The City and Reliquary

I wanted to find an appropriate Chicago example for each section of this ePortfolio and searches on “Relics in Chicago, IL” or “Reliquaries in Chicago, IL” were discouraging.  I was walking along Rush Street to meet friends for dinner on Michigan Avenue and passed the newly opened hotel, The Gwen. The hotel wasn’t really new; it had been the Conrad Chicago Hotel and was now under new management. I think because of this class, I wondered at the significance of the new name?  Why Gwen? I was delighted to find a “spolie” of sorts, my own doorway to something beyond.

(an excerpt from my Welcome Page)

I chose The Gwen, A Luxury Collection Hotel Chicago. The Michigan Avenue elevation of this hotel is the original facade of the McGraw-Hill building. The hotel sits above The Shops At North Bridge, 520 North Michigan Avenue, Chicago, IL 60611, Near North Side. The lobby for this hotel is actually on the 6th floor.

(formerly the site of the McGraw-Hill Building demolished in 1998)

A relic is “an object surviving from an earlier time, especially one of historical or sentimental value”. The entire facade of The Gwen is actually the preserved and reattached facade of the 1928-1929 McGraw-Hill Building, its Michigan Avenue elevation, that previously stood on the exact same site. The original McGraw-Hill Building represented one of the first collaborations between sculptor and architect with adornments sculpted by Gwen Lux, the Gwen of  “The Gwen”! During her career she continued to collaborate with a number of important architects including Edward Durrell Stone (University of Arkansas Theater), Victor Gruen (Northland Shopping Center, Detroit), and Eero Saarinen (General Motors Technical Center, Warren, Michigan).

Relics are most often sacred objects but not always.

Why would Chicago commit to deliberately preserve the facade of the McGraw-Hill building?

First, the physical facade. The limestone, including Gwen’s ornamentation is a tangible material that can be removed, labeled and saved. It is an item from a specific time and place that brings that time and place into the present for us.

The distinguishing sculptural features on the facade are two different sets of decorative stone panels adorned with figures from the zodiac and Greek mythology.

The zodiac panels make up one series; carved in a simplified style with flat, spare detailing which made the whole series easier to read from street level. These panels were located between the fourth-floor windows and were rectangular in shape.

The second set of decorative panels are mythological figures carved more boldly to visually anchor the projecting piers of the building shaft. Three of these panels existed on the Michigan Avenue facade representing Greek deities and as cross-shaped panels they extended between vertical flutes to visually anchor the recessed windows. 

Second, the building design.

This facade represents one elevation of a building designed in a specific style and records a design process that we can also interpret.

The original McGraw-Hill Building was designed in the Art Deco style which was seen as the progressive style of the day. This style combined form and verticality and the McGraw-Hill employed many of its signatures- the sharply rectilinear forms, multiple setbacks and cornice-free tops that help the building appear to soar into the sky.  The trim vertical look of these “Jazz Age” skyscrapers embraced decoration allowing non-traditional ornamental schemes to provide visual interest on the facade and often, to direct the eye to key points.

                                                              Original McGraw-Hill Building,

                                                    520 N. Michigan Avenue (east) and north facades

The McGraw-Hill building was a study in miniature of the design Eliel Saarinen submitted to the Chicago Tribune competition for a new headquarters building. This Saarinen design placed second and went on to inspire a generation of skyscrapers. (2)

The similarities between the McGraw-Hill and the Saarinen building are apparent: both structures use a visually separate base and shaft, both buildings are composed of relatively solid corner piers that flank projecting piers and recessed windows, both use setbacks to define distinctive building tops (McGraw-Hill is a truncated version so has fewer setbacks) and both buildings incorporate “non-traditional” ornamental schemes to add visual interest. The limestone mythological figures carved in bolder relief also provide a vertical emphasis to the fluted piers and a unified thrust up into the sky (2.)

Third, the streetscape.

The scale and proportion of the facade serve as a bridge to the past; an echo of the city fabric of 1930s Chicago when people shopping on Michigan Avenue paused to look up and admire the ornamentation on buildings. This building added to the diversity of styles and character as part of an ensemble of buildings Blair Kamin called “a civilized urban coherence”, that made Michigan Avenue such a world-class street. Relics can be scaled up to the size of the city. “With these interventions on behalf of salvaging the past, Chicago calls our attention to a problem which is important for us even if not yet taken on by the institutions: the recognition of the value of the architectural appearance of our cities in the industrial age, and the concern for the development of intelligent building plans and types, whether for habitation or business in our suburbs” (5).

History of the Facade.

Does this “facadectomy” work? Is it a credible landmark?

In 2000, the complex called the Shops at North Bridge officially opened. Some 6,000 pieces of the old limestone facade of the McGraw-Hill building, including the Art Deco panels designed by Gwen Lux, were clad to the new steel frame structure along Michigan Avenue. Some of the limestone panels were up to 14-feet wide and ten inches thick: some plain, some fluted, some carved. The hotel portion of the project occupies the upper floors. The AIA Guide to Chicago at the time called it Chicago’s largest “facadectomy”.

The hotel reopened on the original site and was built with two more floors than the former McGraw-Hill building but those floors were set back far enough to be invisible from across Michigan Avenue.

Photo showing The Terrace

Rooftop, The Gwen, and building setback.

The Nordstrom entrance on Michigan Avenue is marked by an 80-foot atrium sandwiched between the original site at 520 North Michigan and a pre-existing Marriott Hotel. The bottom two floors at 520 North Michigan are retail spaces, typical for multi-use buildings along Michigan Avenue.

Four limestone panels of Roman gods formerly on the north facade of the original building are now installed on the first floor of the glass atrium.

Some parts were left over after the reconstruction, so four, six-foot panels depicting astrological symbols are displayed near the Nordstrom Cafe. These two panels represent Virgo the Maiden and behind her, Capricorn the Sea Goat.

The developer John Buck said, "In the end, to the man on the street, it will look exactly like the 520 North Michigan Avenue building- except cleaner".(4)

Is that true?

The reconstruction of the facade does include both sets of decorative stone panels in their original locations: the zodiac series was located between the fourth-floor windows and the three cross-shaped mythological panels were located at the fifth floor as anchors to the vertical shaft.

At the crown of the building, terra-cotta panels and medallions provide additional interest to the building's top as they did in the original.

The shaft of the current facade is similar in design with solid corner piers and recessed windows.

The mythological panels still anchor a vertical thrust that takes the eye upward along the building shaft assisted by the fluted portions of the facade and the recessed windows.

Like the original building, the top is shaped by setbacks and dramatic tall limestone parapets and rectangular openings.

Essential History of 520 North Michigan Avenue.

McGraw-Hill Building, 520 North MIchigan Avenue, Chicago 60611

1928-1929.

Designed by Frederick Thielbar and John Fugard in the Art Deco style as a 16-story, 190 foot tall building clad in light-brown limestone (demolished in 1998). The architects chose a scheme of ornamentation based on ancient Greek architecture and mythology.

1977.

The facade and its architectural sculpture received Chicago Landmark designation.

1988.

A hotel was built inside the original building.

1995.

Blair Kamin, the architecture critic for the Chicago Tribune wrote an article, “The Case For The McGraw-Hill Building” which is attached to this portfolio.

The Commission on Chicago Landmarks prepared a report, also attached here, which declared the building to be “one of the city’s best collaborations of sculpture and architecture”.

1998.

Developer John Buck received the approval to tear down the existing McGraw-Hill Building because (monitored by two separate outside consultants) he agreed to undertake the careful removal of the vintage 16-story facade, restore it and install it as part of the new building being constructed on the site.

In fact, the original building facade was disassembled piece-by-piece starting from the top (2,200 slabs of stone, the largest of which weighs about a ton), labeled and stored in a warehouse while the North Bridge complex was built.

2000.

The opening of Le Meridien Hotel and the Shops at North Bridge (originally Westfield North Bridge), Anthony Beluschi Architects with OWP&P, and with Farr Associates Preservation Consultants and Callison Architects (Nordstorm building).

A reconstruction of the original McGraw-Hill facade was assimilated into the North Bridge complex.

The mall also inherited this topographically unusual site. Michigan Avenue at this location is elevated, gently sloping back down to ground level from its bi-level bridge over the Chicago River.

Nordstrom occupies floors one through four of a full-block building one block behind Michigan Avenue (the southwest corner of N. Rush Street and E. Grand Avenue). The mall curved southwest through the building and ramps up several feet, accommodating a rise in Grand Avenue below, then spans Rush Street to meet Nordstrom whose first floor is actually quite high above ground level.

Michigan Avenue Elevation 

2005.

The hotel is renamed the Conrad Chicago Hotel

2015.

The hotel is renamed The Gwen, owned by DiamondRock Hospitality.

Essential History of Michigan Avenue.

In 1909 the architects Burnham/Bennett worked with property owners to prepare a series of remarkable plans for the development of North Michigan Avenue into a “carriage street” that “would match, if not surpass, its counterparts in New York and Paris-both in quality and style”.(1.)

Developers were delighted when McGraw-Hill decided to move its previous quarters to this newly developing North Michigan Avenue. The Tribune Tower was three years old at the time, and with McGraw-Hill as a neighbor this portion of Michigan Avenue was turning into a publishing and advertising center.

In 1918 a second plan for North Michigan Avenue developed by the North Central Association followed the original plan. This purpose of this plan was to expand the original vision of a “carriage street” and require the first two floors of all buildings along the avenue to be devoted to retail use. The storefronts of the Palmolive Building (adjacent to the McGraw-Hill Building designed by Holabird and Root,1927-28) and the McGraw-Hill Building were designed to accommodate this preference.

In 1920, the Chicago River Bridge opened and development of this street accelerated until the stock market crash in 1929.

31 major buildings were built or remodeled along this newly widened North Michigan Avenue during this time. Suddenly North MIchigan Avenue was one of the few streets in downtown Chicago where the designs of the buildings represent a very limited time period. A streetscape arose overnight- a showcase for art and architecture of the time and “a means for the city to be read as a narrative of a specific period”.

Today, “the Magnificent Mile” starts at the Chicago River and heads north to 900 North Michigan.

520 North Michigan Avenue can be seen on the left

(1.)“City of Chicago Landmark Designation Report” submitted to the Commission of Chicago Landmarks, March 1, 1995.

(2.) Chicago Architecture Blog, chicagoarchitecture.info,

“North Bridge Makes Historic Chicago Architecture More Public”, Daniel Schell, Artefaqs Corporation,January 3, 2015

(3.) “The Case For The McGraw-Hill Building”, Blair Kamin, Chicago Tribune, October 29, 1995

(4.)”A $1.5 Billion Renewal of a Chicago Neighborhood”, David W. Dunlap, Chicago Tribune, June 6, 1999.

(5.) Beyond The International Style, New Chicago Architecture, A cura di/edited by Maurizio Casari, Vincenzo Pavan, 1981. (Page 15).

High Relief Panel- the face of Atlas