Would tower mar beauty of Unity Temple?
Cityscapes
In Oak Park, home to the world’s finest collection of Frank Lloyd Wright buildings, a fascinating clash of public policy agendas is taking shape, and the outcome is sure to affect Wright’s masterful Unity Temple.
The first agenda is historic preservation, which preaches the value of making the past a part of the future. It achieved a triumph last year, the 150th anniversary of Wright’s birthday, when Unity Temple reopened after a sparkling $25 million restoration led by Chicago’s Harboe Architects.
The second agenda is transit-oriented development, which calls for placing high-density housing near rail and bus stops, enabling people to take transit and cut down on pollution.
This philosophy, which is reshaping parts of Chicago and the downtowns of suburbs like Arlington Heights, is back in the news with just-announced plans for a 28-story apartment high-rise at 835 Lake St. in Oak Park. The tower would be built a short walk from the Chicago Transit Authority’s Green Line elevated station at Oak Park Avenue — and just down the road from Unity Temple at 875 Lake St.
That proximity has the people who safeguard Wright’s buildings worried.
They fret, in particular, about the shadows the tower would cast on the 110-year-old landmark, a monumental mass of exposed concrete that houses an intimate, light-dappled worship space that is nothing short of extraordinary. Sunlight filters down from a grid of skylights and through bands of art-glass windows, creating an effect Wright compared to a “happy cloudless day.”
“The minute you start to interfere with that, particularly in the morning, when services are going on — that is something that is concerning,” Barbara Gordon, executive director of the Chicago-based Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy, which is devoted to protecting Wright’s buildings, said Thursday.
She is also concerned because, just before Thanksgiving, the conservancy and the National Park Service nominated a group of eight Wright buildings, including Unity Temple, for inclusion on the United Nations’ list of the world’s most significant cultural and natural sites.
The nomination follows an unsuccessful try in 2016 to land Wright buildings on the prestigious World Heritage list, which recognizes places of “outstanding universal value.” Being on the list can help lure tourists.
Unity Temple, Gordon said, demonstrates “universal value” through its innovative use of concrete, as well as Wright’s abstract geometric forms and masterful manipulation of space. Those characteristics, she said, create an architecture “that’s responsive to functional and emotional needs.”
“Anything that would affect that,” she added, “is something we’ve got our eye on.”
Notably, the current nomination mentions a “buffer zone” around Unity Temple that includes Wright’s Home and Studio and houses by the architect on nearby Forest Avenue. It’s unclear if the proposed high-rise would make the proposed buffer zone less of a buffer.
The team for the tower, Chicago’s Golub & Co. and Chicago architects Solomon Cordwell Buenz, on Monday night unveiled renderings for the project during a meeting at Oak Park’s Nineteenth Century Club.
The renderings show a 299-foot, 256-unit building, which would be the tallest in Oak Park. The height limit set by the current zoning for the site is 45 feet, said Village Planner Craig Failor.
The architects stress that their plans are preliminary. “We have done shadow studies. We’ll be doing more,” John Lahey, SCB’s chairman, told me.
Gordon, who spoke with the developers before the meeting, said the studies show that the tower would cast shadows on Unity Temple’s sanctuary in the morning. She couldn’t say, however, how long the shadows would last.
At Monday’s meeting, a Golub & Co. executive noted that an eclectic sixstory apartment building to the east of Unity Temple already casts shadows on Wright’s masterpiece.
But “it’s not a 28-story shadow,” Gordon said. “Do you want to add to that shadow and make the shadow grow?”
Because the developer has yet to submit a plan to the village, the debate is still taking shape.
Residents also have expressed concerns about shadows the tower would cast on nearby Scoville Park and whether the proposed high-rise will include affordable housing.
Oak Park, it should be noted, already is far down the road of transit-oriented development.
Recently built residential high-rises there include the 21-story Vantage building, a Golub & Co. development. The high-rises have helped make the suburb’s downtown a vital shopping, restaurant and cultural hub.
But this latest transitoriented plan requires special attention.
Unity Temple, after all, is the finest public building of Wright’s Chicago years and home to one of the most beautiful rooms in America.
No transit-oriented highrise, no matter how much energy it saves, should be allowed to undercut its transcendent beauty.