge to the main house’s front door.

The north façade’s opacity contrasts with the south elevation’s near-complete

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transparency, making the entire house a threshold to the view of the pond. The kitchen to the west and the master bedroom to the east flank the central living–dining room; these spaces are separated by partial-height walls and connected by a continuous volume of space under the roof. They share fullheight windows along the south wall, which is punctuated by custom lift windows that can be easily opened to dissolve the barrier between inside and out.

Cutler’s designs are driven by a simple philosophy: “If you see something beautiful, you’ll never forget it,” he says.

“You’ll protect it.” With the Newberg Residence, Cutler has designed a home in a carefully choreographed landscape that delights the residents, and will most certainly be remembered by those who visit it.

Published June 2016 CUSTOM HOME Magazine

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Enough House Upper Kingsburg, Nova Scotia, Canada MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects The 700-square-foot Enough House, designed by Halifax, Nova Scotia–based MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects, sits within a unique complex of structures, called Shobac, on the Atlantic coast of the Canadian province. It’s part of a fascinating dialogue between traditional and modern architectural forms on Brian MacKay-Lyons’ Ghost Architectural Laboratory encampments.

Enough House is the 10th permanent structure added to the ensemble and its site on the entry road gives it the prominence of a gatehouse.

The gabled volume plays off an adjacent schoolhouse, a classically designed 1830s structure that MacKay-Lyons, Hon. FAIA, moved to the site just a few years ago. “The gable shape holds onto tradition as an archetype,” he says.

“We’re searching for the mythic center.”

But while the historic structure is strictly symmetrical in its volume and detailing, the house stems from a more kinetic impulse that informs both its fenestration and the relationship between the interior spaces and the surrounding landscape.

The simple palette is defined by 4-by-8foot panels—Cor-Ten steel on the exterior, plywood on the interior.

MacKay-Lyons refers to the aesthetic as “rural industrial” and eschews fetishizing craft or materials. The structure sits on two concrete walls that extend into the landscape, and the entrance is at the south corner, where a piece of the volume has been dramatically cut away.

This negative space is balanced by floorto-ceiling glazing at the north corner which provides expansive views of the property’s agricultural areas (and the occasional visiting sheep) from within.

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The Cor-Ten sheathing is detailed as a rainscreen with rigid insulation lying outboard of the wood-framed walls. This construction allows for exposed stick framing in the primary dwelling areas— the living room on the ground level and bedroom above. The service areas—a kitchen and bathroom—receive a more “finished” look with plywood sheathing that conceals services and provides a sturdy backing for cabinetry. The exterior’s rusty metal is reprised within by a perforated Cor-Ten screen framing a bent-metal stair.

The building’s lack of eaves is a sculptural detail to be sure, but is also rooted in the place; Nova Scotia has the highest weathering rate in North America, with as many as 265 freeze/thaw cycles each year. Having an eave is begging for trouble with ice dams.

The Enough House is a smart essay in how to create a quietly remarkable structure with minimal means. “It’s not a folly,” MacKay-Lyons says. Rather, it’s meant to be a good, generic building that’s part of an ensemble—not unlike the fishing shacks that have been the mainstay of Nova Scotia’s coast for centuries. “That’s what makes the best places,” he says.

Published July 2016 ARCHITECT Magazine

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Salt and Pepper House Washington, DC KUBE Architecture When a septuagenarian couple approached Washington, D.C.–based KUBE Architecture about renovating their three-story, 100-year-old Capitol Hill rowhouse, they made the program considerably more difficult when they announced they wanted the narrow house to serve them as they aged.

Principal Janet Bloomberg embraced the challenge by carefully considering their future needs through the principles of universal design. She based her process on Americans with Disabilities Act guidelines but also relied on commonsense solutions customized to her clients.

The width necessary to accommodate a wheelchair—36 inches—became the controlling dimension for the redesign.

Continuous open space on the first floor breaks down the sense of narrowness that usually constricts a rowhouse, connecting a media room at the front to an ample kitchen and living area that extends into the garden at the rear.

These spaces are separated by a central core that conceals an elevator, powder room, pantry, and stair to the basement—while maintaining a bearing wall from the existing construction.

“The kitchen is easy to get in and out of,” Bloomberg explains. Its U-shaped island is the centerpiece of the main living areas. Universal design dictated no overhead cabinets, which also aids in the sense of openness. Undercounter cabinets open to both the inside and outside of the U, doubling storage space.

The continuity between interior and exterior is emphasized with a custom steel-framed, glass-top table bisected by the sliding glass doors. When the doors

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are fully deployed, it creates a 14-foot opening between garden and house. An Italian floor tile runs continuously from inside to out, varying only in its texture between the two.

The second floor master suite includes a bath that follows the same principles as the kitchen, with a 9-foot-long vanity and roll-in shower that can be accessed via wheelchair. “It’s easy to get into, but tight,” Bloomberg says. She also designed custom grab bars for the space, preferring to avoid the institutional look of stock fixtures. Just three steps lower from the bedroom is a lounge that overlooks the living/dining room and garden. It has a small sleeping nook that doubles as a guest bedroom.

With an eye to the future, Bloomberg and her clients decided to include a third floor bedroom that can be used as living quarters for a health aide or nurse, should the clients require one.

The couple likes black and white and enjoys cooking and eating at home, which inspired the architects to adopt the “Salt + Pepper House” moniker for the project. Despite the predominantly monotone palette, there’s considerable use of varying textures and occasional splashes of color. “It feels colorful,” Bloomberg says. “A little goes a long way.”

The same common sense approach that informs the color and material palettes applies to the thoughtful, inventive resolution of the client’s changing accessibility needs, proving that bespoke solutions sometimes are a better choice than code requirements. “As long as it will work, you don’t have to satisfy ADA,” Bloomberg notes.

Published June 2016 BUILDER Magazine

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Alejandro Aravena Wins 2016 Pritzker Prize Less than two weeks into 2016, Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena is already having a very good year. In the midst of preparations for the May opening of the Venice Architecture Biennale, which he is directing under the theme “Reporting from the Front,” Aravena has been named this year’s Pritzker Architecture Prize laureate.

“I was happy and surprised,” Aravena tells ARCHITECT about receiving the news. Given his closeness to many on the jury from his participation with them in recent years, he says, “I look forward to discussing the process [with] them in New York.”

The award, consisting of $100,000 and a bronze medallion, will be formally conferred in a ceremony on April 4 at the United Nations in New York, a building designed by a team of architects including Wallace K. Harrison, Le Corbusier, and 1988 laureate Oscar Niemeyer.

Chicagoan Tom Pritzker, who heads the Hyatt Foundation, sponsor of the Prize, says, “[Aravena’s] built work gives economic opportunity to the less privileged, mitigates the effects of natural disasters, reduces energy consumption, and provides welcoming public space.

Innovative and inspiring, he shows how architecture at its best can improve people’s lives.”

Born in 1967, Aravena started his own office in 1994 before founding the Santiago, Chile–based collective practice Elemental in 2001. He has lived his entire life in Santiago, growing up in the 1970s and 1980s under the

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Augusto Pinochet reign, when the country was isolated and information was tightly controlled. His parents were both schoolteachers, and one early outlet was vacationing in nature in southern Chile, which clearly influences his approach to architectural design. “You reduce your practice to the irreducible and move to the essential core,” he says.

Perhaps Aravena’s most striking body of work is a series of thoughtful, monumental structures for his alma mater, Santiago’s Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. These projects rethink sustainability using practical means expressed in radically bold forms.

Aravena has also tackled social housing with a deft hand that produces complexes that are both inventive and ennobling on tight budgets. Beyond his native Chile, Aravena has built projects in Texas, Mexico, Switzerland, and China.

The Medical School (2004) at Universidad Católica de Chile is conceived as a vertical cloister, with its monumental tripartite façade of varied brick piers reminiscent of classical precedents. Recognizing that glass buildings are a poor choice for Santiago’s environment, yet faced with the client’s request for just such an expression, Aravena designed the Siamese Towers (2005) for the same client as a sculpturally evocative, energy-efficient building wrapped in a glass skin.

During a time when Brutalism has seen many of its most important mid-20th century works under siege (and some lost to the wrecker’s ball), Aravena’s UC Innovation Center—Anacleto Angelini (2014) provides an inspiring antidote.

“The aim was to build the right environment for knowledge creation,” he said in a 2014 TED talk. The design

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hollows out the core for an atrium and places mass (in the form of concrete) at the perimeter to combat solar gain.

Interior daylighting comes via a central atrium, but also through multi-storied windows whose scale allow them to act as urban squares for gathering. By turning the building inside out, energy consumption is one-third that of a similarly sized glass-clad building. “This is just archaic, primitive common sense,” Aravena said. “With the right design, sustainability is nothing but the rigorous use of common sense.”

“The purpose of design...is to channel people’s own building capacity,” Aravena said in the 2014 talk. This approach is best seen starting with the Quinta Monroy Housing (2004) in Iquique, Chile, which poses a unique typology for social housing that Aravena has developed in later projects. To save initial costs, simple three-story houses were built as “half a good house" (as he describes them), while providing the opportunity for future expansion by each individual family according to their ability and priorities. Monterrey Housing (2010) in Monterrey, Mexico, and Villa Verde Housing (2013) in Constitución, Chile, extend the concept, with the Mexico project configured as a flat-roofed megablock and the Chilean variation featuring a series of identical, attached gabled forms. In each case, Aravena uses a participatory design process to determine what amenities are most needed at the initial stage of construction, providing the occupants with direct design input within a low-cost, subsidized model of building.

Aravena has created an architecture that is visionary, yet eminently practical.

While the first winner from Chile, Aravena is the fourth winner from Latin America, following Mexican Luis

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Barragán in 1980, and Brazilians Oscar Niemeyer in 1988 and Paulo Mendes da Rocha in 2006.

Coupled with the 2014 laureate, Shigeru Ban, Hon. FAIA, it seems Aravena’s selection is part of a trend to elevate more socially conscious designers through the Pritzker Prize. In addition to the social housing projects, Aravena has been involved with disaster relief and the reconstruction of Constitución, Chile, since an earthquake and tsunami hit the city on Feb. 27, 2010.

This year's Pritzker Prize jury included architectural patron (and jury chair) Lord Peter Palumbo; U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer; Beijing-based architect and educator Yung Ho Chang, AIA; Berlin-based architecture curator, writer, and editor Kristin Feireiss; 2002 Pritzker laureate Glenn Murcutt; 2007 Pritzker laureate Richard Rogers, Hon. FAIA; Barcelona architect Benedetta Tagliabue; and Mumbai-based businessman Ratan N. Tata. The executive director of the Pritzker Prize is Madrid-based architectural educator Martha Thorne.

Aravena is the third laureate to win the prize after previously serving on the jury, following Ban in 2014 and Fumihiko Maki, Hon. FAIA, in 1993. The jury visited Aravena's work in 2006, resulting in an invitation to join the panel in 2009.

According to Aravena, they never discussed his work while he was involved. He is genuinely humble and modest while discussing his time on the jury. “The level of discussion is very high,” he tells ARCHITECT. “My work isn’t even close to what I witnessed.”

This year’s jury, rightfully, begs to differ.

Published January 13, 2016 ARCHITECT Magazine

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Let's pause and push reset on this whole Lucas lakefront deal George Lucas is the envy of every real estate developer in Chicago today. What builder wouldn't want the mayor to bend over backwards to get their proposed design built—if not on the site they initially wanted, then the next site over that's inconveniently already occupied by a building? And not just a building, a genuine, landmark quality building that most cities would covet having in their environs.

This new scheme to demolish McCormick Place East and put the Lucas Museum there is a boneheaded idea that demonstrates Mayor Rahm Emanuel's zeal to get a deal done, even if it's poorly planned. And that's been the problem with the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art from the start.

It's been an exercise in getting something done for one of the Mayor's buddies, but neither an example of good urban planning or architectural design.

One argument in favor of Ma Yansong's fanciful design for the museum was that it provided a foil for McCormick Place's Lakeside Building.

Designed in 1967 by C.F. Murphy's Gene Summers and his young assistant, Helmut Jahn, that building is arguably the finest Mies van der Rohe building not actually designed by the master himself. Its brawny long-span steel trusses are supported by huge cruciform columns that sit on a charcoal gray brick plinth—it's a modern version of the Parthenon writ large.

Where McCormick offered dark rationality, the Lucas is light, soft, and landscape-y. html setting McCormick Place's biggest problem has always been its site; simply stated, it's a building that shouldn't be there. But it is, and the fact is that it's a building of remarkable architectural quality. It's strikingly memorable within a now sprawling complex of later, forgettable McCormick Place buildings that seem like misplaced airport terminals in search of some runways.

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If the Mayor is ready to suggest moving the project off the original site between Soldier Field and McCormick Place, then it's time to hit reset on the whole project and find a better location than just moving it one site over and destroying a landmark quality structure. Unless, of course, Lucas can be persuaded to put his new institution within the shell of McCormick Place's Lakefront Center. A variation of this strategy has been suggested before, most prominently by Chicago architect Helmut Jahn and Preservation Chicago's Ward Miller.

It would be nice to add George Lucas' collection of art and movie memorabilia to Chicago's cultural scene—a testament to his success and the role this city has played in the later years of his life. Watching him pivot from a horrendously banal design for San Francisco's Presidio to a much more interesting design attempt on Chicago's lakefront has been instructive. While I've vocally voiced my opinion previously that this design isn't of sufficient quality for this important site, Lucas has shown the ability to grow designwise, even through a fraught process.

The Mayor shouldn't give Lucas anything and everything in order to secure the museum. But couldn't those same persuasive political talents be enlisted to get Lucas to commission a new design? If the lakefront is that important to Lucas, then let his chosen architects have a look at genuinely reusing the compelling architecture that McCormick Place offers. Or find a site within the city that can benefit more from the cultural resources that the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art can provide. This shouldn't be cast as a Hail Mary pass—it's an opportunity to hit reset and do this project right—here in Chicago.

Published April 15, 2016 Crain’s Chicago Business

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Jackson Park the right choice for Obama Library Chicago made its first real mark on the global stage with the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, a temporary world's fair set up in the then-incomplete Jackson Park on the city's South Side. Now that the same park will become the site of the Obama Presidential Center, this historic piece of lakefront ground will have the opportunity to spur new economic and architectural activity for the 21st century.

Located on the western edge of the 543-acre park along Stony Island Boulevard, the site could help revitalize the long-struggling Woodlawn neighborhood that lies across the street. The site is a relatively narrow parcel between Stony Island Boulevard and Cornell Drive, stretching from 60th to 63rd Streets.

Today, it's home to some playing fields; in a few years, it's likely to sport an elegantly wrought minimalist and somewhat abstract structure that will house a combination of museum galleries, presidential documents and the Chicago offices of the Obama Foundation.

There seems an implicit intent to connect the Obama Presidential Center with the Museum of Science and Industry, whose building is the primary architectural legacy of the 19th century fair, and to create a new museum campus on the South Side that's akin to that comprising the Field Museum, Adler Planetarium and Shedd Aquarium in Burnham Park.

Transportation will be a key factor in making the site a success. Four CTA bus lines run by the site, and it would be easy to reconfigure others to provide direct access. Metra has stations at 59th and 63rd Streets, but they're bare-bones facilities in need of an upgrade before they could handle the crowds likely to visit the Obama Presidential Center. One tangible benefit that could help both the new museum and the neighborhood would be the restoration of the Green Line's traditional route all the way to Jackson Park.

The structure was built to serve the 1893 fair, and the stations closest to the park were closed in stages between 1973 and 1994. Parking is likely to be a problem, though the Museum of Science and Industry has demonstrated that an underground garage can be constructed in the park, albeit at substantial cost.

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Both potential sites were located in Frederick Law Olmsted-designed parks, landmarks of the landscape art. While Jackson Park tends to be better known due to its lakefront location and 1893 provenance, Washington Park is generally acknowledged among designers as the more important work. Jackson Park is the better choice in that the less significant piece of landscape architecture will be redesigned, but it's unfortunate that Chicago's parks are still considered mostly as open land, ripe for cultural development. In a city where fully landscaped parks remain woefully inadequate for the overall population, it would have been better to locate the new structures adjacent to or near these historic parks, rather than in them.

It may be many months before we see actual building designs for the project, but the early signals are positive. It's reasonable to speculate that Jackson Park's location directly between Hyde Park, where Barack and Michelle Obama lived their married life together prior to their residence in the White House, and South Shore, where Mrs. Obama grew up, is an indication of how personal this project will be for both of them.

I suspect that the selection of Tod Williams and Billie Tsien as design architects is another sign of how involved the president and first lady will be with the project. Williams and Tsien are highly skilled partners with a substantial portfolio of first-rate cultural and institutional projects—and are husband and wife.

It wouldn't surprise me if this proved an advantage for them in the high-stakes sweepstakes among seven well-accomplished architects who vied for the job.

The best architecture is almost always the result of a collaborative creative effort between architect and client. The quick site selection, just weeks after the architects were chosen, seems to indicate that the team believes the conceptual designs are already far enough along to proceed. We only have tea leaves to read at the moment, but the Obama Presidential Center could become an awfully nice cup of tea.

Published July 28, 2016 Crain’s Chicago Business

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Too Close for Comfort: A Look at Architectural th Graphic Standards 12 Edition When the 11th edition of Architectural Graphic Standards (AGS) was released in 2007, drafting was already part of the architectural profession’s dinosaur past, and the efficacy of a $250 book to help guide a new era of professionals into the future was questionable. With April’s release of AGS 12th edition (John Wiley & Sons, 2016) and, more notably, its newfound companion website, Architectural Graphic Standards Online, perhaps it’s time to end the eightdecade-long run of the series of tomes that has helped define drafting culture.

Comprising 1,081 pages of densely packed graphics and text rendered in a font that is borderline too small, the latest edition is slightly shorter than its predecessor yet includes 25 percent new content, according to Wiley. But with the ability to search and download the same details in multiple, editable formats (DWG, DGN, and DXF) through the AGS website, why would anyone opt to purchase the hard copy? Yes, buying it will earn you a one-time, 30 percent discount off the website’s subscription cost of $139 per year, but you still need to shell out $250 first.

I hefted a copy of the latest book to several designers at firms in my hometown of Chicago. I summarize their reactions below.

What’s different?

Pinpointing exactly what’s new in the 12th edition could take years, given the sheer amount of content, but one change is clear: its overall organization. The book is divided into three sections: Design Principles & Construction Documentation, Materials, and Building Elements. This is a sensible order, directing the reader from planning, to materials, to how to put them together. But it’s completely different from the last edition, which subverted logic by placing Building Elements at the front.

Should a $250 book have a cover this dull?

Graphic designer Bruce Mau had given AGS a complete and highly touted redesign for the 11th

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edition based on the plan of a medieval monastery. In my review of that edition, I gave Wiley and Mau a hard time for the metal, commemorative “tombstone” inset on its cover, as it was certainly overkill. But the 12th edition’s façade, provided by Wiley’s in-house staff, is about as dull as a doorstop. We’re visual people, folks.

The book’s interior design is, once again, the work of Bruce Mau Design (with illustrations by the Magnum Group). The layout buries much of the text deep into the binding gutter where it can’t be easily read without a crowbar. Full-bleed works for imagery, but it doesn’t work for copy in a book. As for the graphics, there remains a serious lack of architectural sophistication regarding line weights. Drafting has never looked so dull and uninspiring.

Is the content in AGS still relevant?

Lynne Sorkin, AIA, a 40-something director at BKL Architecture, recently pointed architectural intern Maxim Fields to an earlier edition of AGS to research bar-seating clearances. In a completely unscientific experiment, I asked the 2015 Howard University graduate to re-create his search with the new book.

Fields quickly found the relevant section on pages 846 and 847. “This is a nice book,” he says, adding that it gave information regarding seating clearances that wasn’t available in the earlier version.

Is AGS still the “Bible”?

Wiley and the AIA (the book’s author) pay marketing lip-service to its “indispensable” role, but they’ve substantially changed the order of the material from edition to edition. You don’t need to be a theological scholar to know that the re-sequencing of basic information discourages useful textual exegesis.

Within each section, the material seems to have been re-sorted to better help fit things on a specific page, rather than to more clearly present the information in a comprehensive fashion. It’s an episodic approach that lacks the overall cohesion that was once a hallmark of the book—although that aspect has been on its way out for at least several editions.

Can I still use AGS as a doorstop?

Yes. As with the 11th edition, this book, while a few

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pages lighter, is just as serviceable as a doorstop, weighing eight pounds according to the delivery service.

What’s next?

Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture senior architect Matt Dumich, AIA, bought his first copy of AGS as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. But even the 30-something sees limited potential for the latest print edition. “We would most likely use it as part of a digital library,” he says. For the incoming generation of designers, he says, “the go-to resource is Google.”

Though a less reliable and less established resource than AGS, the search engine may seem to have vanquished the reign of this once indispensable standard. But there’s no doubt that the content in Wiley’s publication is more reliable as “standards” than what one might find via Google. In print, the 12th edition’s often incomprehensible layout seems to point to the near-inevitable demise of its own printed existence and usurpation by its own website.

In Steve Martin’s 1979 movie, The Jerk, his imbecilic character, Navin R. Johnson, runs to a van, rips a thick paperback from the driver’s hands, and starts shouting, “The new phone book’s here, the new phone book’s here!”

His next, less frequently quoted line is as funny and pertinent to the new AGS: Upon finding his name, Navin says, “I’m in print! Things are going to start happening to me now!”

While the print version of AGS lives on, I am betting that it will go into the remainder bin sooner rather than later. The new website delivers the same, essential information in a format that’s more readily usable for today’s practitioner. If, for some reason, we begin to lament the diminishing number of AGS copies from the reference shelves of firms, we can ask ourselves this: When was the last time we used a phone book?

Published May 9, 2016 ARCHITECT Magazine

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A Tale of Two Ballparks: Wrigley vs. Progressive Chicago and Cleveland. Two Great Lakes cities. It's been 60-plus years since the Indians won a World Series; it's been 108 years since the Cubs did it.

Neither team's current ballpark existed when they last raised the world championship pennant, yet both venues have provided a template for the most recent generation of ballparks. Here are some things you may not know about our own Wrigley Field and Cleveland's Progressive Field, where the World Series opens tonight.

Neither was the work of a neophyte ballpark designer.

Chicago architect Zachary Taylor Davis designed the White Sox's Comiskey Park in 1910, four years before he completed what was originally called Weeghman Park on the North Side. Kansas City, Mo.-based HOK Sport designed Cleveland's Jacobs Field in 1994, following the firm's designs for several ballparks, including the “new� Comiskey Park, which had opened three years earlier.

Neither has its original name; both advertise local companies.

Weeghman Park, named for its original owner, became Cubs Park in 1920 and was renamed Wrigley Field in 1926, several years after William Wrigley Jr. bought the team. While the ballpark remained bereft of major advertising signs until the past decade, it's seldom noted that Wrigley Field was probably the first significant use of stadium naming rights, since the eponymous chewing gum company has benefited from the name for 90 years.

Cleveland's ballpark was built just before corporate naming became a business necessity and originally bore the name of the club's owners. But when it was renamed Progressive Field in 2008, with considerable financial benefit to the facility's public owner, at least it was named after one of Cleveland's better-known businesses, Progressive Insurance.

Progressive Field is a downtown ballpark; Wrigley is a neighborhood ballpark.

When Progressive Field opened in 1994, its location just a half-mile from Cleveland's Public Square was

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an act of faith in the rejuvenation of the city's downtown. In the two decades since, this has provided real dividends for Cleveland, with a vibrant street life now filling the area between the ballpark and downtown. Urban revitalization on this scale is always a complex story, but the ballpark was a catalyst.

Wrigley opened in 1914, but it's arguable that it didn't really become recognizable as the current ballpark until the addition of the ivy-covered brick outfield wall with subtly curving bleachers and iconic center field scoreboard in 1937. Like many ballparks of that era (including those in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and others), it was a sports venue located in a residential area. Until the recent expansion of the bleachers and addition of large video boards that block much of the view out to Sheffield and Waveland avenues, it had been obvious to Wrigley's fans that they were in a Chicago neighborhood.

New construction and reconstruction of surrounding buildings as sports-related ventures, not to mention the massive ongoing demolition and construction throughout the vicinity, are now transforming the area around Clark and Addison streets into a single-use entertainment district that will satisfy the Ricketts family's business plan, but it remains to be seen how it contributes to the fabric of Chicago's North Side.

Wrigley is almost symmetrical; Progressive is clearly asymmetrical A baseball diamond is required to be 90 feet square and symmetrical, but baseball parks make themselves distinctive through asymmetrical outfield arrangements. These were often informed by adjacent streets, like Boston's Fenway Park, where the left field “Green Monster� towers 37 feet above the field, due to the short 310 feet between home plate and Lansdowne Street.

Wrigley Field sits on a typical Chicago block, but its configuration isn't quite symmetrical. The center field scoreboard appears to be in straight away center field but actually is situated slightly right of center.

Finding some of Wrigley's very slight asymmetries, like the 353 down the right field line versus 355 feet

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down the left field line, is one of the pleasures of lazy summer afternoons within the Friendly Confines.

Wrigley's seemingly humongous left field video board is 42 feet high by 95 feet wide, but Progressive Field's scoreboard dwarfs these dimensions with a 59-feet-high-by-221-feet-long extravaganza that dominates the left field side of the diamond. It's an exuberant backdrop to the outfield (with views of the downtown skyline above and to each side), but it clearly proclaims that this is not a symmetrical ballpark. The triple decks of seats do the same; they're on the first base side and in right field, but the middle deck is replaced by a cliff of enclosed skyboxes behind home and along the third base line.

This configuration is similar to what the same architects used on the South Side just three years earlier, but by carefully varying its location, it's an interesting rather than stultifying feature.

Surprise: Wrigley is bigger Despite holding more than 41,000 fans, the intimate quality of Wrigley Field can be traced to the fact that its fans are squeezed into just two decks of seating, and those pesky obstructing columns help get all the fans much closer to the action than at more modern facilities, like that in Cleveland. Three primary levels of seating at Progressive Field allow for less encumbered views but place most fans farther from the action.

The original Jacobs Field seated 42,865 and was expanded to more than 45,000 during 2009 and 2010. But declining overall attendance has led to the elimination of entire sections of upper deck seating in right field, leading to a current capacity of 35,225.

Expect quite a number of Cubs fans to make the 350mile drive to see the Cubs play in Cleveland, but imagine if there were 10,000 additional tickets available for each of those games.

Both are structurally expressive You'll leave Wrigley dreaming of green ivy and red brick; memories of Progressive will probably involve its predominant white steel and concrete. Yet the two venues, separated by eight decades in their design and construction, actually have more in common than

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is apparent at a glance. That's because each openly celebrates its construction.

Wrigley's upper deck and roof are supported by an exposed steel structural frame that presages minimalist Chicago architectural landmarks like Mies van der Rohe's 860-880 Lake Shore Drive and SOM's John Hancock Center. Progressive Field likewise celebrates its steel and concrete frame, albeit with a heavier and more contemporary look. A defining feature is its series of triple-columned light towers that surround the park. Their designs are related to the outfield light towers that the same architects designed for Sox Park. It's unfortunate that Chicago got the bulky first draft while Cleveland has the more elegant and refined example.

Both are the only places to see Major League Baseball until April Let's be thankful the Indians sent the Toronto Blue Jays packing in the American League Championship Series, because that other Great Lakes city's ballpark is a dreary indoor affair that makes sense only during a blizzard. Progressive Field is one of the more striking designs to open during the past 25 years, a period that now matches the 1910s and 1920s for producing a large number of memorable and enjoyable spots to watch baseball. This isn't just a good World Series for Chicago Cubs fans; it's a good one for architecture buffs, too. The last four to seven games of the 2016 season will unfold in venues that are genuine fields of dreams.

Published October 25, 2016 Crain’s Chicago Business