A critic’s take on proposed One Central complex
Early assessment: Don’t sign onto this plan in haste
Cityscapes
It is, perhaps, too soon for an architecture critic to assess Chicago’s latest megadevelopment plan, which calls for building a massive row of skyscrapers on a platform over the train tracks near Soldier Field.
The renderings are obviously preliminary. The developer’s pitch is more fiscal than architectural. Yet a plan of this scope simply cannot pass by without comment.
The overall cost of the project, called One Central, is staggering — more than $20 billion, three times the just-approved Lincoln Yards megadeal. It would have up to 20 million square feet of new office, apartment and hotel highrises — the equivalent of nearly five Willis Towers.
Its transit center, which would serve Amtrak, Metra and CTA trains as well as buses linking lakefront attractions, is grandly pitched as “America’s transit hub.” And its developer is promising that the project will produce a longterm boost of $57 billion in new state tax revenue, a sum that surely would help financially struggling Illinois meet its pension obligations.
Little wonder, then, that my colleagues on the Tribune Editorial Board are urging Gov. J.B. Pritzker and Mayor-elect Lori Lightfoot to give the plan a close look.
I don’t disagree, but I would add this caveat: Don’t sign onto this plan in haste. And don’t forget that the ultimate outcome of this plan will be physical, not just fiscal. At this stage, both the process and the end product look to be equal parts audacious and dubious.
The developer, Bob Dunn, president of Landmark Development Co. of Madison, Wisconsin, has spearheaded stadium construction and renovations for the Green Bay Packers, Detroit Lions and Minnesota Vikings.
So it seems only natural that he’s floating a plan where the transit center would serve as a game-day gathering spot for Bears fans. But that’s simply icing on the cake.
The plan’s best stroke is its big urban design move: Its first phase would move a swath of railroad tracks and an old railroad maintenance facility, both of which form a barrier between the Near South Side and the lakefront, to open ground west of their current location.
New passenger rail tracks and the proposed transit center would replace them. Extending outward from the center would be a platform on which the high-rises could be built from roughly 14th Street on the north to 18th Street on the south.
So far, so good. These changes would heal the urban scar formed by the railroad tracks, covering them with a deck — the same “air rights” strategy that developers have used in Chicago to take blighted industrial land and make it attractive and productive.
In the bargain, Dunn claims, the changes will improve transit access to the Near South Side, boost the number of visitors to the Museum Campus, and generate all those billions in new tax revenue.
But the timetable is hasty with a capital “H.”
The developer wants the General Assembly to fund a chunk of the plan’s $3.8 billion first phase by the end of May — only four weeks after he announced that he would seek state taxpayers’ support rather than the controversial tax increment financing that’s backing Lincoln Yards.
That would also be 11 days after Lightfoot’s inauguration. To her credit, the mayor-elect has already said, in essence, “What’s the rush?”
Without the platform, there are no high-rises. Taxpayers, in effect, are helping to lay a foundation that will let the developer make a profit. Dunn says he needs the state’s backing now to take advantage of federal programs that back transit-oriented development, but that’s his problem, not the taxpayers’.
As for the plan itself, here’s my take: Just because you build it doesn’t mean they’ll come.
Is there really a demand for the proposed transit center, or is it just a way for Dunn to make his land more accessible and therefore more marketable?
Dunn talks a good game about how transit-oriented developments like this can spark a wave of commercial construction, but it’s worth recalling that Central Station, the high-rise cluster of apartment buildings to the west of One Central, originally was pitched as an office complex.
When that didn’t work out, its developers shifted to residential. Factor in competition for office tenants from Chicago’s other two megaprojects in the making, Lincoln Yards and The 78, and One Central’s prospects of becoming a commercial hub look chancy at best.
With little or no office space, the project’s taxpayer-backed transit center could easily become a white elephant.
And why Amtrak trains at One Central? Doesn’t it make more sense to keep those trains centrally located, at Union Station, where they can easily be reached by travelers?
The project’s urban design, by Chicago architects Perkins+Will, also does not inspire confidence. The proposed row of towers, which appears to top out at least at 80 stories, resembles an asparagus patch — a series of vertical stalks that have little to do with one another or with the ground around them.
Even though the architects have thrown in some cross-bracing on two of the towers to evoke the structurally expressive look of the former John Hancock Center, the project could be anywhere. The flashy, mall-like atrium in its transit center also looks generic, like something out of Dubai or a Chinese instant city. These days, companies want to go where there are walkable, lively streets, not on-steroids versions of dull suburban office parks or shopping malls.
Worse, it’s unclear if One Central would break down barriers between the city and the lakefront or create new barriers.
Dunn says he wants to build pedestrian bridges across Lake Shore Drive as well as a “pedestrian park” (is there any other kind?) that would connect the city to the lakefront.
Yet there’s no sign in the renderings that existing streets would connect with One Central. Instead, the development looks physically isolated — an island, not a new patch of urban fabric that’s woven into, and brings new life to, the areas around it.
One Central also looks socially isolated — and politically tone-deaf. Ignoring Lightfoot’s campaign promise to make big new developments economically accessible, the words “affordable housing” are nowhere to be found in the developer’s brochure describing the project.
Also absent is any reference to the likelihood that One Central will block views from existing residential high-rises to its west, or that, with those views gone, property values and, thus, property taxes, could fall.
These urban design shortcomings should not be brushed off as mere aesthetic issues. In these plans, the physical and the fiscal are intricately intertwined. If One Central fails to connect with the city around it and doesn’t become a lively place, it won’t produce the promised bonanza of tax revenue.
Such flops have happened before. Think of the underperforming retail mall at Block 37. Perkins+Will did the conceptual design for that one too.