Can South, West sides be revived, beautified?
Maybe. Don’t expect architects willing to aid to make miracles
Cityscapes
Can architects help Mayor Lori Lightfoot rewrite Chicago’s depressing, Dickensian “tale of two cities” narrative?
Can the designers of structures overcome decades of structural racism, from substandard housing to mass incarceration to disinvestment and limited job opportunities? We’re about to find out. The city’s Department of Planning and Development recently tapped the nonprofit Chicago Architecture Center to help pick 24 to 36 architecture and design firms to take part in Lightfoot’s $750 million Invest South/West program, which seeks to boost struggling business districts in 10 neighborhoods on the South and West Sides.
Roughly 170 firms raised their hands — almost 200 if you count the 15 or so firms that formed teams of two or more. The architecture center, which declined to identify the competing firms, gets kudos for participating in this innovative partnership.
The strong response is a heartening sign that Chicago’s architects believe their professional aims should extend beyond designing skyscrapers and mansions for the 1%.
It’s also the latest good stroke by Lightfoot’s planning commissioner, Maurice Cox. With it, he’s signaling that good design should be a priority everywhere, not just on Chicago’s affluent North Side or its glamorous, though coronavirus-emptied, downtown.
“Design matters,” Cox told me Thursday. “The quality of buildings, the quality of the built environment, communicates that we value those neighborhoods and we value the people who live there.”
Yet there are limits to architecture’s power to change lives and perceptions.
The real architects of our cities often have been politicians who plotted the course of expressways to divide one racial group from another. Or bankers who decided that a white applicant qualified for a loan while denying a comparable Black application. Or real estate agents who steered Black families away from white neighborhoods.
Then there’s Chicago’s ongoing plague of gang violence, which has sharply diminished the impact of even the finest socially conscious designs.
For all the good that projects like architect John Ronan’s brightly-colored Gary Comer Youth Center and
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Comer Prep have brought to troubled neighborhoods like Greater Grand Crossing, they only have been able to provide a haven from gang-related shootings, not halt them.
As if to underscore the challenges the architects will face, one of the 10 Invest South/West neighborhoods is Auburn Gresham, where 15 people were shot Tuesday outside a funeral home.
Still, if redevelopment is going to occur, good design should be part of the equation. Cites are built and rebuilt block-by-block, not just in broad strokes. One bright spot in the cityscape can encourage another, leading to dramatic change over time. Despite the bad rap the South and West Sides get because of ongoing violence, they don’t lack for architectural character.
A good example came in June when Lightfoot announced a $4 million Invest South/West grant for a project that will turn a long-vacant commercial building at 839 W. 79th St., into a “healthy lifestyle hub” that could house medical providers, a fitness center and a restaurant.
The developers plan to restore the 1926 building’s once-gleaming terra cotta facade.
Whether the Invest South/West project is a renovation or new construction, the chosen architects will likely follow a similar path, mixing different uses in a single building. As the urbanologist Jane Jacobs wrote in her classic book, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” that’s an almost surefire way to bring vitality to moribund commercial districts.
A jury headed by Reed Kroloff, the dean of the Illinois Institute of Technology’s architecture school, will winnow the field down to the chosen firms, but the jury won’t be looking at visionary drawings for Invest South/West projects. The key standard, according to a brief that lays out the selection process, is a sustained commitment to design excellence.
Firms of all types — large and small, established and emerging, commercial and community-oriented — will get a shot. The aim, the brief adds, is a collection of talent “as diverse as the city of Chicago.”
Chicago being Chicago, there’s a potential catch: The winners, who will be announced in August, will be listed as a possible “resource”
for developers who submit Invest South/West plans to the city. Translation: Developers won’t be required to hire the firms. But the architects still should have a leg up because they’ve received the city’s stamp of approval.
Among the potential benefits of the exercise: It could give emerging design talents, including firms headed by Black and brown architects, a chance to show their stuff. Cox also sees the effort as a way to hook developers with exciting architecture. “We are going to continue to shine a light on the value-added that design brings to investment strategies,” he said.
But it would be wise not to expect too much of this effort, especially if Chicago’s violence continues and businesses prove reluctant to invest in the South and West sides.
Architecture can do a lot, yet it can only do so much.