'Works in Progress' exhibit gives rise to a greener Chicago

Nov. 17--It's easy to overlook the fine little exhibit on green architecture in Chicago now at the Museum of Contemporary Art. The show, a companion to Bruce Mau's big, eye-popping traveling exhibit, "Massive Change: The Future of Global Design," is imperfect but still well worth a visit. It's like seeing grass pop out of the ground. Chicago architects are starting to formulate a green aesthetic to go along with Mayor Richard M. Daley's much-touted green ethic.

Titled "Sustainable Architecture in Chicago: Works in Progress" and organized by the museum's chief curator, Elizabeth Smith, the exhibit features seven uncompleted projects of vastly different scales. At one end of the spectrum is Studio Gang Architects' planned Ford Calumet Environmental Center, a low-slung, bird's nestlike education center planned for Chicago's Southeast Side. At the other is Skidmore, Owings & Merrill's Pearl River Tower, a 69-story office building that would rise like a rocket in the boomtown of Guangzhou, China.

The show's exclusive emphasis on works in progress is at once adventurous and regrettable, given the existence of award-winning green buildings by Chicago architects, such as Joe Valerio's serene Kresge Foundation Headquarters in Troy, Mich. The finished projects would have made the case for energy-saving design more tangible -- and more credible.

The exhibit's design also leaves something to be desired. With the exception of the Pearl River Tower, the projects are displayed in two underwhelming white-on-white rooms on the museum's fourth floor. Inconveniently and incongruously, the skyscraper has its own, much more showy niche on the third floor.

Those faults aside, the material stands up well because the architects have shaped strong forms, boldly integrating energy-saving features into their designs. Curator Smith ably sets up the work, with easy-to-grasp wall text and smart juxtapositions. The designs also reveal an intriguing variety of approaches.

Skidmore's Pearl River Tower -- principally shaped by Adrian Smith, who has since left the firm to set up his own shop -- updates the vaunted Chicago tradition of integrating architecture and engineering. Among its impressive myriad green features: an aerodynamic shape designed to funnel wind down the building's face. The wind would whip into turbines within slots between the tower's three parts. The turbines would transform the wind power into energy.

Now here's the kicker (which the show neglects to mention): The skyscraper would be the headquarters of China's national tobacco company. The prospect of a fresh-air tower, built by a company whose tobacco products foul the air, is deliciously incongruous.

Studio Gang's Ford Calumet Environmental Center represents another approach: less macho and more like a mother bird building a nest. The architects won the commission in a controversy-filled 2004 competition, but it's been delayed by land-acquisition maneuvering. City officials hope for a groundbreaking in fall 2007.

As architect Jeanne Gang states in the wall text and the exhibit demonstrates with an elegant model, the one-story center is to be built with discarded materials from the surrounding Calumet industrial area. Salvaged copper wire, for example, will shape the center's striking south porch.

The outcome promises to be more than a collage of discarded materials. It suggests an eco-pavilion, completely different from the energy-hogging, steel-and-glass boxes of the 20th Century. The porch's "netting" would prevent birds from slamming into the building's glass walls.

The show also reveals a socially conscious strain of green design. The best example is Helmut Jahn's single-room occupancy building, due to open early next year along Clybourn Avenue near Cabrini Green. The design, with its rooftop wind turbines, represents a refinement of Jahn's first-rate dormitory at the Illinois Institute of Technology.

Stanley Tigerman's refreshingly crisp Pacific Garden Mission also belongs to this socially conscious genre. While it lacks Jahn's formal elan, it may be more attuned to the needs of its inhabitants. Greenhouses would allow residents to cultivate organic produce and improve job skills.

To its credit, the show takes a leap beyond these individual buildings to an urban scale. That's good because sustainable design isn't just about green buildings. It's about cultivating a green way of life.

We see Gensler's intriguing but seemingly improbable plan to transform space beneath Lower Wacker Drive into a light-filled greenhouse with views of the Chicago River. Farr Associates and Christy Webber Landscapes exhibit solid plans for an "eco-industrial park" on Chicago's West Side. And UrbanLab shows a fine master plan for fast-growing Aurora. "Before" and "after" images dangle the tantalizing prospect of transforming the city's moribund riverfront into a vibrant urban center.

All this adds up to reason for hope. For years, Daley has set the tone for green architecture with his median planters and green roofs. Now the city's architects are finally beginning to transform that vision into the rich reality of three dimensions. While Chicago still lags New York in the number of green skyscrapers and the "deep green" innovation of such scintillating designs as Lord Norman Foster's Hearst Tower, the city's green architecture movement is clearly gathering steam. Or (to choose a better metaphor) it's on the verge of blossoming.

bkamin@tribune.com

"Sustainable Architecture in Chicago: Works in Progress" appears at the Museum of Contemporary Art through Jan. 7.

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Copyright (c) 2006, Chicago Tribune

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