The Reese buildings were Gropius’s sole Illinois project, a fact that increases their value to the city’s built environment, said Grahm
Balkany, a researcher with Gropius in Chicago, the organization formed to save them.

“If you can’t save Gropius buildings, you can’t save anything,” he said. “We talk about being world-class. No other city has this. You can’t replace it.”

During a recent tour of the exterior of Reese, Balkany pointed out features on each building — two-toned colored brick on the hospital power plant, a canopied entryway and sloping brick wall fronting the Serum Medial Pavilion, for example — that embodied Gropius’s style. Considered with the older Reese buildings, the Gropius structures formed a harmonious whole with parks and mature trees on the hospital grounds, Balkany said.

Ald. Toni Preckwinkle (4th), whose ward includes the Reese campus, confirmed she requested and received confirmation from the city and Chicago 2016 that the old main Reese Hospital building — a 1905 structure at 2838 S. Ellis that’s rated as potentially significant in the city’s historic resources survey — would be saved as part of an Olympic Village.

Preckwinkle said it wasn’t clear if a consensus existed that the eight buildings in question were designed by Gropius himself or if they just came out of his studio, The Architects Collaborative. She doesn’t plan to request they be saved.

“I don’t share their view. Since some of them are my friends, it’s an awkward position,” she said. “These preservation issues are always difficult and I appreciated the efforts by the preservationists. This is one where we don’t agree.”

Chicago 2016, the group organizing the local Olympic bid, assumes Reese is mostly cleared for the athletes’ village, according to the bid book submitted to the International Olympic Committee. Envisioned as an environmentally oriented community for the 16,000 participants expected to compete in a Games here, 21 new, 12-story buildings would be built on the site.

Whether Chicago is chosen for the 2016 Olympics or not, the city envisions that the Reese site will host a mixed-used residential neighborhood. In December, city council gave its approval to purchase the 37-acre site for $86 million. Two contracts have been let out to two teams to start preparing the site for demolition.

While media representatives from bid committee didn’t return two calls and e-mails from Chicago Journal for this story, Lori Healy, Chicago 2016’s president, defended the prep work at a recent community meeting about the Games.

Responding to a question about whether the bid committee would forswear demolition of any of the Reese buildings until at least Oct. 2, when the IOC will decide which city gets the Games, Healy said actual demolition was “highly unlikely.” But no changes were promised.

“There is an extensive environmental remediation program that must be accomplished before buildings are demolished. It is highly unlikely, as we’ve said in every meeting where you guys have asked this question, that demolition would take place … before Oct. 2,” she said. That view was confirmed by Preckwinkle.

The preservationists want Chicago 2016 to consider alternatives. And those proposals are coming, Balkany said, from his own and other organizations.

Landmarks Illinois, for example, a statewide preservationist group, offered a plan last week that would save six current buildings on the Reese site, including three by Gropius. The Sun-Times has reported a local architecture firm was drawing up new plans as well.

One idea advanced by Balkany’s group calls for creating a broader “Bauhaus District” in Bronzeville, an area made up of the Groupius structures and modernist buildings on the campus of the Mies van der Rohe-designed Illinois Institute of Technology.

A co-founder of Bauhaus with Gropius, van der Rohe is widely recognized for his monuments in the Loop, at IIT and elsewhere in and around Chicago.

Last week, the Commission on Chicago Landmarks heard a pitch from Gropius in Chicago to include the Reese on the National Register of Historic Places, a designation that would make tax credits available for reusing the vacant buildings.

The city staff report said the proposal didn’t meet criteria for inclusion on the national list, and commission members confirmed that take.

But Phyllis Ellin, a member of the commission, said the group didn’t write off the buildings. The staff recommendations said the register nomination should be revised and resubmitted.

“The site certainly is very interesting,” she said of the Reese campus.

That sentiment will help his group make the case, Balkany said. He admitted, though, the push to persuade Chicago 2016 to incorporate Gropius into their plans is a “race against the clock.”

Balkany, an architect and engineer, confirmed his frustration in trying to work with the Olympic committee. Already, about 100 trees have been removed from the site, he said.

Terry Clark, a professor at the University of Chicago, lives in a high-rise building in Prairie Shores, just east of the Reese campus. Clark said he’s watching Reese “with trepidation,” keeping an eye out for demolition equipment.

Removing the buildings would, according to Clark, be out of step with the city’s move toward an economy that’s based on tourism and entertainment.

“Look at the number of tourist and architectural tours. You have an Oak Park architectural group. And they have massive numbers of people taking boat trips on the Chicago River,” he said. “This could fit along with one of those.”

Contact: mmaidenberg@chicagojournal.com

---

By loosh from Lincoln Square
Posted: 08/23/2009 3:00 PM

I think it says a lot about Alderman Preckwinkle's complete incompetence about good architecture when in the article, she states that she doesn't know if a set of Gropius buildings are worth saving, and then the first comment made to the article is a man from Germany that is organizing a museum exhibition on the man whose very work Chicago (and Ald. Preckwinkle) is trying to destroy. It really shows how out of touch with reality she is.

---

By gereon sievernich from berlin germany
Posted: 08/20/2009 2:40 PM

Dear Sirs, I support the movement to save the buildings of Walter Gropius in Chicago. Beeing the director of the Martin-Gropiu-Bau in Berlin (Germany), we present at the moment a big exhibition on the Bauhaus and Walter Gropius of course plays an important role in it. By the way: Martin Gropius was a great uncle of Walter Gropius. More information: www.gropiusbau.de. Good luck for all who help to save the Gropius-buildings in Chicago (for requests my Mobile 0049-171-7858901)