The trees in front of the Picasso have turned, and their yellow and brown leaves are beginning to fall. Across Washington Street, under a striped awning, a vendor in the Brunswick Lofts building shows a blue-and-orange rug to two customers wearing loose, wide-sleeved garments. A clock shows that the lunch hour is almost over: a preacher in his open-air pulpit (built into the side of the Chicago Temple building) must be winding up his sermon. Children scamper among the trees. A free trolley clangs its way down Clark Street. There’s less traffic around Daley Plaza, and the plaza itself seems somehow more lively and welcoming than it ever was in 1989.
In Sakal and Hood’s first drawing, benches line the walls of the little “Miro court” between the Chicago Temple and the Brunswick building. People lounge in the corners, chat, look at the statue, listen to the preacher’s spiel. Across the street, Daley Plaza is full: trees, pools, fountains, pushcarts, small round-roofed shops, and a larger glassed-in enclosure. Outside of one small structure–a marriage chapel?–a traditionally dressed bride and groom, pirouette.
Daley Plaza became of more than passing interest to Sakal and Hood when Wim de Wit, architecture curator of the Chicago Historical Society, asked them to produce an image of what they’d like a Chicago street of the future to look like. Their work over the last decade has included designing both new residences and residential and commercial renovations, as well as teaching architecture and urban design at the University of IIlinois at Chicago. Sakal and Hood, who live and work in both Chicago and Union Pier, Michigan, and have a 16-month-old daughter, have received a Graham Foundation grant to do a book on small houses that’s due out in 1991. But Hood says, “This project was a big break for us,” and they were happy to spend some 932 hours on it (“half an average work year, and that doesn’t include time spent talking about it”)–so that, figured on an hourly basis, their fee was not a large one.
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We’re back in the future, it’s midafternoon, the crowds have thinned out a bit, and were looking down on the plaza from the fourth floor of the Daley Center. The stairs that today lead downward are still there–but they’re lined with shops and benches. A lone woman is standing by the eternal flame, which is set off by a reflecting pool and a row of square white pillars. Hood points out to me that just behind the eternal flame is the Harold Washington memorial–a great shiny ball of black granite on a granite pedestal. Across the street, the Brunswick building has been converted into lofts. Many of the apartments have balconies, with greenery overflowing them–there are even a few tenement-style clotheslines running across the space between the Brunswick and the Chicago Temple. (“We used to hate that building, but this makes it kind of nice. The thing about balconies is that you immediately know how big a person is. Otherwise the scale of the building is unclear–are the windows 5 feet high or 50?”)
People have a concept of the future, says Noel Barker, “that is actually 50 years old–the kind with walkways 300 yards above the pavement, and autogyros. If you stand at Harrison and Ashland and look west to the medical center–it’s like that. Or the second-level walkway at the UIC science and engineering labs.” Such high-tech scenery may excite some architects’ megalomania–it’s like recreating the world from scratch. It may exhilarate the tourist or visitor. But “it just doesn’t work out for human life,” says Barker, who had a big hand in what went into the drawings. “‘We have seen the future, and it doesn’t work.’
