Column: City’s tallest office building in 30 years opens along Chicago River, mixing drama and banality
Here are three big reasons you should care about the just-completed, hauntingly empty, Bank of America Tower on Chicago’s ever-more-alluring downtown riverfront:
1. The city’s tallest office building since 1990, it represents a strong sign of confidence in the coronavirus-hammered central business district.
2. The owners of the $775 million project expect to pay more than $25 million a year in property taxes — no small thing with the city’s budget drowning in red ink.
3. The modernist design, a mix of bold structural drama, attractive public spaces and reflective-glass banality, will leave its mark on downtown long after the COVID-19 pandemic has passed.
Holding down a high-profile site at 110 N. Wacker Drive that’s convenient to downtown’s train stations and previously was occupied by the five-story General Growth Properties (originally Morton Salt) headquarters, the 816-foot tower is the latest sign of how the Chicago River has become a focal point of civic and commercial life.
Skyscrapers, like the neighboring Civic Opera Building at 20 N. Wacker, once turned their back on the polluted river. No more.
Here, the star of the show is the riverfront facade, where a trio of three-pronged structural elements, clad in shiny stainless steel, help support the massive tower, as if they were a waiter’s fingers balancing a stack of plates.
In addition to giving tour boat guides something to yak about, this arresting arrangement advances the vaunted Chicago tradition of skyscrapers, like the X-braced 875 North Michigan Avenue (the former John Hancock Center) that powerfully express their underlying structure.
But there’s a difference between creating an attention-getting part of a building and forming a satisfying whole — which is why this tower, despite its many pluses, is unlikely to make it into anybody’s architectural pantheon.
Ghost floors
The lead tenant, Charlotte, N.C.-based Bank of America, expected to have more than 2,600 people working on its 17 floors of the 56-story tower. But fewer than 200 work there now, according to company spokeswoman Diane Wagner.
Moving boxes remain unpacked. Work stations are covered in plastic sheets. A barista bar, part of a fourth-floor suite of amenities, awaits those yearning for their shot of caffeine.
Plans call for the tower to consolidate employees from four downtown locations, including the landmark Art Deco office building at 135 S. LaSalle St. Yet that’s unlikely to happen until there’s a widely distributed coronavirus vaccine. So it’s too soon to assess how the tower functions as a working office space.
What can be discerned are the strong similarities and telling differences between the Bank of America Tower and its architectural sibling across the river, 150 North Riverside.
That 51-story office building, which opened in 2017, flaunts diagonally sloping lower walls that narrow to the building’s elevator core, creating an effect that has been compared to a tuning fork or a guillotine.
Chicago-based Goettsch Partners designed both towers for Riverside Investment & Development Co. of Chicago, which co-developed the Bank of America project with its majority partner, Texas-based Howard Hughes Corp.
Not without reason, the firm’s namesake, Jim Goettsch, argues that a roughly 800-foot skyscraper will never amount to anything more than a foothill compared to the 1,451-foot Willis Tower. He’s not one to bother with fancy architectural tops.
“The way [a skyscraper] hits the ground is more important than how it hits the sky,” Goettsch said as he showed me around the tower.
Overcoming a tight site
At 150 North Riverside, the sloping walls enabled Riverside Investment & Development to shoehorn the skyscraper into a tight site constrained by commuter railroad tracks below street level. The daring move turned the long-empty plot into a major commercial asset and endowed the riverfront with ample, well-used public space.
Similarly, Bank of America’s thin, trapezoidal site was too narrow for a conventional high-rise that would have had 45-foot-wide expanses of office space flanking its central elevator cores. Further complicating matters, the City of Chicago required a 30-foot-wide riverwalk, which had to be both accessible to the public and open to the sky.
To squeeze the tower’s 1.5 million square feet of office space onto the challenging site, Goettsch and his team, which included senior designer Scott Seyer and project architect Erik Harris, dispensed with a typical box in favor of a tower that gets progressively skinnier from its southern edge along Washington Street to its northern edge along Randolph.
The elevator cores become narrower. A serrated wall along the riverfront steps inward every 30 feet. And that’s just the beginning.
At the tower’s base, a trio of three-pronged columns, each a staggering 83 feet tall, channel the huge gravity loads from the tower’s office floors to a triangle-shaped structural anchor.
By drastically reducing the number of columns that come to the ground, this structural tour de force allows the tower’s caissons to reach bedrock without hitting the remaining caissons of the old Morton Salt building. It also opens up the riverwalk, which would have felt constricted had it been hidden behind a row of columns.
An alluring riverwalk and bland glass
The new section of riverwalk, with its long, curving benches and still-to-be-planted greenery, is among the strongest contributions the tower makes to the public realm. It will not become a windblown cavern, the architects assure.
As a result of a compromise the developers struck with federal and state officials, crenelated stainless steel panels from the old Morton Salt building are woven into river-level exterior walls, retaining a trace of mid-20th century modernism.
Another plus comes at the tower’s north end, where a small, unfinished outdoor plaza will provide seating for the public and dedicated seating for customers of a restaurant from noted chef Jose Andres and the Gibsons Restaurant Group. The plaza offers fine views of the handsome Boeing headquarters across the river. The value of such open spaces, which serve as clearings in the urban forest, cannot be overstated.
Yet the tower itself doesn’t match the standard set by 150 North Riverside. Along the riverfront, the serrated glass produces strong vertical lines when the high-rise is glimpsed from the north, but when seen from the south, the wall devolves into a flat mass of glass. In contrast to the unified sculptural presence of 150 North Riverside, the muscular base and meek upper levels speak different, disjointed architectural languages.
The Wacker Drive facade is equally underwhelming, despite the presence of stainless steel and glass fins as well as the sculptural character created by the tower’s upper-level setbacks. The high-rise is the latest icy-cool behemoth to line a street that, for all its economic might, can’t compete with the urban character of the LaSalle Street financial canyon.
The blandness is countered, but only so much, by some alluring ground-level features, like the stainless steel columns that gesture to the arcade of the Civic Opera Building. Pedestrians also should enjoy the peek-a-boo views of the three-pronged columns that can be glimpsed through the high-ceilinged lobby’s remarkably transparent, cable-supported glass walls.
Pandemic-proofing the interior
With COVID-19 still a significant threat, the developers have put several safeguards in place, including walk-through temperature scanning in the lobby, antimicrobial cladding on the building’s entry doors and upgraded air filtration systems. Tenants can swipe their smartphones on high-tech turnstiles that call an elevator. There’s also none of the welcoming seating that animated other downtown office building lobbies before the pandemic struck.
Upstairs, Bank of America’s floors bring together eight lines of business, from private banking to commercial real estate banking. The interior design, by the global firm IA , includes touches that reflect the company’s sponsorship of the annual Chicago Marathon.
The offices provide more natural light and views than the bank’s former offices at 135 S. LaSalle, yet the tightly bunched work stations and ample use of “hoteling,” in which desks are shared rather than assigned to individuals, are ill-suited to the pandemic.
It’s premature, then, to judge whether the Bank of America Tower successfully combines form with function. But it is clear that the tower’s architectural ledger is marked by pluses and minuses, and that its contribution to the public realm is defined more by its memorable bottom than its forgettable top.
The prophet of the skyscraper, Chicago architect Louis Sullivan, famously wrote that the tall office building should be "every inch a proud and soaring thing.” This one is more proud than soaring.
Blair Kamin is a Tribune critic.
Twitter @BlairKamin
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