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Spyguy at skyscraperpage1/18/2024 ![]() Upscale retailing has been spilling out beyond its traditional Oak Street home, onto Rush. Last September, Crain's also reported that the one-story building at State and Cedar is slated to come down once the leases of current tenants, including a Corner Bakery (formerly a KFC outlet) and Big Bowl restaurant, expire in 2015, to be replaced by a three-story structure with retail at ground level, and a restaurant on the upper floors. In are four, white-clad stories, with large windows on the first three floors for retail, and an a more enclosed top floor, for a restaurant or club space.Īnd that's not the end of it. Out are the big windows in dark-painted frames. In mid-December Spy Guy on unveiled a new, very different rendering. The design seemed an homage to early 20th century industrial buildings, with huge windows placed within a spare (faux?) brick and terra cotta frame.Īlthough fall of 2013 was the target completion date, after the demolition nothing much seemed to be going on at the site. ![]() Originally it was to become Maple and Ash, with a restaurant on the first two floors and a nightclub on the top third story. ![]() Recently, Crain's Chicago Business's Micah Maidenberg reported that Urban Outfitters is again moving back north, this time to a stalled building at 1020 North State that replaced the split-level Hunt Club. In 1996, with the move to the Goldberg building, 1120 North State become home for the Urban Outfitter's spinoff Anthropologie, which in turn moved out in 2010 to part of the former American Girl space on Chicago. Outfitters was originally a couple of blocks north, at 1120 North State, which for a long time had been the neighborhood McDonald's, and for a short time Winkelstein's deli. Most of us know the building as Urban Outfitters. What's evident, however, is that it's an immensely striking building, especially at night when the light shining out from within makes the spare steel frame almost disappear. I'm going to tell you the story of a single building - Walton Gardens - and how it falls into the history and future of Rush Street, a geographically compact district of Chicago with an exceptionally flavorful personality, one that has gone through several dramatic transformations down through the decades, and seems now on the brink of another.įew people who pass by the jewel box of a building on the northeast corner of Walton and Rush probably know it's the design of architect Bertrand Goldberg, best known for twin-towered Marina City. Have I lost you yet? Rereading the previous paragraphs, I can imagine you finding them abstract - tl dr - so I want to try to pump some blood back into the ideas. They may be altered for new functions, but the accommodations and values inherent in the original construction will often carry forward to influence the new construction in a way a tabula rasa would not. Just as likely, however, the buildings may endure. It is the medium of transmission for the continuity of life.Ī perfect city and architecture would be the equivalent of the audiophile's dream of “a wire with gain”, a neutral amplification of individual action but, inevitably, the city and its architecture provide their own “feedback”, which reshapes and alters the actions which they are supposed to express.Īs functions change or disappear, buildings may be replaced for new constructions serving new functions, or simply annihilated when functions and cultures lose their meaning and value. Like the city itself, architecture bridges generations and transcends individual mortality. Architecture is the expression of these impulses, generating heat, light and, in moments of failure, anxiety, darkness and despair. A city is an energy, a circuit board of dynamic pathways through which the appetites, fears and hopes of individuals smash against each other, in association or exploitation, in pursuit of satisfaction.
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