I reached the lakefront kiosk on the Museum Campus just in time to climb its stairs, poke my head through an opening in its roof and gaze out to Lake Michigan and the downtown skyline. That was precisely what its architects intended. But they didn’t anticipate what happened next.
Minutes later, Chicago Park District workmen closed off the entry to the stairs with a chain-link wall. They had good reason to do so: After the kiosk opened, people climbed from a platform atop the stairs and went onto the roof, endangering both themselves and the roof’s rubber membrane.
So it goes with the four lakefront kiosks designed for the Chicago Architecture Biennial, the sprawling, captivating survey of contemporary design that is making its inaugural run here. Only two are completed; none has a vendor yet. Despite such problems, these little buildings, which the biennial erected in concert with the Chicago Park District, are cause for celebration, or at least guarded optimism.
They serve up delicious eye candy, explore new uses of materials, create a showcase for up-and-coming architects and promise to create a family of architecturally significant structures that will replace the lakefront’s modest food-and-drink shacks. They remind us of the value of architectural experimentation, a key biennial theme. And they raise fascinating issues about small park structures:
What exactly is their purpose? Are they meant to be iconic objects or form spaces that invite people to gather? How can they be artful contributions to the cityscape and stand up to vagaries of the weather and human behavior? Which should take precedence — their identity in the summer, when they’re supposed to be used by vendors and visitors, or in the winter, when the vendors shut down?
Such questions have been popping up with increasing frequency on architectural radar screens since 2000. That’s when London’s Serpentine Galleries began sponsoring the construction of temporary summer pavilions by revered architects like Zaha Hadid and Frank Gehry.
But unlike the glamorous London pavilions, their workaday Chicago counterparts, which will house vendors selling things like hot dogs, are meant to be permanent. They’re also built on tiny budgets. In other words, in classic Chicago fashion, the kiosks challenged architects to do more with less.
Did they succeed?
Here is a progress report on the kiosks:
‘Chicago Horizon’
Set at the base of a hill near the Shedd Aquarium and titled “Chicago Horizon,” this small structure poses a big question: How to build a flat wood roof that can span great distances without sagging like a wet noodle?
The answer, designed by Ultramoderne, a team of Rhode Island designers (Yasmin Vobis, Aaron Forrest and Brett Schneider), comes in an enticing package. A thin roof, 56 feet square, spreads far beyond 13 asymmetrically arranged interior columns. It shelters a large gathering area and small rectangular zones for a vendor as well as those trouble-inducing stairs and viewing platform.
The kiosks’ imagery and the views it frames are lovely. It’s Ludwig Mies van der Rohe meets Ikea: handsomely proportioned, carefully detailed, a poetic essay in wood that vividly contrasts the natural with the man-made. I hope it stays in its lush Museum Campus setting rather than being moved, as originally planned, to the concrete desert of Queen’s Landing, the lakefront promenade that sits to the east of Buckingham Fountain.
But the jury is still out on how this $75,000 pavilion, which was the winning entry in a global architecture competition that drew more than 400 entries, will work.
Its abstract architectural language makes it inscrutable to some passers-by. But once touches for the vendor, like LED signs and menu displays, are in place, they should better signal that the kiosk is a spot for hanging out.
To solve the climbing problem, the architects are exploring options like a glass guardrail around the roof slot. Let’s hope they get it right: This will be a lesser project if parkgoers can’t ascend its stair to the viewing platform, stick their heads above the roof and look out over the namesake horizon.
‘Summer Vault’
Temporarily placed near Millennium Park’s Cloud Gate sculpture, “Summer Vault” is one of three $50,000 biennial kiosks designed with Chicago architecture schools. In this case, Colorado architect Paul Andersen and Chicago’s Paul Preissner joined forces with the University of Illinois at Chicago.
The outcome is an airy, pale-blue barrel vault that’s so paper-thin it almost doesn’t seem real. Steel sheets, three-quarters of an inch thick, provide the alluring thinness. Steel screens with hexagon-shaped grating split the parallelogram-shaped floor into two triangular spaces. One is allotted to a vendor; the other is reserved for the public.
The complex geometry creates ever-shifting profiles as you move around the kiosk. The screens, diagonally canted, suggest large-scale courses of brick and add enriching shade and shadow patterns.
Like “Chicago Horizon,” though, this kiosk has yet to prove itself as a working building. After people climbed onto the swinging metal doors that lead to its vendor space, the park district clamped them shut. Here, too, many passers-by can’t figure out what purpose the structure serves. And the communal space is tiny. It hardly encourages people to linger.
A variety of solutions could fix things by next spring, when the kiosk will move to its permanent home at Harold Washington Playlot Park, 5200 S. Hyde Park Blvd. There, it’s expected to sit in the middle of an egg-shaped plaza the architects designed. Benches and other seats could make up for the lack of interior space.
That would help the design become a focal point for social interchange rather than what it is today: an object that’s better at gathering fallen leaves than people.
‘The Cent Pavilion’
It’s a pleasant shock to see the uncovered, structural framework of this 40-foot tower rising over Mies’ iconic Crown Hall at the Illinois Institute of Technology.
Its stacks of rotating hexagons add a jolt of verticality to the overwhelmingly horizontal modernist campus on the South Side. The pavilion’s exposed frame suggests the crown of a setback skyscraper — or, perhaps, a much smaller version of Tatlin’s Tower, a grandiose double helix designed by the Russian architect Vladimir Tatlin that was never built. Its name expresses its identity as “a centralized structure” without a clear focal point, according to its Chilean architects, Mauricio Pezo and Sofia von Ellrichshausen, who designed the pavilion with IIT.
The pavilion will be covered in diagonal wooden boards when it opens next spring at its permanent home at North Avenue Beach in Lincoln Park. For now it resembles scaffolding, which may explain why it’s ringed with green metal poles, yellow rope and signs that warn: “Climbing the structure is expressly prohibited.”
In its current state, the pavilion appears objectlike — less a place where people can converse than a sculpture in conversation with the downtown skyline. You wonder how a vendor and the public will co-exist within the minuscule floor space. Supporting wires within the scaffolding make the pavilion seem uninhabitable.
But let’s reserve judgment: The wires, the architects say, are temporary and will disappear once the wood-framed structure is complete. Its tall interior space, which is to be lit by skylights at the level of the setbacks, could be spectacular — a chapel of the sky.
‘Rock’
The final lakefront kiosk, titled “Rock” and designed by Nigerian architect Kunle Adeyemi in association with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, has unmistakable echoes of Frank Lloyd Wright’s famous Fallingwater house. Among them is a platform that will cantilever over protective rock walls at Lincoln Park’s Montrose Beach.
According to the architect’s statement, the design strives to be “a pop-up pavilion — a public sculpture.” A cultural space and bar are anticipated, the latter wittily illustrated in drawings of the pair from Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks” sitting at a counter.
At this stage, the design is only a dream. It consists of nothing more than a circle of rocks from the lakefront wall that are placed near “Summer Vault” in Millennium Park. This is due to prudence rather than malfeasance. It would have been prohibitively expensive to build the kiosk, then disassemble it and ship it to Montrose Beach.
Come spring, you get the feeling, “Rock” might rock. By then we’ll know much more about the biennial’s lakefront kiosks and whether they live up to their billing as gemlike legacies of the big architecture show and catalysts for creativity that open the door to experimentation on a larger scale.
Twitter @BlairKamin
