To mark the May 2003 completion of Skybridge, a unique residential tower on the western edge of Downtown Chicago, Emporis.com asked the building's architect Ralph Johnson of Perkins & Will to discuss its design and his ideas about architecture in general. Johnson has become one of the best known architects in the United States during the past 15 years with major projects such as the Los Angeles Federal Courthouse, O'Hare International Terminal, the Chicago Nature Museum, and the Boeing World Headquarters.

A little-known fact about Skybridge is that it began when developer Moran Associates invited you, Murphy/Jahn, Inc. Architects, and Nagle Hartray Danker Kagan McKay Penney Architects Ltd. to compete for the design of a residential tower in Chicago's West Loop. What guidelines were laid out for the competition, and what was your approach to meeting their outline? Developers Bill Moran and Howard Weiner wanted a unique building for that site because it's not a typical area for high-end condominiums. They also wanted to attract a younger crowd, traders and those kinds of professionals, a different client from those who might locate in the Gold Coast area. Their specific program called for lots of exterior space. They wanted big balconies; originally they had the idea that these balconies would be convertible into interior space. You see that in Europe a lot, where you can glaze the balconies, although we didn't end up doing that. They also wanted every unit to have a view to the east toward the skyline. And they wanted to provide the feeling of loft living in a highrise, so they asked for high ceilings and layouts that were more loft-like and less traditional. And obviously they had functional requirements including a specific number of units.

Ralph Johnson at his office

The initial design that we presented in competition actually had a single-loaded corridor with all the units facing east, just like what they asked for. And they liked the design. We also wanted to personalize the effect of the slab: it became very long, so we wanted to break it down into "neighborhoods in the sky". We started to cut slots down the center of the building, also at the bottom and to the sides, to break it down into separate units while keeping the integrity of the original rectangle as a kind of ghost figure. Eventually as we ran the numbers, analyzing floor area and usage efficiency, we found that a fully single-loaded corridor gave us too much corridor per rental space and it wouldn't be competitive in the marketplace. So we compromised; we put the elevator core and a fraction of the units on the west side, so now approximately 75% of the units get east views. We also lowered the floor heights a little bit, but the units still have the option of a finished or an unfinished ceiling. The balconies were originally very deep and they got cut back, but there are still quite a number of exterior extensions on the building, which gives it some of its character. Originally the building's shape was a super-thin slab, and although the final design became wider it also got taller so the proportions are better vertically. Our competition design would have been spectacularly thin if it had been built.

Original design of Skybridge

According to reports, the Near West community's wide acceptance of the Skybridge design helped to secure its approval by the alderman. Do you believe this is correct? Yes. The quality of the design was a big selling point for the two community organizations in the West Loop. The local planning board even insisted that if this building got approved, the design would stay the way it is. They were very insistent that the developer wasn't just showing them something attractive and then actually building something totally different. So yes, it is true, the quality and uniqueness of the design was a big selling point. Another big selling point that had nothing to do with the design was the fact that there was a high-quality supermarket in the plan. There is a lot of new residential property in that neighborhood, both in conversions and in smaller-scale newer buildings, so there are a lot of people but there was no place for them to buy groceries in that area.

Skybridge at its completion

When an architect is trying to design a building that will please its neighbors, obviously not every bold or creative design will be welcomed. How do you design a building which reconciles a forward-looking approach with community standards? In general you look at the context and then adjust the building to its context. In the case of Skybridge we looked at where the lower and higher scale elements fit in their surrounding context, and placed them appropriately so nothing in the building was out of scale. So you have the garage and retail on Halsted, which is appropriate to the scale of that street, and you have the higher element next to the expressway, which looks back to the skyline and relates more to the scale of the skyline and that side of the site. We thought of the expressway as an amenity, an open space with a protected view, so we wanted to push the higher element next to the expressway. This also gives it some iconic presence on the skyline as part of the entry sequence to Chicago.

What were the most important goals you were aiming for in the design of Skybridge? Number one was to meet the requirements of the developer. The second was to respond to the uniqueness of the site. And the third was breaking up the scale of the components - we wanted to differentiate the residential element from the parking and retail, so they interlock with each other and there is a sculptural quality to the basic elements of the project.

Top of the "bridge"

Are you pleased with the results? Yes, I think very much so. It has received a lot of positive attention among my peers. I think it has a good presence on the site and will probably be a catalyst for the development of the West Loop.

The Chicago Architecture Foundation is currently exhibiting your design for a visionary project in the West Loop called the Kennedy Expressway Green Corridor. What is the status of that project, and what will it lead to in the future? This was a project which the Chicago Architecture Foundation commissioned. They asked three architects - Valerio Dewalt Train Associates, Brininstool & Lynch, and myself - to provide designs that expressed possible realizations of the three long-range master plans currently being rolled out by the city: the new 2020 regional plan, the Zoning Ordinance reforms, and the Central Area Plan. The idea was for the architects to speculate on the physical implications of the plans, to make them less abstract and to show the public what they could bring over the next 20 years. I took the Central Area Plan because of my interest in the Kennedy Expressway corridor through my involvement with the design for Skybridge. In the Central Area Plan there was a proposal to cap one block of the expressway, and what we did was to look at what happens if you have a whole system that covers the expressway from Hubbard's Cave to the interchange with the Eisenhower, and how that might affect the city at ground level and in terms of residential and office development. This was an outgrowth of our notion of the expressway as an open space; and maybe Skybridge, along with some of the ideas about capping the expressway, will transform the whole West Loop, which is really the growth area of Downtown Chicago for the next 20 years.

[Enlarge] Overview of the Kennedy Expressway Green Corridor

When did you begin your career at Perkins & Will and what are some of the projects you worked on before you designed your first high-rise at 123 North Wacker? I came to Perkins & Will in late 1977 because of its reputation for doing educational buildings. At the time there was not a lot of work on educational architecture being done in the office, because population growth was declining and at that time schools were being converted into office buildings. So at first about 75-80% of the work in the office involved health care, and I did a lot of work in hospital design. I did a project in Iraq which we worked on for two to three years until the Iran-Iraq War put an end to it. There were a lot of smaller projects, and the first published project I did was a psychiatric clinic for Ingalls Hospital in the south suburb of Harvey, Illinois, which was published in Architectural Record. I think the project that put me on the map was the music school for Pacific Lutheran University. It never got built, but it won a progressive architecture award in 1984. There was an energy company I did an interesting design for that was exhibited at the Architectural League in New York. And eventually, the next thing that put me on the map was the reemergence in the firm of educational architecture. I started working on schools with Bill Brubaker, who had joined the firm in 1948, and we did a number of award-winning schools together, four of which won national AIA awards in the 1980's.

123 North Wacker

Are you still interested in school design? Yes, I'm doing a few projects right now. One is in Columbus, which I'm very proud of because there's so much innovative architecture that happened there in the 1960's and 70's. There are also a few other high school projects, so I still keep involved in that.

Other architects practicing in Chicago, including Frank Lloyd Wright, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Murphy/Jahn, Inc. Architects, have seen themselves as continuing in a tradition of architecture specific to Chicago, a tradition which originated with Louis H. Sullivan, Burnham and Root, Charles Atwood, and others. Do you see yourself as part of this tradition? Certainly there is some influence of Frank Lloyd Wright in my work. But I would probably put myself more in the Bertrand Goldberg & Associates - Andrew N. Rebori category of Chicago architects... definitely modernist but with a more idiosyncratic approach to context, a little less rigid in terms of its approach than the Chicago School of Architecture. There's a kind of second strain of Chicago architecture that I'm probably more a part of, which would also include Keck & Keck. They were interested in sustainability and energy and how it related to architecture, and I'm doing a lot of work in that as well, so their architecture's very interesting.

Ralph Johnson with a model of Skybridge

Looking at the interlocking forms in your buildings, critics have called your style a synthesis of many older architectural styles including De Stijl, the Prairie School, Russian Constructivism, and the International Style. Do you agree with this description? Yes, certainly. There's no one specific literal reference, but I think it's a synthesis of a lot of those buildings that I look at, that are characteristic of all those styles you just mentioned, and I hope what comes out is something that's new through the lens of the lessons of those buildings.

In some recent projects there are points where your window patterns evoke the façade styles of the early 1960's, such as Skybridge's garage windows on Halsted Street with their tiled pattern, or the windows patterned like bricks at The Contemporaine. Were you intentionally reviving the spirit of that period? It's certainly a more playful interpretation of the language of architecture, and I think that's probably characteristic of our whole period. I see that a lot in Europe actually, taking the style of modernism and becoming a little more mannerist in terms of how you treat a curtain wall, so it's more playful and not as rigid as a literal interpretation of a curtain wall. It's kind of pushing it to do something beyond pure function.

The garage at Skybridge

You were recently asked to design The Clare at Water Tower on the Loyola University campus near the Water Tower. What shape is that project taking, and what ideas have you been considering in its design? It's in a traditional area of Chicago called the Cathedral District, and the client is the Franciscan order… so it's a more conservative client than the developers of Skybridge or The Contemporaine. We had to talk them into something more modern, and frankly this building is probably a little more conservative than my recent buildings. We were able to arrive at a design with punched windows and an abstract shape - it's a quarter of a circle - and the client went a long way, probably not as far as I would have like to have pushed it, but they feel that it's a building for seniors and it has to have some familiarity to attract that client base. We also had to relate to the traditional gothic buildings of Loyola. The university owns the site and is selling the air rights to the developer, but they are taking 50,000 square feet of space in the bottom of the building. That made it a tough context problem, much more than the two residential projects under construction west of downtown where we were able to do more pioneering designs. The building has some of the massing characteristics used in Skybridge where the quarter-round tower is pulled out of the base and comes down to street level. With the round corner it picks up on the angle of Rush Street in an interesting and effective way. There's also a big slot cut into the tower, not a through-slot like Skybridge but something with a dynamic massing, so I think it could be an interesting addition to that area of the city.

[Enlarge] The Clare at Water Tower

The mayor of Chicago has recently criticized the designs of many new condo towers here, and demanded a higher standard for future designs. Do you believe it is possible for a city government to raise the standards for good design, and what is the best way to get better quality of architecture from builders? I'm not sure you can mandate good design, I think you can encourage good design. And the impression in the past, right or wrong, has been that if you want to get something approved through City Hall you need to do traditional architecture. I think this has led to some of the not-as-successful residential towers. Recently there's been a change in the message going out to the street, that modern architecture is being encouraged. Skybridge and The Contemporaine are both good examples of that; they were endorsed by the city and it's proof that there is support at the city level for modern architecture. So I think you can encourage good design through the public message being sent to the architectural community.

One of the major problems facing the architect of a typical condominium tower is the parking garage at the bottom. Do you have any advice for architects trying to integrate parking into residential structures? I think it's important that it not be simply a wedding-cake design where you have this great massive parking base with the tower just simply sitting on top. I think it's important to separate them somehow in terms of the character of their architecture. If there's enough room you could do what we did at Skybridge and actually pull the tower out from the base. If you have a tighter site you can put reveals in the façade that separate the building parts, and make cuts underneath at the corner or entrance. In my projects I used a very tall column to carry the presence of the residenial tower down to the ground. This way you get scaling and separation of mass. The other issue is the first floor of the garage - I think it's critical for that to be retail or something with some kind of human activity, not just a warehouse for cars. At The Contemporaine we have retail along Wells Street, and along Grand Avenue we actually made the parking ramp into an interesting feature - we glazed it, and it becomes this kind of angular sculptural element on the side of the building where you will be able to see cars going down the ramp through the glass. So it celebrates the features of a garage and makes something out of it that isn't just a blank façade. There are many examples of that in earlier European garages, including Russian Constructivist garages done by Ivan Leonidov and others that expressed the dynamism of a parking garage.

The Contemporaine

Generally speaking, do you think that architects have more freedom in designing a large residential building as opposed to an office tower, or vice-versa? That depends on the client and the specifics of the problem, but I think there's a lot more opportunity for scaling down a residential building. With offices, since you're not dealing directly with the ultimate user, there's a kind of formulaic 20-25,000 square foot floor plate that wants to be very generic, very rectangular; so it becomes a difficult problem to make it interesting, because every time you sculpt it or round a corner or cut an angle into it, it reduces the leasing flexibility. Residential towers on the other hand have specific functions in them that you can play with: the bedrooms and living rooms and balconies - there's a lot more potential for scaling and break-down. So I think the office building is a much more difficult problem in that sense.

What differences have you found in design requirements between the U.S.A. and other countries you have worked in? In some of the countries there's actually more freedom for the architect to propose the style of a building, whereas clients in the United States tend to get more involved with mandating what the building looks like. For instance in Angola we did a university, and they trusted us to come up with the expression of the building; they were only concerned about functional qualities. In the United States if you work for a university many times they'll tell you what kind of aesthetic they want for their buildings. And of course that varies from country to country and from client to client, but I think there's much more respect for the architect as artist in Europe than in the United States. It's a general statement, but there's a lot of interest on the part of the public there, and newspapers write a lot more about architecture in Europe than here. In Germany high-rise design is quite a bit different because of regulations mandating daylight availability. That makes a huge difference in office building design because you don't get these big massive floorplates; the rules not only provide daylight but scale the buildings down to smaller towers, like the 20's towers of the United States, making it a lot easier to design what I think are more interesting masses for office buildings. Also energy costs are a lot higher there, which drives a lot of the daylight requirements as well as under-floor air distribution systems, which in this country are considered expensive and exotic but in Europe are probably the standard. Certainly Europe is much more advanced in terms of double-wall systems than we are. That's where it's all happening in terms of advanced high-rises - in London, Germany, and not so much in the United States.

Boeing World Headquarters

What qualities do you like to find in a developer who commissions a design from you, and what role do developers have in producing the best possible architecture? Well, I've had two good clients in the residential towers that are under construction now. They had an interest in allowing the architect to solve their functional problem without getting involved in mandating the aesthetics of the building. Unlike a lot of developers, Moran Associates and CMK Development Corporation both believed that modern architecture would sell in a residential market. And it has.

Are innovative buildings like Skybridge and The Contemporaine hard to build? Are they a challenge from the point of view of the general contractor? No, actually both of those buildings, in terms of the actual construction systems, are fairly conventional concrete flat-slab systems, with standard mechanical systems and exposed concrete on the outside. They work with the standard conventions of residential construction used for the last 20 years. Although we've made the structures more sculptural and expressive, we haven't turned them into anything more exotic or unaffordable. It's the same construction system as almost any hotel or residential tower built during the last dacade; they work within the conventions of the construction industry, just massing them and organizing them in a different way. But it's certainly not harder to build.

The top of Skybridge

What direction is architecture taking in the early 21st Century, both in the United States and in the world at large? There is more interest in energy conservation as a form-making device, a holistic approach to sustainable architecture that is present in Europe and is now impacting the United States. I think postmodernism has almost faded away, and we are now in a period of invigorated modernism - both through a loosening up of canonical modern architecture to allow it to adjust to context, and through the input of advanced ideas about sustainable architecture. There are many interesting evolutions in modern architecture that make it different from the modernism of the 1950's, and allow it to be a style that's still evolving and fresh.

Thank you very much for this conversation.

Interview by Daniel Kieckhefer (May 2003)

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