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Fueled by a growing shortage of apartments and fears that condominiums will lose their value, Chicago’s apartment building boomlet is a welcome shift from the brutal recession years, if only because it will help keep struggling architects off the unemployment rolls. Yet as two new apartment towers reveal, the design consequences of this anticipated construction surge are complex and, in some ways, troubling.
The towers have much in common. Both were designed by the workhorse Chicago firm of Solomon Cordwell Buenz and were financed before the market turmoil of 2008. Both rise just west of the Wells Street elevated train tracks, a placement that makes you wonder whether their residents will ever get a good night’s sleep. And both have names that strive desperately to make them sound hip.
One (left) is called 215 West, which is shorter and snappier than its actual address, 215 W. Washington St. The other, two blocks to the north, is named 200 Squared, reflecting its location in the 200 blocks of North Wells and West Lake Streets but also suggesting (unintentionally, no doubt) that the building is crammed with ex-math majors. Fortunately, the architecture is better than the names, though nothing here is going to turn heads like the boldly undulating balconies of the Aqua hotel and residential tower.
This Lake Wobegon, all-the-buildings-are-above-average quality was predictable. These are apartment buildings, where budgets and architectural ambition tend to be considerably lower than corporate office buildings or condominium towers. If an apartment high-rise turns out not to wreak havoc on the cityscape and to give us some decent design in the bargain, then we have every reason to tolerate it. And that, with some notable exceptions, is what these buildings deliver.
Rising 50 stories and designed by SCB’s Drew Ranieri, 215 West is composed of three distinct parts, each housing a separate function. A ground floor lined with storefronts nicely addresses Washington Street. Above it rises a 600-space parking garage and, above the garage, a thin apartment slab housing 389 apartments. Most skyscrapers save their visual drama for the top. Here, it comes near the bottom.
Due to a difference in the size of their floor plates, the slab’s eastern end cantilevers over the garage by 25 feet. Indeed, the slab would seem to be in danger of falling off the garage were it not for the presence of a big steel truss (above) that reassuringly joins it to the rest of the building. The truss also gestures to the exposed structure of the “L.”‘Lake Wobegon’ in the sky: Apartment high-rises are above average, but nothing special
‘Lake Wobegon’ in the sky: Apartment high-rises are above average, but nothing special
The 42-story 200 Squared (left), designed by SCB’s Jim Curtin, is a more pleasing variation on the three-part theme.
Above its glassy, still-to-be-finished ground floor is a 547-space garage, outfitted on two sides with narrow ribbon windows and handsomely corrugated metal panels. Above the garage rises another thin slab, this one housing 329 apartments. It is noticeably glassier than its counterpart at 215 West because its columns, unlike its barely visible floor slabs, are hidden inside. The slab is divided into four wafer-thin layers, including a hard-edged plane of concrete that confronts the “L.”
Any detailed consideration of these buildings must begin with a glaring contradiction: By virtue of their downtown location, they will encourage people to walk rather than drive. But their parking garages contain far more spaces than their residents will ever need. Their extra, or “non-accessory,” spaces invariably will make it easier for people to drive, limiting or even canceling the buildings’ energy-saving benefits. Memo to City Hall: Stop green-lighting these garages on steroids.
All those extra spaces also make the garages ridiculously tall — 12 stories at 215 West, 10 stories at 200 Squared (left). Thankfully, though, the high-rises don’t give us a repeat of the brute towers plopped atop faceless parking garages that marred River North over the last decade.
Their proportions are pleasingly vertical. Their bottoms and tops subtly interlock. Their slabs, which cover only a portion of their sites, create welcome openings in the Loop’s thicket of high-rises, letting daylight filter down onto the streets below. And their ratio of glass to concrete is high enough, especially at 200 Squared, that the high-rises don’t look like concrete hulks.
Still, these buildings suffer from the blandness bug. The grid patterns of their painted concrete walls, an SCB visual trick that’s become tiresome, lack the rich sense of depth and texture that uplifts the Loop’s office buildings. Even the big move at 215 West, its large steel truss, comes off somewhat feebly, its fire-proofing and light-colored paint making it look indistinguishable from the building’s concrete.
215 West has more serious problems at ground level, notably its failure to strike up a convincing relationship with its richly textured Victorian neighbor to the east, a post-Chicago Fire office building called the Washington Block. The Washington Block, which holds down the corner of Washington and Wells, looks marooned. Its brick side walls are artlessly exposed to the passers-by. It’s as if the architects couldn’t move the building, an official city landmark, so they decided to dwarf it instead.
The worst damage comes along Wells, where an outdoor, curving parking ramp (left) that serves the tower’s garage brings a discordant touch of car-happy Sun Belt cities to the pedestrian precinct of the Loop. The ramp replaces a surface parking lot, meaning that a critical opportunity was lost to flank the Washington Block with a building of complementary scale. The architects have decorated the ramp with perforated metal, but that’s nothing more than perfuming the pig.
The interiors of both buildings are skillfully done and reflect SCB’s decades of experience in this genre. Each has a spacious, tastefully designed two-story lobby. Amenity floors provide indoor exercise areas and access to outdoor decks.
The apartments — $1,350-a-month studios to $5,000 three-bedrooms at 215 West, and $1,450-a-month studios to $2,750 two-bedrooms at 200 Squared — have floor-to-ceiling glass that takes advantage of the surrounding open space. At both buildings, glass is thicker than normal to shush the racket of the “L.”
The architects and the developers — Jupiter Realty Co. and Cornerstone Real Estate Advisers at 215 West, and Midwest Property Group Ltd. at 200 Squared — haven’t produced any masterpieces in these buildings, but they haven’t saddled us with any eyesores either. Let’s hope that they and other design teams learn from the strengths and shortcomings of these apartment buildings and reach higher in the next wave.
Via Chicago Tribune City Scapes
Karen Thomas
Karen Thomas worked for more than 20 years at architecture firms in New York, including Costas Kondylis and Beyer Blinder Belle, after graduating from Pennsylvania State University in 1988. But she eventually realized she would rather manage the construction of complex buildings than draw their blueprints. In 2007 she established her own firm, Karen Thomas Associates, an owner’s representative for high-end residential projects. Ms. Thomas, 45, lives in Greenwich Village with her husband, Ralph Gillis, an architect and former employer of hers, and their 9-year-old son, Henry.
Design gene: My family is from California, but I grew up in State College, Pa., where my dad was a college professor. It wasn’t an area rich in architectural examples; my schools were nondescript. Our house was modern and mostly designed by my mother. She went to school to be a costume designer and wound up becoming one of the first women to be an Episcopal priest.
Art plus math equals… My high school art teacher said I should be an architect because I loved math and art, and architecture combined them. Not exactly true. At my college there was a great emphasis on architectural philosophy and the idea that all design came out of philosophic notions.
Platonic Architecture 101? No Plato, more like Dante and Umberto Eco. But Penn State had a premier lighting design program, so I took a course in that, and also architectural engineering.
aren Thomas with another architect, Ted Klingensmith, at the work site for the educational center at the Rubin Museum of Art in Manhattan.
New York or bust: I came to New York City basically with not a penny in my pockets; I stayed on Long Island for a week with a friend’s parents while I looked for a job, and I found one at LCP, a firm that failed in the ’90s. They did commercial interiors.
Mixing it up: I worked for my future husband for five years on a nice mix of commercial and residential projects. Then I was with Costas Kondylis for two crazy years. He had a busy office and high-profile clients like Trump. An incredible opportunity, but at the time, it was like, “Here’s a 26-story building project, go do it,” and “Hey Karen, I know you’re working on two high-rises, but can you take on another?”
Sweating the details: Part of being with an architectural firm is having a lot of arguments with your respected colleagues about aesthetics. It got to where I didn’t enjoy it. Also, I didn’t like it that as an architect there were so many things you couldn’t control. You’ve got the zoning board, building codes, economics, permits and 88 community board meetings to worry about, but what I found out was I loved dealing with all that stuff, even the controversy.
Making it happen: I guess I’m totally a control freak. The work we do here, we let the architects and interior designers focus on the aesthetics and we do all the things they don’t want to; it provokes in me, frankly, more creativity than before. The architect designs the project and we make it happen. Everything has to be beautiful, but everything has to work perfectly. On a single house, there could be 20 consultants; it’s highly technical.
Personal projects: We gutted our apartment on 11th Street. I was up every night until 2 worrying over details. I’d call the aesthetic modern with a use of organic materials. Now we’re planning to tear down our little 1970s house in East Hampton Village and do something modern, low-maintenance and very, very sustainably designed. As an architect, you try to achieve perfection but never really can.
Via NYT
Construction spending fell 2.5% sequentially in December to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of $787.9 billion, 6.4% behind the rate of December, 2009, the Commerce Department reported Tuesday morning.
Residential construction fell 4.1% from November to a rate of $226.4 billion, a drop of 6.3% from the prior December. Total private construction was at a rate of $486.9 billion, 2.2% below the revised November estimate of $498.0 billion and 9.8% below December, 2009.
The value of private construction in 2010 was $507.3 billion, 14.3% behind 2009. Residential construction in 2010 was $241.4 billion, 1.7% below 2009.
For public construction, the seasonally adjusted annual rate was $301.0 billion in December, 2.8% below November and 11.2% below December, 2009.Highway construction was at a rate of $84.9 billion, 1.6% below November but 7.5% ahead of December, 2009.
The value of public construction in 2010 was $306.8 billion, 2.7% below 2009. Educational construction in 2010 was $74.4 billion, down 13.6% from 2009, and highway construction was $83.3 billion, 1.7% above 2009.
Via AIA.org
Mr. LiMandri, 45, is the commissioner of the Department of Buildings, which oversees nearly a million properties in New York City, by enforcing various building codes and laws. He was appointed in 2008, after the resignation of Patricia J. Lancaster, following a series of construction accidents, including a crane collapse in Manhattan that killed seven people.
Robert D. LiMandri
Q The department just released its 2010 annual report. Can you discuss some of the numbers?
A There are 975,000 buildings and properties in New York City and we have 1,109 employees, 337 of whom are inspectors. We performed 335,449 inspections last year; issued 136,294 construction permits and 1,517 new building permits and 67,069 violations.
What many people don’t realize is that we do about 450,000 plan reviews a year. Last year it was 457,375. That rivals some of the largest architectural firms.
Q Do you have more or fewer inspectors now?
A Slightly fewer, through attrition and budget cuts. But we’re doing more with less and using technology to be more efficient.
Q How so?
A We’ve been trying to make it easier for people to get permits, to do plan reviews, online. Electricians can go online as of last year: they put in their ID numbers, pay for the permit online and print it. Construction permits will also go online this year.
The other piece is dealing with plans online. We hope to pilot that by the end of this year. You would submit your plans — the simplest plans, not the big complicated ones. You open an account with us, send it to us electronically. We look at it when we’re available — we might ask questions or note objections — and e-mail it back to you.
Q Could this work with the big developers?
A The number of large buildings that get built every year is like 200 to 300. So if you are a large developer/owner like the Rudins or the Resnicks, you’re doing these kinds of filings on a regular basis. Instead of hiring someone to drop off stuff for us to look at, they can save transaction time.
Q How much time?
A We saw that when they went online for electrical permits, the processing time went from days or weeks to minutes.
Q Getting back to the annual report, what does it tell us about the city’s recovery?
A It’s in pockets. Permits for new buildings and major alterations fell around 19 percent last year, to 13,000 from 16,000. But permits for small-scale alterations — like moving a wall — rose 6 percent, to nearly 103,000. People are still doing smaller work, and that drives the economy as well.
We’re starting to see pockets of demolitions. We just had seven or eight sites in the last couple of weeks. When you see demolitions come back, it’s a leading indicator that development is coming.
Also, in Manhattan there are four or five large sites, where maybe they slowed construction, that are starting to pick up. It’s the heart of the winter so it’s going to be slow anyway, but we’re hoping that the spring will bring a set of new buildings.
Q It’s been over two years since you took office. What are some of your biggest accomplishments?
A We’ve been working on transforming this department — making it more accountable and instilling confidence in our training programs. We put G.P.S. tracking on our 337 inspectors, so we know where our people are. We conducted a facade safety initiative, and we investigated illegally converted apartments. We used Craigslist and posed as tenants.
Q Have you been able to curb construction accidents?
A We had a reduction in 2010 from the year before by about 28 percent. Clearly there’s been less large-scale construction, but also I am very satisfied that the industry has heard us and responded.
Contractors are using cocoon-netting systems to protect the top four floors during the very early stages of construction. These innovative systems prevent people from falling, as well as falling debris. I’m hoping it will become a city standard.
Building a building is complex, and there are a lot of people you depend on to do it well, and it takes just one of them not to do their job for things to go awry. Our job is to make sure that they put safety ahead of profit.
Q Let’s talk about some of the new regulations for this year.
A The big thing that’s coming down the pike is the Greener, Greater Buildings Plan, which will rank buildings by energy efficiency. Owners have to benchmark their buildings — if they’re over 50,000 square feet — and upload information about utility bills into a federal Web site by May 1. The next step is that every 10 years they will have to go through an audit process.
Hat tip to the NYT
Read article via NYT – Jan 20, 2010
To support our Get Paid, Not Played campaign, freelancers at our Monthly Member Meetings produced this draft of a Freelancer Bill of Rights to empower themselves to demand fair treatment from clients. Our goal is to offer a space for freelancers to articulate the minimum work standards that they have the right to expect when taking a job or gig.
Read more about the Freelancer Bill of Rights
When: 12:00 PM – 2:00 PM WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 26
Where: At The Center
AIA New York Chapter
536 LaGuardia Place
NY, NY 10012
(212) 683-0023
This panel discussion will take a look at what architects might expect in terms of employment and workforce trends this year.
Speakers: David C. McFadden, Founder/CEO of Consulting for Architects, Inc. and Daniel A. Cloke, President, Parade A|E|C Staffing
The economy has changed radically throughout the world and the impact has been strongly felt in the design community in New York City. The NBAU program focuses on what design professionals need to do now for themselves and their firms.
Please RSVP as a light lunch will be served. Check local weather report for snow forecast.
Events in this series are provided at no cost thanks to our sponsors: Chief Manufacturing, Lutron Electronics and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, LLP
Register
aia, architects, architecture, CFA Freelancer Community, Consulting For Architects, David McFadden, Hiring trends, jobs, unemployed architects
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AIA NY, CFA, David C. McFadden, LLP, Lutron Electronics, McFadden, NBAU, Owings & Merrill, Skidmore
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Remember last summer when architect Will Alsop announced that he was getting out of the architecture business to concentrate on his painting? As quickly as that was announced, shortly thereafter it came out that, no, he was getting into becoming a professor. Finally, just a month or so later, he decided that he was going to stick with architecture after all and would be joining the international firm RMJM. Unfortunately, it’s looking like it may have been a better move to stick with his original painting and retirement plans as now RMJM is in something of a tumultuous flux, with not just layoffs, but staffers exiting en masse from several offices and at least twenty principals and senior staff have left as well. Specifically worse is that the firm has admitted that, after a year of employment, none of Alsop’s big projects have been picked up yet, something they undoubtedly must not have expected and which certainly isn’t helping the situation at a company “struggling to pay its bills” according to the Independent. Will Alsop stick it through and will RMJM, one of the largest firms in the world, make it through this bump in the road relatively unscathed? That’s a cliffhanger you’ll have to wait it out for.
Via UnBeige
The American Institute of Architects (AIA) reported today that following on the heels of the first positive reading since January 2008, the Architecture Billings Index (ABI) dropped nearly two points in October.
As a leading economic indicator of construction activity, the ABI reflects the approximate nine to twelve month lag time between architecture billings and construction spending.
The October ABI score was 48.7, down from a reading of 50.4 the previous month. This score reflects a decrease in demand for design services (any score above 50 indicates an increase in billings). The new projects inquiry index was 61.7, down slightly from a nearly three-year high mark of 62.3 in September.
“This is disappointing news, but not altogether that surprising,” said AIA Chief Economist Kermit Baker, PhD, Hon. AIA. “We were anticipating a slow recovery period and it is likely that there will be some fits and starts before conditions show consistent improvement. Right now, reluctance from lending institutions to provide credit for construction projects and a sluggish economy are the main impediments to a revival of the design and construction industry.”
Key October ABI highlights:
- Regional averages: Northeast (54.5), Midwest (51.8), South (48.6), West (44.3)
- Sector index breakdown: commercial / industrial (54.5), institutional (50.8), multi-family residential (49.1), mixed practice (43.2)
- Project inquiries index: 61.7
Via Real Estate Channel
The Architectural Billings Index for the nation was positive in September for the first time in two years, but billings in the western region that includes Colorado weren’t, according to the index released Wednesday.
The ABI, compiled by The American Institute of Architects, is a leading economic indicator of construction activity. It reflects the nine- to 12-month lag between when architecture firms bill clients and when funds for construction are spent.
September’s national ABI score was 50.4, up from 48.2 in August — and up for the fourth month in a row. A score of 50 and above represents an increase in billings.
“This is certainly encouraging news, but we will need to see consistent improvement over the next few months in order to feel comfortable about the state of the design and construction industry,” AIA Chief Economist Kermit Baker said in a statement.
The western area had the lowest regional ABI score for last month, at 44.5, a dip from 45.8 in August. But September’s western score was up significantly from 36.0 in September 2009.
The index breaks the country into four regions: Northeast, Midwest, South and West.
Both the northeastern and midwestern parts of the country had positive ABI scores for September, at 56.7 and 51, respectively. The South had a score of 47.
The ABI is based on a “work-on-the-boards” survey of AIA members by organization researchers. Members are asked each month whether their billings have increased, decreased or stayed the same for the month just ended.
The AIA is more than 150 years old, and based in Washington, D.C.
Hat tip to multiple sources including AIA, Denver Business Journal and Sam Armijos.
