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Written By Blair Kamin
Chicago Tribune
Sunday, October 17, 1999
It's like seeing great but time-worn
fresco–one thinks of the Sistine ceiling brought
back to its legendary splendor. Once vivid colors emerge
from decades of dust and grime. The bold outlines and
sharply etched details of the artist are revealed anew.
You see a brilliant, total work of art, not faded fragments.
That is the near-miracle wrought
by the architects who have transformed the 104-year-old
Reliance Building, the gossamergorgeous Chicago skyscraper
that now etch the world's skylines. Their achievement
is al the more astonishing because they have converted
the renowned Reliance to an entirely new use without
compromising the building's brilliant original design.
Four years ago, when the big-windowed,
white terra cotta exterior of the Reliance was returned
to its ethereal glory, it was half a victory. Now with
the interior sparkling as a new 122-room luxury hotel
(renamed the Hotel Burnham in honor of architect Daniel
Burnham, whose firm designed it) this triumph of preserving
the past is complete.
From a dazzling elevator lobby
to a dramatic internal staircase, the job has been executed
with meticulous attention to detail. Never has the often-grubby
business of recycling old building s seemed so artful
or so significant.
The Reliance boosts an already
resurgent State street and fuels the emerging trend
of giving Chicago's aging skyscrapers new life as hotels
or condominiums. And at a moment when a developer wants
to erect the world's tallest building in the Loop, the
comparatively diminutive Reliance, at just 16 stories,
offers a timely reminder about what endures in architecture:
not what is biggest, but what is best.
Credit for the final leg of
this six-year odyssey, which cost more than $ 30 million
in public and private funds, goes to architect Joseph
Antunovich of Antunovich Associates of Chicago and his
restoration adviser, T. Gunny Harbor of McClier Corporation.
of Chicago.
But it would be remiss not to
mention either the developers who backed the project,
McCaffrey Interests, Mansur & Company and Granite Development,
the hotel managers, the San Franscico-based Kimpton
Group, and Mayor Daley, without whom the restoration
of the Reliance would have been impossible
In 1994, a year after the city
won control of the reliance from a longtime owner who
had allowed the building to go to seed Daley had to
endure jeers from the City Council before recalcitrant
alderman finally agreed to fund a restoration of thee
reliance's crumbling exterior. "This building is
not worth a dime," said John Steele, then the 6th
ward alderman.
Now, though, it's easy to appraise
the Reliance's true value: priceless.
No other building so dramatically
encapsulates the engineering and aesthetic advances
that made Chicago the birthplace of the skyscraper:
the shift from load bearing walls of glass supported
by internal metal cage; the invention of elevators new
foundation technology that gave the new cloudbusters
firm footing in Chicago's soft clay soil.
The early skyscrapers, finished
in the 1880, were clad in stone, a material associated
with solidity: it was used to soothe pedestrians jittery
about the structural stability of the new kids on the
block. But the Reliance, which was completed in 1895,
eschewed the heavyweight cloak for a thin membrane of
generously scaled windows and white terra cotta panels.
The latte marked the first time glazed terra cotta had
clad an office building.
Projecting window bays added
to the Reliance's sense of verticality while flooding
its interior with daylight, a major improvement over
the dim wattage of the primitive electrical fixtures
then in use. The feature proved especially useful in
the examing rooms of the doctor's and dentists who were
among the building's original tenants.
Yet for all the Reliance was
a precursor to the bare-boned boxes of Ludwig Mies van
Rohe, the skyscraper partook from history, as the 1995
renovation made clear.
Once all the grime was wiped
off the terra cotta, you could see how the Reliance's
designers drew upon the soaring Gothic cathedrals of
medieval France to dramatize the form of the tall building.
Clusters of thin columns or colonnettes, for example,
made the building's corner seem delicate rather than
blocky.
But the fragile beauty did not
last. Gradually the pristine white facade became encrusted
with soot and blightly by klutzy signs and fire escapes.
Panes of some windows were boarded up with plywood.
By 1993, the building had just six tenants, including
Ella's Tea Leaf Studio on the seventh floor. Its street-level
retailer's included a shop selling peek- a-boo brass
and other exotic lingerie.
One of the principal virtues
of the restoration is that it reclaims the work of the
two great architects–Burnham's partner, John Root,
who shaped the very glassy brown-granite base of the
Reliance before he died in 1891; and the man who replaced
him as Burnham's chief designer, Charles Atwood, who
was responsible for the Reliance's equally revolutionary
upper floors. (He gets his due in the Hotel Burnham's
ground floor eatery, the Atwood Cafe)
To passerby' on State street
who have been eyeballing the Reliance's restored terra
cotta facade and cornice since 1995, the most noticeable
change will be to the bottom of the building, where
a temporary wall of glass and aluminum panels has been
replaced by new brown granite walls that are overlaid
with a delicate reproduction of Root's original Gothic
Filigree.
The brown granite endows the
base of the Reliance with an appropriate feeling of
solidity without repeating the heavy, fortress-like
appearance of such earlier Root buildings as the Rookery.
Huge sheets of glass allow pedestrians to glimpse the
tall-ceiling Atwood Cafe while visually unifying the
bottom of the building with the big windows of the Reliance's
upper floors, There are new, curvy drapes up there,
but they do not disturb the building's overall sense
of transparency.
The hotel, whose official address
is 1 W.Washington St., has entrances on both Washington
and State, the former leading to a new and largely conventional
hotel lobby, the latter pointing the way to a restored
elevator lobby that is nothing short of extraordinary.
Here, the visitor encounters
a small but soaring space that repeats in miniature
the perfect proportions of the skyscraper. It has a
glistening mosaic floor and exotic polished marbles-some
red, some green, others black. The most striking of
them, a white Italian stone with inky black and blue
veins, is arranged in wall and ceiling panels that form
near perfect mirror images.
Despite the bold display of
color, the lobby never goes over the top. And like the
exterior, it has an incredible sense of transparency,
accentuated on one side by an enormous interior wall
of glass. Together, they make the lobby, cafe and the
street outside seem like one continuous space.
What marks the Hotel Burnham
as truly and unusual, however, is that when the hotel
guest venture upstairs they will get a sample of what
the interior of a turn of the century office building
looked like. The hotel even allows architecture buffs
to visit one of the rooms, provided they have an escort.
Thus, the Hotel Burnham is something of "a living
skyscraper museum." Says Jim Peters project manager
who helped over see the project as director of Chicago's
landmark commission.
People used to beige-carpeted
white-walled corridors in modern office buildings will
encounter something very different here: terrazo tile
floors, white marble wainscoting and mahogany door and
window frames. In a wonderful touch the hotel room numbers
are painted onto the translucent glass doors in an old-fashioned
format that precisely recalls the office numbers that
once graced the Reliance.
The room numbers exemplify the
balance struck by the architects and the interior designer,
Susan Caruso of Los Angeles, between preserving key
features of the office building and giving the interior
enough in the way of hotel touches so that it doesn't
seem cold and institutional.
Happily, the balance continues
in the guest quarters–former office cells that
were small enough to be easily adapted into hotel rooms.
The drapes, for example, are a clubby blue on the outside,
but white on the outside, so they blend in easily with
the building's milky exterior.
Best of all, by inserting two
new fire stairs in the back of the building, the architects
were able to preserve the openness of the Reliance Building's
richly decorated internal staircase, which sweeps through
the upper-floor lobbies like a piece of sculpture.
All this painstaking detail
work adds up to a supreme example of historic preservation.
A world-renowned skyscraper
that could have been lost to the wrecking ball now proves
that old buildings can be recycled to good effect. Long
heralded for what it for what it foreshadowed, the reliance
today can be appreciated for what it is the culminating
achievement of Chicago's early skyscrapers.
But the reconstitution of the
Reliance teaches a broader lesson about architecture,
and it is one that deserves special attention in a tradition-bound
city that sometimes seems to have lost its nerve: The
same daring that gave us the landmarks of yesterday
is needed to create the landmarks of tomorrow. Only
if we need that lesson will we fully appreciate the
restored glory of this total work of art.
Written
By Blair Kamin
Chicago Tribune
Sunday, October 17, 1999
Bringing back the old glory
of flagging skyscrapers typically demands detective
work that would confound Hercule Poirot.
Just ask the restoration expert
on the Reliance Building, Gunny Harboe of the McClier
Corporation. To get the right stone for the 104-year old Reliance,
now he had to search the world over.
The brown granite that once
covered the base of the Reliance was known to have distinctive
hues of gray, brown and pink. Replacing it with a generic
brown granite would look, well generic. So Harboe had
to find something that would replicate the old as closely
as possible.
Clue No. 1 was the Celtic cross
headstone of architect John Root, who designed the base
of the building. An 1895 magazine article said headstone,
located in Chicago's Graceland Cemetery, was made of
the same Scottish granite as the Reliance. But the quarries
from which the rock had been hewn were no longer operating.
"Then we had a mad search
to try to come up with something as close as possible
to what it was," said Harboe, 44 whose credits
also include the award-winning restoration of another
Burnham and Root gem, the Rookery Building. A quarry
in Finland was one possibility, and the stone subcontractor
on the project, George Lockerbie checked it out. But
that quarry, too had closed.
Finally. The subcontractor came
up with a suitable material. Its name: "Charlie
Brown" Granite. It was found in another quarry,
this one in Texas, that just happened to have Five blocks
of the stone, each roughly as big as a car. Harboe acknowledges
that "Charlie Brown" is a shade browner than
the original granite on the Reliance, but it had to
precisely the soft subtle color he was looking for.
The blocks were cut into about
70 pieces that eventually were shipped to Chicago and
affixed to the base of the Reliance.
Now, after all the detective
work, they are a part of history.
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