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Note to Editors:
This feature on the new Hyatt Center by Michael Webb has been commissioned for use throughout the world by media free of charge. You may simply download and use the story along with photos and drawings provided in another part of this web site. About the author…Michael Webb was born in London and has lived in Los Angeles for 27 years in the Neutra apartment that Charles and Ray Eames called home. He is the author of 20 books on architecture and design, including Brave New Houses: Adventures in Southern California Living, Modernism Reborn: Mid Century American Houses, Architects House Themselves and monographs on Ingo Maurer, George Nelson and Richard Sapper. He is also a regular contributor to Architectural Digest, Architectural Review, Domus, Frame and the New York Times. His latest books, Art/Invention/House (Rizzoli), and Building for Bacchus (Images) will be published in September.
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BREAKING OUT OF THE BOX:
THE HYATT CENTER IS
CHICAGO'S NEWEST LANDMARK
By Michael Webb
The first steel-frame skyscraper was erected in Chicago 120 years ago, and no city has a greater concentration of elevated architectural landmarks. Harry Cobb, a founding partner in the New York firm of Pei Cobb Freed & Partners, has been designing high rises for 50 years, but few have given him greater satisfaction than the Hyatt Center. "I've waited all my life to build in Chicago and add my piece to that incomparable urban fabric," he says.
Cobb's elliptical tower stands out from neighboring blocks in its iconic form, clarity of plan, nobility of proportion, refinement of detail, and complex layering of spaces. It is the latest contribution to a legacy of distinguished commercial buildings by such architects as Adler & Sullivan, Burnham & Root, and Mies van der Rohe, as well as the Marina Towers of Bertrand Goldberg, and the John Hancock Tower of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. What makes this achievement even more remarkable is that Cobb was commissioned to design a speculative office building--not a prestigious headquarters--on a tight budget and a tighter schedule, while meeting the city's tough new energy code.
In downtown Chicago, most buildings shoulder up to the sidewalk, creating high walls along the street grid, in contrast to the set-backs and plazas that are mandated in Manhattan. Developers everywhere favor rectilinear blocks that provide the greatest permitted amount of leasable floor space. Like the grid plan of most American cities it's a formula everyone can live with. Cobb perfected that model in Boston's John Hancock Building, then broke the mold for the multi-faceted Library Tower in Los Angeles, and the elliptical Tour EDF in Paris, which directly inspired the Hyatt Center.
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In plan, the 49-story tower resembles a football with sharply notched ends presenting a slender, elegant profile to South Wacker Drive and Franklin Street. The long façade on Monroe Street curves gracefully back to accommodate a public garden that complements the sleek expanse of glass and stainless steel spandrels, softening the sharp lines and hard surfaces. A mighty beech shades benches that encourage commuters to take a refreshing pause on a busy street. The seating does double duty as security barriers, replacing the customary bollards, and transforming the defensive perimeter into an amenity. A six-story "bustle," as the architect calls it, juts from the rear façade, enlarging the floor plates over ground-level parking. At either end, lofty entry vestibules are set into the junction of the bustle and the tower, and vibrant paintings by British artist Keith Tyson beckon visitors from afar. Like the garden, they are gifts to the city, enhancing the public presence of this private venture, which can be glimpsed from Grant Park at the east end of Monroe.
Architecture adds value to every kind of building, from a modest row house to a mile-long airport terminal, and good architects turn every problem to advantage. When the Pritzker family decided to develop the site they envisioned a headquarters for the Global Hyatt that would be shared with other tenants. Following 9/11, Harry Cobb was invited to design a no-frills building. The immediate need was to attract an additional anchor tenant, which would be the law firm of Mayer, Brown, Rowe & Maw, and to provide space for Hyatt when the lease on their existing offices expired in December 2004. Pritzker Realty Group and their co-developer, Higgins Developer Partners, gave the architect just four weeks to develop a schematic design for a building that would maximize the site and provide column-free, 33,000-square-foot floors, spanning 45 feet from core to exterior wall.
Cobb likes to quote a comment by one of his favorite writers, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, who declared "my brain is like a taxi-it responds when hailed." As the architect explains, "I don't have projects waiting to go; as a modernist I respond in a fresh way to each program and site. I had no interest in doing another cereal box, and it took about 20 minutes to realize the advantages of curved faces on a narrow site with these monsters on every side." The curves would play off the sharp angles, open up oblique views of the city from every floor, and provide a distinctive signature. However, Cobb knew that his clients would need to be convinced of the superior merits of an elliptical building. So he and his team raced to sketch models of that and a conventional scheme, and they presented the contrasting designs side by side in their New York offices.
"For Mayer, Brown it was love at first sight-but we would never have got this building without the box," says the architect. Goldman Sachs, the financial services company, were willing to relocate, provided they could have even larger floors and higher security than the law firm required. "This is where architecture can be fun," says Cobb, who seized the opportunity to add the bustle and six extra floors to the tower, dramatically improving its proportions, and pushing up the total floor area to about two 1.7 million square feet. Higgins explains that the garden and grassy roofs brought bonuses from the planning department, allowing them to build higher without having to seek waivers. He describes the project as "three build-to-suits, and a speculative building in one package." IBM became the fourth anchor in a building that is now almost fully leased.
The Hyatt Center was conceived in the months following 9/11, and that catastrophe
shaped its design in obvious and subtle ways. As Cobb notes, "security demands allow us to make a case for more elaborate entries-- which no developer in his right mind would have agreed to before. The first modernists rejected the grand staircases and deep entries of classical buildings. You just walked through an opening in a glass wall, and we would have put ours at the center of the long façade. Returning to a more elaborate, processional route allows you to integrate barriers with the architecture and achieve a more satisfying sense of arrival." To provide convenient access to a building that is a block long and approached from all directions, there had to be entries at either end. These created a formal separation between public and private, and preserved the integrity of the long façade. Tapered steel canopies with sharp edges shelter and define the entries, balancing the horizontal and vertical thrusts.
The glazed reception vestibules are 50 feet high-the tallest spaces in the building. Glass ceilings pull in natural light and allow you to look up one side of the tower. Cobb put tiny reproductions of a Wassily Kandinsky painting into his model as markers for two boldly colored artworks--something he regarded as an indispensable complement to the architecture. Penny Pritzker brought in art consultant Thea Westreich to work with the architect and developers. They considered 25 artists before selecting a proposal from Keith Tyson, who was then little known in the United States, but has since won the prestigious the Turner Prize and is now represented by the Pace-Wildenstein Gallery.
The two 40 x 10-foot painted aluminum panels, located on the inner walls of the vestibules, were conceived as an abstract expression of the dynamic spirit of the building. Tyson picked colors-such as the yellow background-that would stand out, and would emerge or recede as the light changed. Black frames give the panels a sense of transparency. The composition of overlapping spheres-large at the top and finely detailed at the bottom-is an artistic abstraction of a molecule. The design was generated by Maya, a 3D computer modeling program that is used in the film industry, and was hand-painted by 15 people over eight months.
"I see the building as a confluence of forces-of material elements, light, and all the things that happen within it," says Tyson. "I modeled an abstraction of that in molecular form that can be viewed through virtual windows from right or left. Also, I wanted to get a sense of scale into this building, reaching from the cosmic to the microscopic." The artist found inspiration in a favorite film, Charles and Ray Eames's documentary Powers of Ten, which explores the universe from the furthest galaxies to the core of an atom, and begins with a picnic on the shore of Lake Michigan, a mile from the Hyatt Center.
Penny Pritzker praises Tyson's understanding of the different points from which these paintings would be viewed-the opposite side of the street, the sidewalk, and close-up. Within the lobby, they are mirrored in the stainless steel panels to either side and, at night in the glass ceiling, creating a shimmering rainbow. Cobb is that rare architect who believes in a seamless conjunction of art and architecture. "We made a place for the art, and invited the artist to respond to that specific site and to decide how much of it to use," he explains. "The paintings need these spaces, and the spaces would be quite inadequate without them."
Another challenge to architectural invention was the six foot drop in grade from Wacker to Franklin. "You have to manipulate the shift to make it seem natural-an old device that was commonplace in every age up to the present," says Cobb. "I'm passionate about stairs: the way they feel, the proportions of risers to treads, and the position of landings-which should always be below your eye level. You don't want to make a six foot transition in one place; instead there are three-foot flights at either end. The treads are 15 inches by five--similar to Francesco Borromini's stairs at the Palazzo Barberini in Rome, which give you feeling of floating up. I measured them on site-- that's how I got my sense of proportion. History was hidden from my generation; we had to use our eyes and discover it for ourselves."
"Space, light, form and material-the essential elements of architecture-are deployed to transform the necessity of enhanced security into a rich and memorable experience of passage," says Cobb. In the vestibules the exterior cladding of linen-patterned stainless steel is pulled inside to contrast with the dark jet-mist granite that frames the materials of the main lobby-the limestone pavers and anigre wood paneling that mark the point of arrival at the core of the building. The airport-style security barriers at either end serve as low portals connecting the lofty vestibules to the soaring sweep of the lobby, reprising the low-to-high experience of the street entries. Three tall elevator lobbies slice through the service core to reveal a rear hall with a mezzanine-level cafeteria and fitness center. A drawing by Ricci Abenda is planned for the wedge of wall space between the two escalators [to be confirmed].
The varied plantings in the sidewalk garden are echoed in a screen of bamboo rising from black pebbles and water bubblers within a granite channel within the curve of the curtain wall, concealing the pedestrian ramps that bypass the two flights of steps. Feathery leaves play off the colonnade of pierced steel mullions that reinforce the blast-resistant glass, and mediate between the public and private realms. It is here, in this layered, luminous space, that appears from either end to curve to infinity, that the artistry and craft of the building can best be savored by the tenants and their guests. The broad expanses of wood, light and dark stone, steel and glass, generate a feeling of serenity and grace. Even the elevator cages, with their curved wood sofits and dimpled glass walls, are designed to prolong the experience of arrival.
In contrast, the identical office floors have been built out by their tenants. For many years, corner offices were a major selling point, and building plans zigged and zagged to provide more angled spaces. Mayer Brown wanted non-hierarchical floors with similar offices for all its lawyers, reflecting a shift away from the status symbol of a large private office, and towards the segregation of private and meeting spaces. Once, a partner hosted meetings in his own office; now, for reasons of security and convenience, meetings are held in conference rooms. The spaces that would once have been reserved for senior executives are now open to all the staff, and a vertical channel of glass in the narrow end wall provides views out from the center of each floor and down onto grassy roofs of the bustle.
The seven floors of Global Hyatt Corporation and Classic Residence by Hyatt are linked by two translucent glass staircases that cascade through cut-outs in the floor. The Hyatt interiors were designed by Stephen Apking of Skidmore, Owings &
Merrill in New York to convey the idea of hospitality and a fusion of East and West. "We wanted to achieve the best possible working environment, in terms of light, openness, and interaction," explains Penny Pritzker. The walls and a massive stair in the 12th-floor reception area are paneled in black walnut, and coffee stations in open ended slatted enclosures are cantilevered out over the glass staircase. Mira Nakashima, daughter of the brilliant Japanese-American craftsman George Nakashima, crafted the wood furniture in the spirit of her late father.
As Tyson understood, the Hyatt Center needs to be considered as a dynamic complex, which enriches the public realm as much as it does the daily lives of the individuals who work within it. To achieve this, the developers selected an architect who designs from the inside out, and collaborated with the tenants to satisfy practical needs and incorporate uplifting works of art. The architecture adds value to an urban landmark that is also a triumph of consensus building.
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