CULTURE
The Big Screw
By Scott Jacobs
As the home of highrise architecture, Chicago at first welcomed Santiago Calatrava’s design for a Chicago Spire.
The 2,000-foot swirling tower of hotel rooms and condominium apartments would anchor the city skyline with a building situated between our twin towers of The Hancock Center and The Sears Tower and regain for Chicago its claim to have the tallest building in America.
When Calatrava first unveiled the plan in July 2005, he compared it to "a twisting column of smoke going up in the air." With a 150-room luxury hotel at its base, the tower would rotate upward 1,550 feet in a narrowing 360-degree turn to accommodate 300 luxury condominiums -- topped off by a 450-ft. television antenna.
The New York Times likened it to “a blade of grass” and "a tall twisting tree.” Chicago architectural critics Blair Kamin and Kevin Nance praised the design as elegant and stunning. The only negative comment to be heard came from Donald Trump, who is building his own high rise in the Spire’s shadow on the site of the old Chicago Sun-Times. “I don’t think it’s a real project. It’s a charade,” he scoffed.
The Chicago Spire will be located on north edge of the Chicago River at Lake Shore Drive, just across from Chicago’s most popular tourist attraction, Navy Pier (the exact address is 420 East North Water Street.) Although the two land parcels it will cover were originally zoned for buildings no higher than 35 and 55-stories, The Chicago Plan Commission overwhelmingly approved the zoning change in March 2006.
But Trump’s prediction – as is too often the case – proved right. In July, Christopher Carley, the developer who commissioned the Calatrava design, pulled out of the deal and sold the land to Garrett Kelleher, chairman of the Ireland-based Shelbourne Development Group, for $64 million.
On December 6, Shelbourne came back to the city with a new plan for The Spire. Although they wanted to keep the name and 2,000-ft zoning variance, they were dumping the hotel, dumping the TV antenna (i.e. the spire), doubling the square footage (in part, by taking 90-degrees of torque out of the twist) and instead of offering 300 condominiums, they would build and sell 1300 units --at prices ranging from $600,000 to $5 million.
Oh yeah, and the cost of construction would rise from $500 million to something over $1.2 billion.
The pictures of the new design Calatrava presented to the city
now resembled more of a lug bolt than a slender blade of grass, and the architectural
critics were unforgiving. 
“It would be overkill to call it ugly,” Kevin Nance wrote in The Sun-Times. “It remains more interesting than Chicago’s typical human warehouse. But compared with the exquisite original design, it’s a bastardized disappointment that would hardly justify the attention it would draw to itself by its height.”
The revised design did not fare much better with city officials, particularly Streeterville alderman Burt Natarus, or community groups.
The Streeterville Organization of Active Residents 
(SOAR)
was initially willing to overlook the added traffic congestion. When Carley
presented the first design, an accompanying traffic study claimed the 300
new condos, excluding the hotel, would add one car per minute to local street
congestion.
With four times as many units, the new Shelbourne design presumably bumps that average to four cars per minute. Since that is only an average, the added congestion would obviously be much greater during the workday hours than late at night.
Shortly before Christmas, Calatrava came back to Chicago with yet another design that he and the developer quietly shopped around to Mayor Daley, the alderman and selected local architects. Blair Kamin, architectural critic of The Chicago Tribune, reported the new design restores a “tapering, tip-like summit” and adds a thin shaft of light that would shoot into the sky, as if it were the wispy curl of smoke. But there was no mention of scaling back the 1300-unit target and no public drawings were released.
The Shelbourne Group hopes to begin construction this coming June and told various groups it was ready to present the new plans to the city Plan Commission approval as early as this month. Then Mayor Daley and Alderman Natarus and the developers came up with a better idea – wait until after the election February 27.
However much Calatrava may tinker with the exterior look of Shelbourne’s new design, there’s no way to scale back their ambitious plan to quadruple the condominium units in the building into the same slender, elegant tower he first envisioned. He can run cad cam programs all day on his computer to come up with architecturally pleasing facsimiles, but the real issue isn’t aesthetics but density. A Chicago Spire with 1300 residential units in 150-stories is too many people in too little space for an area already over-stuffed with luxury condominiums.
Streeterville is one of the most traffic-clogged neighborhoods in the city – just try to get to Navy Pier on a nice summer night. In 1999, local developers feeling the pinch of complaint from residents started a free Streeterville Trolley so tourists could park outside the neighborhood and ride the trolley into the North Pier and Navy Pier amusements.
But the developers keep developing at an astounding pace. In 2005, 4,700 new condos came on the market in Streeterville; in 2006, another 6,100 were completed. [CORRECTION: This figure, compiled by Appraisal Research, refers to all condos in the downtown area.] Today, there are seven more luxury condominium towers under construction in the 14-block area east of Michigan with a combined floor area equivalent to a 275-story skyscraper.
It’s fair to say the neighbors of Streeterville, and most of Chicago, has a vested interest in whether The Chicago Spire gets a go-ahead from the Chicago Plan Commission. Since Mayor Daley and Alderman Natarus have already seen the revised plans, why aren’t they being made public so we can too?
Because, if the design plans were vetted before the election, they might become an issue in the mayoral campaign and would certainly be a major factor in how Streeterville residents judge their alderman. Voters might start asking hard questions on what criteria the city uses to decide development and how developers go about winning zoning approval.
Mayor Daley and Alderman Natarus would have to take a public position on the development – and that’s just not the Chicago way.
Better to wait until after the election so city officials can take up the matter in the usual course of business. Isn't that what makes Chicago the city that works?
