Oak Park is a daunting challenge for any architect. Like Columbus, Ind., it has a tourist industry because it has some great architecture. In the case of Columbus, in the 1950s, Cummins Diesel decided to start picking up the tab for the architects’ fees for the town’s public buildings. The result has been a few early gems followed by some of the most remarkably mediocre or even bad work by some of our greatest architects.
The problem is that there is too much pressure. Everyone who designs a building in Columbus knows that once completed, it becomes another dot on the tourist map of famous architects’ work.
Oak Park is no different. Every new building here designed by someone who is or wants to be a “Noted Architect” suffers because of this. The Oak Park Public Library architects had to deal with a Hydra of a client that set some nearly intractable problems, such as the library’s awkward entry, parked not just next to but over the garage ramp. Yet the architect either didn’t stand up and make his client understand that it was a bad idea or he wasn’t creative enough to find a way around it.
The same is true with our emerging Public Works facilities. That huge and expensive hole being dug is a basement for the salt trucks so that the building mass is short enough not to overpower its residential neighbors. The architect needed to help the client find a better way.
Both situations were very difficult. That the assignments were in “Frank Lloyd Wright’s Oak Park” only made matters worse. And in both cases, the architects were not up to at least part of the challenge. They got run over by the situation; each is a missed opportunity.
We see this played out again with the new Whiteco design. Mr. Brininstool’s firm has done some fine and sensitive work. This, unfortunately, is not that. If Wednesday Journal had captioned the renderings of the design [April 26] with “The Whiteco Block by David Brininstool, c. 1957,” I would have believed it.
For a 1957 building, we would forgive some of the more egregious errors as lessons learned. It is a bad idea to put a long blank wall along a pedestrian sidewalk on a major street?#34;we know now that you just don’t do that if you want a livable and secure downtown environment. You don’t put up a long, flat, repetitive high-rise slab in a residential neighborhood?#34;it’s unfriendly and cold and dehumanizing. A green roof and architectural precast from Wisconsin can’t hide the reality that once again the architect of a large building in Oak Park hyperventilated.
The statement is made in the article that “The most visible section of the development will be the six-story portion at the corner of Harlem and Ontario.” Hogwash. The most visible section of the development will be the Son of Cabrini housing block that you will see while stuck in traffic southbound on Harlem, staring and wondering how the heck the village could have been involved in creating such a monstrosity.
Not. Good. Enough.
The irony is that this allegedly “modern” building is also a recreation of historic forms?#34;from just 50 years ago instead of 500. Yet another brave architect inflicting harmony upon us today with a basket of forms our fathers discarded in favor of a more humane approach.
But again, the real problem is not solely with the architects. The village also gets to wear the jacket on this one.
And I realize how nifty it is for Mr. Brininstool to get to do this. He got a project out from under some better known architects. All of his architect friends will come and look at this and future Oak Park tourist maps will have a dot there now with his name, too.
But unfortunately, the sleek and simple volumes that work for Mr. Brininstool on smaller buildings simply do not at this scale. Facile, shallow facade manipulations and relying on the ability to see the structure through the glass – something that always works better in the renderings than in real life?#34;can’t cover the fact that the massing is too blocky, the north side, at least, is too flat and repetitive in an undistinguished way and the first floor along Harlem has a 150-foot-long brick wall that can’t be softened by a handful of honey locust street trees.
And don’t try the “but the groundbreaking is in August” argument either. The steel hasn’t been ordered yet, and it is possible to avert what is wrong with this while they’re still digging the foundations. Design-builders do it all the time.
For 1957, put it on the map.
For 2006, try again (again). We know better now.
Eric Davis, AIA, is an Oak Park Township trustee and an architect.
