Recent editorials we’ve written about current West Loop developments — The Gateway at Madison and Halsted, the Target at the Fannie May site — have neglected an important aspect of each project: architecture and design. Let’s examine that now.

First, we don’t want residential neighborhoods surrounding the Loop to exude the planning values of suburbia, where every trip outside the home requires an automobile, and strip malls are fronted by seas of parking lots. (Roosevelt Road’s big-box bonanza, of course, being already too far gone to change or save from this fate.) We want dense communities, thick with local retailers and stocked with well-made buildings that showcase architectural prowess.

We like, as we wrote earlier, the density of The Gateway. But the project’s architecture strikes us as generic rather than unique, tired rather than ambitious. Sad, tan paneling fronts the proposed project’s hotel-and-retail component. A greenish hue covers the parking structure. And, most controversially, Taxman wants a glassy skyscraper to rise along Madison. In renderings, it’s a structure that could rise anywhere, at any time. It evokes nothing specific or particular. Taxman, which is reportedly considering changes to the project, should try harder architecturally before it comes back to the West Loop.

The Target slated for the vacant at Jackson and Aberdeen has a template sort of feel to it as well. We’d like to see the retailer consider urban and pedestrian-friendly features, like more glass at the street level, especially facing Jackson, rather than long hulks of faceless brick.

Architecture isn’t a communal process. But West Loop residents were right at the recent Target meeting to demand to be wowed by a store, to want a design that reflected the neighborhood’s design-conscious sense of itself. Target would do well to take those critiques seriously. Taxman, too.

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By Developer money corrupts the politician from and hurts our neighborhood
Posted: 07/30/2010 11:44 AM

"Intelligent, long-term planning" will remain an elusive myth in the West Loop as long as we have an alderman who breaks his campaign promises and takes money from developers.

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By George
Posted: 07/30/2010 8:05 AM

Excellent article and well said. And as Melissa beautifully said in her comment, responsible, intelligent planning is very, very crucial. There must be long term planning.

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By Melissa Beilstein from West Loop
Posted: 07/30/2010 1:10 AM

What we need more than ever is thoughtful, responsible, intelligent planning. Design, utility and accessibility (pedestian and vehicular) should be paramount. It would break my heart to see our neighborhood turn into Elston/Fullerton/Damen, Roosevelt Road or worse still, North Ave./Clybourn Corridor. These intersections are a nightmare for nearly all that attempt to navigate them on any given day, let alone Saturday morning. When will we learn from the mistakes of the past?