Rendering of new Spertus facility courtesy of Krueck & Sexton Architects. Facility will be located just north of the current Spertus location.
Building a New Spertus
Spertus Institute Gets Go-Ahead for $55 Million New Building
By Samuel D. Gruber
Forward
Arts & Culture
January 7, 2005
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CHICAGO - Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies will soon begin construction of its new $55 million building on Michigan Avenue, which recently won the approval the City of Chicago Plan Commission and the essential support of Mayor Richard M. Daley.
It will be the first major American Jewish cultural building to be designed since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and the distinction is not an unimportant one. Spertus patrons and architects entirely rejected any semblance of the defensive architecture popular for Jewish museums and memorials, in favor of an assertive representation of Jewish optimism. Spertus is that odd institution and an architectural challenge, since it does in one building what most institutions do in many - it houses a college, a museum and a library. The new building's ten-story multi-faceted glass facade should be a substantial change for Spertus, bringing a degree of public attention that has eluded the institute since its founding in 1924 as a division of the Board of Jewish Education to foster scholarship, train teachers, and promote programs of adult and youth education. In 1967, Maurice Spertus gave his collection of Jewish art and manuscripts to Spertus College, along with an endowment, creating the foundation for a permanent museum that has, over the years, produced its own substantive exhibitions and has been a popular venue for traveling shows. But no amount of public programming or challenging exhibitions can equal the eye-grabbing effect the new design certainly will have, especially in architecture-savvy Chicago. It is hoped that the new facility will give Spertus a more prominent place in its cultural neighborhood, which includes major museums and several colleges.
This project is remarkable in other ways. Locally, it is the first venture to test the new design guidelines of the Michigan Avenue Historic District as the first new public building to be reviewed in the post-Millennium Park era, a time when Chicago is especially receptive to new architectural expression. Following Frank Gehry's exuberant Pritzker Pavilion, located a few blocks north of Spertus, apparently almost anything goes - even a 10-story glass facade smack in the middle of the Michigan Avenue street wall.
In this, Spertus chose a different route than did New York's Jewish Museum, which respected the traditionalism of New York's Fifth Avenue and chose to clone the 1908 Warburg Mansion when the museum expanded in 1993. At the time, there was widespread surprise, since the museum used Kevin Roche, one of the most innovative architects, for this design recycling. (Of course, on Fifth Avenue any innovative design would have gone toe to toe with the nearby Guggenheim Museum, so restraint was probably the better part of valor.) On the other end of the spectrum, San Francisco's Contemporary Jewish Museum overreached and made a splash, but nearly drowned in pursuing an expensive anew building (still unbuilt) by Daniel Libeskind.
Wisely, Spertus has steered a middle course. While sharply contrasting with its immediate masonry-clad neighbors, the design is still in the mainstream of Chicago architecture tradition.
Despite interest in the project by many international architects, President and CEO Howard Sulkin and his board eventually did what Chicago has long done best. After considering several dozen architects , they chose Ron Krueck and Mark Sexton of Chicago for the project. Some might see this as an instance of Chicago's architectural parochialism, but it is also a sign of the seriousness of Spertus's claims that project substance was more important than glamour.
"This was not a beauty contest," Sulkin said, adding that it was about "what it take[s] to get a good building."
The new facade is serious, but not boring. Its unevenness should create a wide variety of light effects from a distance and from close up. There is no heavy horizontal to restrain the facade, as was traditionally the norm in Chicago. Instead, the glass wall directly meets the sky. If they get the color right, it just might seem to dissolve in air, like flames in sunlight. "The Spertus is committed to lifelong learning, to learning that never stops," Sulkin said. "We wanted a building that soars, that doesn't get cut off."
The new building will be built next door to the existing one, which will be sold; an unpretentious former office building erected in 1913 and modernized in 1958. In 1974, Spertus occupied and expanded the facilities and established Asher Library, the largest public Judaica library in the Central and Western United States. The almost century-old structure, however, has been ill suited for many of the institute's varied needs. It was deemed more practical to build anew than to refit the older structure. A building with new mechanical systems will better protect the half-million items in the library, the Chicago Jewish Archive and Spertus Museum.
The building will cover one-third of an acre and provide 138,000 square feet of space in a 10-story building, rising 161 feet. Following the mayor's guidelines, as well as the Jewish directive to heal the world, more than half of the roof space will be designated as a green roof, producing oxygen for the city and helping the building to keep its cool.
From the outside, the facade wall will provide a level of transparency that will allow the public some sense of activity within - something seriously lacking in the present building, in which interior support columns and walls and the centrally located service core divide the edifice into a warren of small spaces, and create total separation between parts. So much so, that even when there are hundreds of people in the building, it often seems empty and forlorn when one enters the lobby space.
It remains to be seen how the final building, scheduled to be completed in 2007, will look, and how it will transform the venerable institution. Spertus has prided itself on being in the forefront of the development of Jewish distance learning. Its programs serve students in almost every state. It will be at least two years before the new Spertus opens, but when it does, it is likely that it will be a central place, not a distant one, in American Jewish cultural life.
Samuel D. Gruber is the author of "Synagogues" (Metrobooks, 1999) and "American Synagogues: A Century of Architecture and Jewish Community" (Rizzoli, 2003), and a contributor to "Jewish Identity in Contemporary Architecture" (Prestel, 2004).
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