Flagship shape
North Michigan Avenue is aglow for the holidays but some stores are more ‘meh’ than magnificent
When it comes to architecture, some of the flagship stores on Chicago’s Magnificent Mile are a lot less magnificent than others.
Apple and the new Starbucks Reserve Roastery Chicago — thumbs up! Disney and Burberry — a poke in the eye.
With the Mag Mile stretch of North Michigan Avenue about to be packed with holiday shoppers, the time is right to separate the good designs from the flops among the Mag Mile’s flagships.
The best of these high-profile stores glorify a company’s products and services through designs that are visually striking and appeal to our other senses, even our fantasies. Their larger-than-life, three-dimensional settings push products in a way that a tiny, twodimensional smartphone screen cannot match.
At worst, the flagships are the architectural equivalent of screeching billboards, guilty of maximum self-aggrandizement and minimum style. They’re the eyesores you hope will disappear.
Love ‘em or hate ‘em, this much is clear: Even in the digital age, companies rely on flagship stores to expose their brands to the evergrowing stream of tourists and locals on the Mag Mile.
Typically shaped by the retailers’ in-house design staffs, the stores have remade large chunks of the street into a mass-market affair of attention-getting, individualistic buildings. They have more in common with Tokyo’s glitzy Ginza district than Paris’ elegant Champs-Elysees.
Visually spectacular? Yes. Visually coherent? Not so much.
WINNER: NIKE CHICAGO, 669 N. MICHIGAN, 1992 (REMODELED 2012 AND 2019)
When this flagship opened as Niketown, it quickly became a must-see tourist attraction because of Nike’s association with Bulls superstar Michael Jordan and a cutting-edge design that was part store, part museum and part art gallery. The high temple of the sneaker, Niketown helped propel the Beaverton, Ore,-based company to the top of the sports apparel heap.
It was retailing as an experience, not just a place to buy things.
But retailing has to remain up-to-the-minute, so the store has evolved. Just inside the door, for example, you see a mannequin dressed as the NBA’s current No. 1 — L.A. Lakers star LeBron James, who has a Nike line of shoes. On the second floor, a special Jordan section sells all things Jordan and features a striking wall silhouette of His Airness. Still, MJ no longer occupies center stage.
The interior, whose metal stair railings have a straightforward loft look, is quieter than the flashy original, but still sharp. Fantasy, art and aspiration are still part of the design equation. Alongside the James mannequin, for example, a white-floored mini-basketball court invites visitors to imagine themselves soaring through the air in $200 LeBron shoes. Text on the wall pitches the shopping benefits of the Nike app.
Happily, the limestone-clad exterior is more inviting than it used to be. The store no longer seems like a theme park, closed off from the outside world. From the sidewalk, you can look into the high-ceilinged foyer, which flaunts white chandeliers made out of basketballs and sneakers — a perfect playful touch.
LOSER: UNDER ARMOUR, 600 N. MICHIGAN, 2015
No one was surprised when Baltimore-based Under Armour challenged Nike’s Chicago flagship with its own jock mecca. But Under Armour did something I never thought possible: It made the mediocre 600 N. Michigan building even more visually clumsy than it already was.
The original building, a retail-cinema complex that opened in 1996 to the design of New York architects Beyer Blinder Belle, was a clumsy pile clad in white terra cotta. Seeking to stand out, Under Armour turned a cylinder at the building’s southeast corner from the original white to the jet black the company uses in its branding. In doing so, it made the exterior a disjointed mess.
There’s some razzledazzle inside, including a giant video cube with moving images on its underside, but little here rises to the Nike store’s level of sophistication. Attempts to tailor the brand to Chicago include a display that evokes Wrigley Field’s ivy-covered outfield walls, which surround doors plastered with the Under Armour logo. Such details get points for effort (the display’s ivy is real, an employee told me), but they come off as isolated design riffs in a store that feels too much like one you’d encounter in a mall.
LOSER: T-MOBILE, 700 N. MICHIGAN, 2016
This flashy flagship reveals two Mag Mile trends: An influx of cellphone carriers (AT&T and Verizon Wireless also have big stores on the street) and a retreat from vertical malls.
The outpost of Bellevue, Washington-based TMobile USA occupies part of the old Chicago Place mall that opened in 1990. But the mall, designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, never took off and eventually was broken into individual stores that you enter from the sidewalk. Score one for street-oriented retailing!
But the design story here is mixed.
Shaped for T-Mobile by Cincinnati-based FRCH Design Worldwide, the store takes advantage of the old mall’s high ceilings with skyscraperlike video towers that evoke such landmark Chicago high-rises as 875 N. Michigan (the former John Hancock Center).
Yet there’s way too much “come hither” glitz, including pink video walls and a pink video ceiling that scream to passing pedestrians for attention. In the foyer is a claw machine game with pink, white and black balls; you play it to win some kind of T-Mobile prize. You expect to find gimmicky stuff like this in an amusement park, not on classy Michigan Avenue.
LOSER: DISNEY,
717 N. MICHIGAN, 1999
The prime virtue of the Disney store is that it’s small. That limits the visual damage.
The over-branded exterior, which covers the first floor of an unremarkable three-story building, remains as grotesque as it was when this flagship opened 20 years ago. Like an outbreak of the measles, abstracted mouse ears are everywhere. Note their weird, coiling presence on the brown terra cotta panels that pay a pitiful homage to the natureinspired ornament of the late, great Chicago architect Louis Sullivan.
The interior, whose upper walls are decorated with playful cartoons of Chicago icons like Buckingham Fountain, tries hard to go beyond a generic mall look. But it’s overstuffed with merchandise and hindered by its small size — just a single floor. The latest generation of flagships, with their multilevel stairwells and gathering spaces, makes Mickey’s Chicago outpost feel nearly as claustrophobic as a mouse hole.
WINNER: APPLE,
401 N. MICHIGAN, 2017
The two-level Apple store is everything the Disney store is not: Sleekly modern, spatially generous and a robust work of architecture in which structure, space and enclosure fuse into a memorable whole.
Designed by Londonbased Foster + Partners, the store’s seemingly effortless modernism subtly suggests the precision and beauty of Apple products. This is how you project a brand’s identity, not with the cliches of logos and videos.
The upper level, whose bleacher seating overlooks the Chicago River through dazzlingly transparent glass, is a kind of indoor public room, not to mention a nice place to escape winter’s cold. You don’t see any merchandise until you reach the lower level. It’s the ultimate soft sell, though a big video board, used for in-store presentations, promotes Apple stuff.
To be sure, the store has had problems. Shortly after it opened, wildlife groups said its glassy design was causing deadly bird strikes. In response, Apple said it would dim the store’s lights during the fall migration season. This week, the Cupertino, Californiabased company did not respond to my requests for an update.
SO-SO: THE GAP, 555 N. MICHIGAN, 2000
Back at the turn of the millennium, when the Gap excelled at making fashion basics cool, the San Francisco-based retailer moved into a Mag Mile flagship that was pretty cool itself: A three-story, postmodern design by noted Chicago architect Stanley Tigerman.
Tigerman used classical and Gothic elements to harmonize with the street’s older, limestone-clad buildings. Modern features, like a grid of large windows, gave the retailer a way to show off its trademark jeans and khakis. The store’s diminutive scale also made it compatible with its neighbors.
Unfortunately, the Gap messed with the proportions by insisting on a recessed, two-story entrance that was awkwardly oversized for such a little building. But the interior delivered a dose of visual drama via a multilevel atrium outfitted with a seemingly floating stair. It made walking to the store’s upper floors an adventure rather than a chore.
The bespoke exterior remains quietly tasteful, but the Gap’s place in the retail universe is vastly different today than it was 19 years ago. No longer considered cool, the chain relies heavily on discounts. And with edgier retailers making their presence felt on the Mag Mile, the store’s merchandise displays are cleanlined, but nothing to write home about.
WINNER: UNIQLO, 830 N. MICHIGAN, 2015
The Chicago outpost of this Japanese casual fashion retailer exemplifies the hip style favored by urban millennials that has shoved aside retailers like the Gap.
Occupying the top three floors of 830 N. Michigan, the store signals its presence with colorful, backlit window displays of its iconic mannequins. There’s a welcome urban energy here, though it comes perilously close to upstaging the historic Chicago Water Tower to the south.
Visitors ascend to the store via a superlong escalator outfitted with fireengine red handrails and letters that proclaim “From Tokyo to Chicago.” Mannequins
are artfully placed throughout, most notably in museumlike display cases, where they swivel to music. Adding to the drama are mirror-glass walls and a cleverly lit platform that leads to another set of escalators. The design endows the company’s fashion staples (black pants, oxford shirts and cotton socks) with an air of cool.
LOSER: BURBERRY, 633 N. MICHIGAN, 2012
The flagship of London-based Burberry is an exercise in visual aggression — a black glass box hidden beneath an outer layer of chrome decoration that evokes the company’s trademark plaid. So much for British understatement. The backlit, angled, checked pattern of the chrome has all the subtlety of a sledgehammer.
Which is not to say that the five-story store lacks for appealing features.
The best one is a stack of oversized windows on the building’s south side that turns the store’s staircase into a piece of sculpture. At night, the effect is mesmerizing. By day or night, the stairs afford fine views of the street, enticing customers to make their way to the upper floors of the cleanlined, uncluttered interior.
WINNER: STARBUCKS RESERVE ROASTERY CHICAGO, 646 N. MICHIGAN, 2019
The Mag Mile’s latest flagship reveals how much the street has changed.
Designed by Chicago architects Solomon Cordwell Buenz, the old Crate & Barrel store that houses the Roastery was a jewel-like exception to the street’s traditional, limestone-clad buildings when it opened in 1990. Today, with glass fronts everywhere, it’s more the rule than the exception.
What’s inside the flagship, however, is exceptional, from a towering rocket-shaped coffee cask at the corner of Michigan and Erie streets to ceiling pipes (some see-through) that transport coffee beans from a roasting machine to the cask to the store’s array of coffee bars. The smells of baked goods and coffee add to the multisensory experience.
The interior is a place of both consumption and production, and these activities project outward to the street, especially at night. There’s no need for aggressive videos or logos. The store advertises itself.
Consider all the people taking selfies and sending them to their friends on social media, and this showcase of Seattle-based Starbucks can also be understood as a place of communication — a selfgenerating source of free advertising.
If you build it, the customers won’t just come; they’ll help you publicize your store. That’s the way it’s done today — for better and for worse — in the Mag Mile’s temples of consumerism.