Back from Venice with a fresh take on a Chicago dazzler
Cityscapes
Coming home from overseas is no fun, especially the jet lag. But there are benefits.
Travel scrambles your frame of reference, makes you look at things in new ways. After a trip to Venice, I’m seeing one Chicago building in particular with fresh eyes: the Chicago Athletic Association, a Venetian Gothic dazzler across South Michigan Avenue from the Crown Fountain.
I’ve always loved this building, which opened in 1893 as an athletic club for Chicago’s business elite and reopened in 2015 as a superpopular hotel.
Now I love it more. Designed by architect Henry Ives Cobb, a member of the club, the Athletic Association easily has the most exotic facade in the mighty wall of buildings that line Grant Park.
That exoticism reflects Venice’s glory days as a seafaring empire whose trade routes linked East and West. Cultural winds crossed in the city on the Adriatic Sea, creating a dazzling hybrid of northern Europe’s Gothic architecture and the Byzantine and Islamic design motifs of Venice’s trading partners to the east. Look closely at the Athletic Association, at 12 S. Michigan, and you can see them all.
The facade’s lacy veil of multilobed stone arches recalls one of the key elements of Islamic architecture. Cutouts shaped like fourleaf clovers are a signature feature of Gothic design. Patterned brickwork on the upper levels recalls the surface decoration of late Byzantine architecture. The Doge’s Palace, home to the Venetian Republic’s ruler, is said to have been Cobb’s model.
It’s easy to see why the Athletic Association’s members went for this aesthetic flight of fancy, so different from the muscular, structurally expressive high-rises of the Loop. It was (and is) architecture for masters of the universe — as fit for Chicago’s merchant princes, including athletic club members Marshall Field and William Wrigley, as it was for the rich and powerful Venetian mercantile class.
It was also meant to impress the visitors who flocked to Chicago for the 1893 World’s Fair, particularly as they viewed the building from the lakefront.
But as faithful as Cobb’s design is to its Venetian models, there is still something it lacks: The presence of water.
Even when the Athletic Association was built, before lakefill expanded Grant Park eastward, Lake Michigan wasn’t close enough to create watery reflections of the building.
In contrast, the canals of Venice, especially the Grand Canal, don’t just create mirrorlike extensions of the Venetian palazzi. They bounce light off their facades, animating them and making them appear even lacier than they really are.
And that beauty, it should be noted, extends from the inside out. The veil-like facades form a screen that shades palazzo porches from the hot summer sun. You stand on the porch of one of the palazzi, the Ca’ d’Oro (or House of Gold), and you experience the porch’s coolness as well as the breezes that blow off the Grand Canal. And you watch the life of the city swirl by.
As Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell used to sing. “Ain’t nothing like the real thing, baby.”
Venice offers an object lesson in making memorable places: Its buildings, even the Doge’s Palace, aren’t stand-alone objects. They’re completely intertwined with their surroundings, especially their natural surroundings. The whole is much more than the sum of its parts. And the pleasures are multisensory.
The Athletic Association is real, too, but it’s a different kind of reality: one that is uniquely American, and not simply because of the expansive views of the lakefront and park that are glimpsed from its rooftop.
Like many of the buildings that line Grant Park, the Athletic Association adapts a European architectural model to modern American needs — which, in its case, meant palatial lounges, party rooms, gyms, a swimming pool and overnight guest rooms.
The Venetian palazzi typically have three floors. The Athletic Association has 13 if you count Cindy’s, its rooftop restaurant.
Cobb skillfully extended the building’s proportions, making his design more vertical than its Venetian models, but not turning out a freakishly attenuated knockoff.
In the 1920s, architects Raymond Hood and John Mead Howells performed similar magic at the Tribune Tower, which is far taller than the medieval French cathedrals that inspired it.
What’s truly American, though, is the architectural ensemble in which the Athletic Association takes part.
It’s flanked on one side by an Art Deco skyscraper and on the other by the Gage Building, a workaday former loft enlivened by Louis Sullivan’s ornament. To either side are the beaux-arts splendor of the Chicago Cultural Center, the Gothic Revival elegance of the University Club. Farther south is the Romanesque Revival power of the Auditorium Building by Sullivan and his partner Dankmar Adler.
A mishmash of styles? No, it’s a great wall, built to skyscraper scale, where the individual statements hang together because of common materials and roof lines.
A trip to Europe puts in bold relief how this melding of different aesthetics expresses the American ideal e pluribus unum — “out of many, one.”
Realizing that for the first time made the jet lag worth it.