Franklin Park MCM

This towering MidCentury office building, at 9401 Grand Avenue in Franklin Park, looms over the low-rise suburbia and industrial facilities surrounding it.



Completed in 1960, it's a bit of hybrid - a 1950s design with 1960s colors. It was long the administrative headquarters of the Chicago-based Motorola company, who originally housed over a thousand office and technical workers within it. The building fronted a manufacturing operation that made TVs, radios, and stereo products; other divisions of the company worked on auto parts. An auto lift delivered cars to a 14-bay garage on the 2nd floor, made for testing car radios. A Chicago real estate blog also claims that it had a private executive auto elevator for the company president.


Motorola Annual Report 1960, when the building was brand new

Motorola moved to Schaumburg in 1976. A 1980 ad places the Matsushita Industrial Company at the Franklin Park address. In a later life, the building was known as the O'Hare branch of Telecom Central, with a sign that still stands in front of it.



Today the Motorola Building stands vacant, draped with a gigantic banner promising a total reskin and conversion to apartments. A sales office sits on the parking lot next door. The venture began in 2006 and has since collapsed. The site www.thegrandlofts.com doesn't appear to be online; meanwhile, online rumors swirl of conversion to HUD housing.



Architecturally, maybe it's just as well. The conversion calls for a complete top to bottom reskin that would completely alter the character of this startlingly Modernist building. The rendering doesn't quite look like the soggy historicalisticismist mush that has infiltrated so many Chicago neighborhoods (no developer ever touts the merits of living like it's 1915; their condominiums are unfailingly examples of "modern living". Yet somehow, no building is allowed to reflect this reality on its outside!)



In fact, the longer I look at the details of the rendering, the more I think it's pretty good, particularly if that's not red brick on the ends. Still, the question remains of why it needs to be done at all.



Is the building in its current form a masterpiece? Historically significant? No, of course not. But in equal measure, there's nothing wrong with it, either. It has a powerful presence on the street, and gives a clean, presentable public face to all the industrial buildings behind it.



Of particular concern to me is the fate of the two concrete sculptures at the doorway. Stylized, abstract, and curvaceous, they recall the same sort of abstract works seen in certain Chicago apartment lobbies. I have no clue what they're supposed to represent - the evolution of mankind and his telecommunicative abilities, perhaps? - but I love 'em.



Now, there will inevitably be those who decry the building as an "ugly hulk" or "banal" or "bland" or "awful" or a thousand other pejoratives. To them, and to those who have attacked other Modern buildings that I cherish, I say: just look away. Just don't look at it, if it's that awful. Spare us the onslaught of reskins and re-dos, and save the Midcentury for those of us who can appreciate it, both today and tomorrow!

Machines for Living

It's not just that the occupants of this Northbrook home own three vintage cars. Nor is it the fact that all three cars, including a 1964 Imperial, a 1966 Chrysler Newport, and a 1966 Chrysler New Yorker, are operational.



No, it's the fact that they park them in front of a set of patterned Midcentury garage doors of the exact same vintage as the cars themselves that makes me grin with delight every time I see it. Long may they run!

Friday Photo Special: The Remains of Bensenville

Orchard Avenue, August 2009


Orchard Avenue, April 2010


Orchard Avenue, June 2010

With clearance obtained, the demolition of Bensenville has proceeded with astonishing speed. Two months after the work began, every single house is gone. The only survivors are a 1920s gas station, and the apartment complex at the east end of the area.


View east from Orchard Avenue

North of Irving Park, the land is almost clear of everything except streets.


Orchard Road


Garden Avenue


Garden Avenue

Okay, sure, I would have photographed those railings anyway, 'cause they're poetic and pathos-evoking and all that... but mainly I photographed them because they were the only identifiable landmark left on this side of the road.


South of Irving Park, there's a lot more rubble. Some foundations remain, and piles of salvaged scrap metal remain in the streets.




Garden Avenue


Pershing Avenue

Capital-M Modernism in Rogers Park

Granville Gardens


It's always nice when the AIA Guide to Chicago notes a building I'm interested in, since that means most of the legwork (who, when, what style, original use, for what client) is already done. However, you'd think guys as educated and smart as the authors would, in a city like Chicago, know better than to tempt fate with statements like the following:

"Amazingly, the entire complex is in close to original condition."

Granted, it's been 17 years since those words were published in the first edition copy of the Guide, in reference to Rogers Park's Granville Gardens apartments. But sure enough, when I first paid a visit to photograph the Moderne garden apartment complex, there was construction work underway in the courtyards. On a recent repeat visit, I discovered that the interior courtyards were being converted into parking lots. Augh!!





To be fair, the lots appear thoughtfully designed, retaining the two mature trees in the center of each of the two courtyards as well as a sizable band of grass around them. And hey, parking lots can always be removed. In theory.



Granville Garden - now partially renamed Granville Court Apartments - stands amid the sides streets between Peterson and Devon, on the corner of Hoyne and Granville. It's a complex of 14 buildings, connected by open terraces in groups of three and four, and arranged around the two courtyards. It's a lovely, thoughtful way to manage housing, dense but not crowded.







The buildings went up as a privately financed venture under government insurance and supervision, in a time when not much was being built in Chicago or elsewhere. The architects were Rissman & Hirschfeld, the year was 1938, and the styling is Moderne, with prominent corner windows and thin mullions which (knock on wood) still remain intact. For now. Architectural interest is provided by brick banding at the exterior corners, curved concrete entry canopies with scalloped edges, glass block and curved walls in the entry foyers, and the stepped massing of the buildings. Look close at the entryways and you may find some surprisingly sleek original door hardware still in place.




Winchester-Hood Garden Homes


Granville Gardens are not the only early Modernist housing development in Rogers Park, nor even the only one in this neighborhood. Just down the street is an even bigger complex, occupying parts of four contiguous, partially-developed city blocks. The Winchester-Hood Garden Homes were built from 1948 to 1951, to the designs of Holsman, Holsman, Klekamp and Taylor.



HHK&T liked their angles. Not only do short angled bay windows form the buildings' most distinctive feature, but the site plans place nearly all of them at slight angles to the streets and to each other. The four block plans are all different, as none of the available parcels were the same shape and size. The result is a delightful variety in the resulting garden spaces between buildings, with no two alike. Meandering sidewalks lead through the buildings and to their doors.



The buildings themselves are almost Spartanly simple, though many feature three sculptured designs piercing the walls of their stairwells. The three sculptures - stylized versions of Zodiac figures Aeries, Pisces, and Capricorn - were designed by architect Coder Taylor. Each is only semi-solid, allowing light from the stairwell to illuminate its outlines at night.







The resulting effect in the evening, of lantern-like lights filtering from the buildings, the curving paths, and the mature trees, is like walking through some celebratory forest village.



Winchester-Hood has a near-twin down on the south side, the Parkway Gardens apartments at 6415 S. Calumet. Fenced off, surrounded by parking, and in a generally rough section of town, it's not nearly as inviting. I have yet to photograph it.


Lunt Lake Apartments


HHK&T were busy after World War II. In addition to Winchester-Hood and Parkway Gardens, they acted as consulting firm to Mies van der Rhohe's famous Lake Shore Apartments. And in 1948, the firm designed a second Rogers Park complex, the Lake Lunt Apartments.





Consisting of three buildings on a single large lot, Lunt Lake stands on one of the many dead-end street stubs east of Sheridan, that end at the lakefront. Lunt Lake isn't as bucolic as its sister development, but its structures are cut from the same cloth.

One might expect a U-shaped arrangement facing the lake, but instead the buildings are simply arranged in a line along the street, doing little to take advantage of the lakefront location. Only one receives lake views. These structures also lack the the fascinating stairwell sculptures of the other complex, and the view of them from lakeside is a bit underwhelming.





Lunt-Lake was finished at a cost of $1,000,000 - quite a steal for putting up three buildings! Lunt-Lake and Winchester-Hood were both featured in Architectural Forum of January 1950, which noted the unusual brickwork. Designated "rowlock bond", it was combined with poured, steel reinforced concrete to create a very thin, strong bearing wall.

Today, the buildings look as good as new. May they remain unblemished for another 60 years to come!

Chicago Main News Stand

The Chicago Main Newsstand in Evanston is a real oddity, a little mutant of a Modern building. At first glimpse, it seems easy enough to suss out -- it's a classically Modern 1950s building, now and perhaps always functioning as a news stand, complete with a vintage neon sign on top, and thin sans-serif fonts announcing its purpose on the side.



But it's too perfect. There's no sign of aging at all. Those thick window mullions are not very 1950s. And the interior uses varnished wood trim and exposed ductwork. No MidCentury architect would dare leave ductwork exposed, no more than they would walk out their front door without a pair of pants on. No, that interior, at the very least, is from the 1980s or later.



Turns out, the stand originally went up in the 1940s. Named for the streets upon whose intersection it stands, the Chicago-Main Newsstand operated until 1993 as a mainstay of Chicago readers from across the region. After years of neglect following its closure, it came close to demolition in 2000, but was spared. In 2001, it re-opened after an intense renovation that included an entirely new roof and structure, relaying of the north and south walls, and the restoration of the original neon sign, which glows to the delight of sign fans across the city.



Today, the City Newsstand sells "60 newspapers and 6,000 magazines", according to its web site. And it looks pretty cool, a beautiful modern box glowing in the night and gleaming in the day.

Friday Photo Special: Greek Statues again

Wouldn't you know it? The very day the post on Midcentury Grecian statues goes up, I happen to make it back out to the O'Hare neighborhood, where the whole thing started. Here's a few closeups of the strange and intriguing chunks of statuary that inhabit the courtyards of this 1960s neighborhood.





Some are weathered, and some are well-loved and even decorated with flowers. Perhaps the biggest surprise for me was realizing that some of them had been painted.





Not all of these things are centrally placed. Some of them look like they were just stuck any old place.







But THIS one, by contrast... it not only occupies the focal point of its courtyard, but it was also meant to be lit up in blue, red, green and yellow beams of light. Brilliant! Brilliantly tacky, actually, but still brilliant. I simply must come back after dark.