“Plop architecture” is the name I gave to one of the biggest urban design faults of Chicago’s pre-recession building boom. It was my pejorative description of the graceless combinations of hulking condo towers crudely stacked atop massive parking garages. The blank-walled garages weren’t just eyesores. They were energy wasters, encouraging people to drive instead of using bus and train lines that were steps away.
While the condo towers raised the tax base and downtown’s population count, their aesthetic banality and concessions to the car were a slap in the face to city life. In New York, you looked up at the second-floor of a residential building and saw windows displaying plants and other evidence of human life. In Chicago, you saw concrete.
So the city’s overdue embrace of a less car-centric model of urban development is welcome, a signal that the recession wasn’t just a pause but a pivot point that allowed policymakers to come to terms with a variety of shifts, especially among the millennial generation born from the early 1980s to the early 2000s. Those changes include more bike- and car-sharing as well as a drop in automobile use — evidence of a changing mindset that views cars as transportation, not status symbols.
Now the global phenomenon of transit-oriented development, which encourages construction of dense residential buildings near rail stops, is adding momentum to these seismic shifts.
Last Thursday, the Chicago Plan Commission approved a 52-unit building near the CTA’s Blue Line station at California Avenue, one of several transit-oriented projects in the pipeline. Early signs of the trend’s impact, which include a finished high-rise at 1611 W. Division St. with no on-site parking, show promise that it will be a boon to the cityscape.
A Chicago law passed in 2013 lets developers cut by as much as half the number of required off-street parking spots if the projects are within 600 feet of a CTA or Metra rail station. The same parking offer is available if the building is within 1,200 feet of such a station and also is located along a street the city has certified as pedestrian-friendly. Back in the dark ages, before this law was passed, there had to be one parking spot for every residential unit.
The law, which also allows developers to build more square footage if their projects are deemed transit-friendly, makes sense (and cents): Developers stand to make more money. More people will live near transit stops, cutting energy use, pollution and their commute times. This population density should provide a built-in market for shop and restaurant owners, giving them a fighting chance for walk-in traffic in the age of e-commerce.
Suburbs from Evanston to Arlington Heights to Naperville have already experienced such benefits by pushing their own form of transit-oriented development.
For architects, fewer parking spaces means a chance to shape buildings that are less cloddish and more responsive to human needs. In the past, said David Brininstool, a partner at Chicago’s Brininstool + Lynch, which has designed several of transit-oriented projects, “The developer would show you the site and ask, ‘How many cars can we get on it?’
“Now we start with the people, not with the cars, which is what it should have been all along.”
The best place to watch these changes emerge is the Polish Triangle, a lively but barren outdoor plaza bounded by Milwaukee and Ashland avenues and Division Street.
Alongside the plaza, steps from its CTA Blue Line stop, you find a residential high-rise that once would have been unthinkable: 1611 W. Division, which consists of 11 stories, 99 apartments, a bank branch, a coffee shop and zero parking spaces for tenants. Local resident Scott Rappe, an architect, spearheaded efforts by the East Village Association, whose turf includes the Polish Triangle, to get a transit-oriented, mixed-use project at the site.
The unconventional design, led by Jon Heinert of Chicago’s Wheeler Kearns Architects, consists of subtly folded facade planes and vertically proportioned panels (both transparent and opaque) that counteract the building’s squat and boxy mass. The arrangement of the panels, seemingly random, reflects an energy-saving layout that provides more windows for living spaces and fewer for bedrooms.
Even if the design is overly two-dimensional — more graphic than architectural — it still vividly captures the energy and eclectic character of the Polish Triangle and relates well, through aesthetic counterpoint, to the classically trimmed former Home Bank & Trust Co. building next door. The high-ceilinged apartments have an admirable simplicity.
Developed by Rob Buono and Paul Utigard, the year-old high-rise has been both a financial success (just two units were vacant last week) and an urban design mold-breaker, confounding skeptics who predicted that its absence of parking spaces would make it a financial flop.
In real estate, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Five more transit-oriented projects — 1515 W. Haddon Ave., 3400 N. Lincoln Ave., 720 N. LaSalle St., 1237 N. Milwaukee Ave. and 2211 N. Milwaukee — have passed the City Council, according to Peter Strazzabosco, a spokesman for the city’s Department of Planning and Development. Another, at 1647 N. Milwaukee, has been approved the council’s zoning committee, he said.
It has not all been smooth sailing. As in the suburbs, some neighbors have attacked the transit-oriented plans as too tall and too dense, forcing developers to lop off height. Others have complained about rampant gentrification. Still other have charged that the buildings will worsen traffic congestion and parking problems.
The changing face of the cityscape invariably produces such tensions, but the trend of transit-oriented development appears to be here to stay. That’s good news for both architecture and urban design. It certainly beats the bad old days of “plop architecture.”
Twitter @BlairKamin
