Complex
I caught the first rays of sunlight this morning as they poked between a couple of buildings over on Erie Street, toward the right. This spot is in the middle of the big complex of stuff owned by Northwestern University. Northwestern's main campus is up in Evanston, but the Law School and the Medical School are down here, and there's a big hospital complex with five or six different buildings. I spent a bunch of time down here a decade ago, mostly in a building right behind me.
I don't think the old building on the other side of this field is owned by Northwestern, though the university medical school does have a couple of departments in there. That's 680 N. Lake Shore, built in 1926 as the American Furniture Mart. Between 1988 and 2012, the corporate headquarters of Playboy magazine and related entities was located there, and there was a sign with a bunny head over one of the entrances. I never saw anybody naked down here though. I just wandered through for the articles.
The empty field between me and 680 used to be the site of the architecturally significant Prentice Women's Hospital, which was designed by cutting edge modernist architect Bertrand Goldberg and completed in 1975. Prentice was part of the Northwestern complex, and the same urge that pushed them to get Bertrand Goldberg to design one of their buildings in the '70s pushed them to replace the whole thing with a furturistic high-tech glass building in the 2010s. Northwestern likes to present itself as one of the nation's most advanced medical institutions, but by the middle of the last decade, the Prentice Building was very old, and the unique architecture made it impossible to update. For one thing, they couldn't wire it to handle the kind of high-speed data they wanted. So in 2014, they tore old Prentice down and built a new Prentice next door. There was much wailing and gnashing of preservationist teeth amongst Chicago's architecture nerds over this, but I got to see the innards of old Prentice a few times before they bombed it, and I saw Northwestern's point. The fact that the site of old Prentice is still nothing but a field of goldenrod behind a fence really eats at the nerves of a lot of people I know, though.
Complex
I caught the first rays of sunlight this morning as they poked between a couple of buildings over on Erie Street, toward the right. This spot is in the middle of the big complex of stuff owned by Northwestern University. Northwestern's main campus is up in Evanston, but the Law School and the Medical School are down here, and there's a big hospital complex with five or six different buildings. I spent a bunch of time down here a decade ago, mostly in a building right behind me.
I don't think the old building on the other side of this field is owned by Northwestern, though the university medical school does have a couple of departments in there. That's 680 N. Lake Shore, built in 1926 as the American Furniture Mart. Between 1988 and 2012, the corporate headquarters of Playboy magazine and related entities was located there, and there was a sign with a bunny head over one of the entrances. I never saw anybody naked down here though. I just wandered through for the articles.
The empty field between me and 680 used to be the site of the architecturally significant Prentice Women's Hospital, which was designed by cutting edge modernist architect Bertrand Goldberg and completed in 1975. Prentice was part of the Northwestern complex, and the same urge that pushed them to get Bertrand Goldberg to design one of their buildings in the '70s pushed them to replace the whole thing with a furturistic high-tech glass building in the 2010s. Northwestern likes to present itself as one of the nation's most advanced medical institutions, but by the middle of the last decade, the Prentice Building was very old, and the unique architecture made it impossible to update. For one thing, they couldn't wire it to handle the kind of high-speed data they wanted. So in 2014, they tore old Prentice down and built a new Prentice next door. There was much wailing and gnashing of preservationist teeth amongst Chicago's architecture nerds over this, but I got to see the innards of old Prentice a few times before they bombed it, and I saw Northwestern's point. The fact that the site of old Prentice is still nothing but a field of goldenrod behind a fence really eats at the nerves of a lot of people I know, though.