The New Spertus
In the News
Like a cut diamond, Krueck and Sexton Architects’ Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies fits seamlessly Chicago’s downtown street wall.
Architectural Record
Published: May 2008
By Blair Kamin - This is an excerpt of an article from the May 2008 edition of Architectural Record.
Like the imposing towers lining the edges of New York’s Central Park, the street wall of historic skyscrapers fronting on Chicago’s Grant Park exist as built topography—a man-made cliff of stone and brick that includes such seminal structures as Adler & Sullivan’s robust Auditorium Building. Now, with the completion of the Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies by Chicago architects Ron Krueck and Mark Sexton, this mighty street wall—a mile and a half long—has made a dazzling leap into the 21st century. The 10-story building resembles a shimmering piece of quartz exquisitely inserted into a great stone wall, its faceted, folded facade of glass glinting in the morning sun.
While Spertus may appear to be yet another one-off “icon building,” it actually imparts several broader lessons. It is, first, a cultural building on a budget, with a construction cost of just $39 million—far less than the recent crop of spectacular museums whose price tags typically exceed $100 million. It is, second, a creative essay in Jewish architecture, eschewing facile iconography or familiar historicism for its beguiling study in light. Lastly, it is, like Steven Holl’s much-praised Bloch Building at the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, Missouri, an exercise in complementary contrast, with the new subtly juxtaposed to the old instead of trying to outshout it.
For both architect and client, the building represents a felicitous debut on a broader stage. Krueck and Sexton’s commissions have tended to be quiet triumphs, like the firm’s skilled 2005 restoration of Mies van der Rohe’s Crown Hall. For its part, Spertus, a leading Jewish institution in the Midwest, with three interrelated divisions—Spertus College, the Asher Library, and the Spertus Museum—was stuck in a remodeled turn-of-the-century office building. In a move straight out of The Fountainhead, the building suffered an International Style makeover in the 1950s that concealed its cultural identity. Inside, the institute’s three divisions were separated from each other by a conventional stack of office floors. “People would come in and they would say, ‘Spertus is dead. Why doesn’t anybody come here?’ ” recalls the institute’s ebullient president, Howard Sulkin. “There would be 700 people in the building. There was no way you could know that because everything was compartmentalized.” For its new home, located directly north of the old one on a former vacant lot, Spertus chose Krueck and Sexton over three highly regarded finalists—James Stewart Polshek, Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, and Rafael Pelli. The winning team wasn’t just brilliant, they were the best listeners, Sulkin said at the time.
Nevertheless, it took Krueck and Sexton several tries to develop a scheme that achieved the delicate balance of form and identity the client sought: A bold contemporary statement that would, of necessity, respond sensitively to the Michigan Avenue street wall, which Chicago had declared a landmark district in 2002. At the same time, the building would seek to communicate the Jewish values of learning and culture through light while it expressed the institute’s identity as a civic institution.
The result, which marks the first insertion of a contemporary structure into the historic Michigan Avenue wall, turns out to be immensely persuasive, and the finest cultural project in Chicago since the 2004 completion of Millennium Park. The building's crystalline forms are bold enough to hold their own against the muscular older structures in the street wall, and yet they are not jagged and aggressive, as Daniel Libeskind's buildings can be. Subtle modulations enhance this careful balancing act, from "valleys" in the facade that create a sense of verticality compatible with the landmark district to a 7-foot-tall window module that extends the horizontal rhythms of the historic buildings into the newcomer, slipping beneath the expressive facade like a tensioned net.
Literally and symbolically open, the building bravely rejects the fortress mentality that has gripped innumerable clients since 9/11. Security is dealt with, but quietly, in the nonshattering, laminated exterior glass and the presence of metal detectors just beyond the entrance. Spertus is equally effective inside, though soaring prices for the building's steel frame and other materials forced Krueck and Sexton to abandon its plan for a unifying atrium that would run the building's entire height. Still, the architects retained the essence of this idea, beginning in a light-filled, three-story lobby ringed by a gift shop, kosher cafe, classrooms, and a theater. The two-level theater, its column-free spaces made possible by 14-foot-deep trusses, uses a partitioned balcony, one side of which slides down to the main level like a ski slope, to create intimacy—even when the room is only half full.
The glory of the new Spertus, however, occurs on the building's upper floors, with a wandering atrium that meanders from a student lounge on the 7th floor to a soaring reading room on the 8th to a grandly scaled multipurpose room on the 9th to temporary exhibition galleries on the 10th. These are magnificent public spaces, enhanced by skylights and lightwells.
There are, to be sure, minor problems, such as the somewhat intimidating security guard in the outer lobby, whose presence may discourage people from entering, to a technically complex lighting and audio system in the museum, with its more than 1,000 objects of Judaica. Lastly, disturbing noise seeps from one part of the atrium to another—a problem that could be fixed. All in all, what the exterior promises is delivered inside—unlike so many contemporary buildings that are nothing more than slick packages.
Related Links: Crimps, Facets, and Folds
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