Cities: Change for the Changeless

To thousands of visitors who have known and loved Chicago, the city has always seemed changeless. But they should see it now: Chicago is in the midst of a building boom that is transforming its downtown area.

The most ambitious project under construction is the $36 million Marina City, which is rising into the sky alongside the Chicago River. Built around two eyecatching, 65-story cylinders, the multipurpose development will have 896 medium-rent apartments, plus a 16-story office building, a 1,700-seat theater, a 1,000-car garage, boat dock, swimming pool, ice rink and even a sculpture garden.

Marina City was the idea of William L. McFetridge, president of the 300,000-member A.F.L.-C.I.O. Building Service Union, who hoped to stem the population exodus to the suburbs, give union members more work within the heart of Chicago. So promising is Marina City that a group of New York banks willingly granted it a 97% mortgage.

More to Come. This year, half a dozen major buildings were completed in downtown Chicago, including the 41-story, marble-faced home office of the United Insurance Co. of America and a $10 million, 600-room addition to the Sheraton-Chicago Hotel. Now abuilding are another half-dozen handsome structures ranging from an eight-story headquarters for the American College of Surgeons to the 17-story headquarters of the United States Gypsum Co.

But the drawing boards hold greater changes. Beginning in early 1963, Chicago will build a 32-story, $67 million Civic Center. Using his familiar materials of glass and steel, Chicago Architect Mies van der Rohe has designed a 30-story. $50 million U.S. Courthouse and Federal Office Building. Starting from scratch, the University of Illinois will build a completely self-contained campus for its Chicago division that will eventually be used by 9,000 students.

Wherever It Is. Chicago’s developers are grabbing space wherever they can find it. One grandiose plan is to build a $500 million apartment-hotel-office complex on Lake Michigan over the tracks of the Illinois Central Railroad. A similar $250 million project scheduled to begin next spring will also rise above the Illinois Central’s tracks, and the air space above Union Station is being measured for a $150 million development that will include three 20-story office buildings. The building boom is furthering the architectural confusion along Michigan Avenue. Last week the Equitable Life Assurance Society announced that it will erect a modern 35-story structure on an avenue site bought from the Chicago Tribune.

As a whole, Chicago’s new buildings reflect the influence of Mies van der Rohe’s cleanly sculpted rectangles and squares. Although a few architects are fretful (“We’re going to have a fantastic glut of office space and apartments”), most are convinced that Chicago is growing fast enough to fill the buildings that are popping up all over town. Says William Hartmann, a vice president of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill: “The boom represents the solidification of the Midwest as an industrial center and as a place to invest.”