Home > Editorial Review > Blades of glass

Chicago's rough-hewn cityscape, already studded with architectural jewels, has a sparkling new gem. It resembles an exquisitely cut diamond dropped into the great wall of stone that rises like a cliff across from Grant Park.

With its faceted, folded facade of glass glinting softly in the sun, the new Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies at 618 S. Michigan Ave. is a beguiling expression of light, both actual and metaphoric. It is at once novel and neighborly, a building whose spectacularly sculptural, computer-aided design is truly of our time even as it engages in a dialogue across time with masterpieces that put Chicago on the architectural map.

The 10-story, $55 million structure, which opens to the public Friday and was paid for almost completely with private funds, represents the finest cultural project in Chicago since the 2004 completion of Millennium Park -- and a welcome sign that the park's bold embrace of the new was no one-shot deal.

Designed by Chicago architects Ron Krueck and Mark Sexton, who have been in the public eye as the shapers of the controversial plan to put the Chicago Children's Museum in Grant Park, the new Spertus forms an object lesson in how the past should engage the present: through sophisticated counterpoint rather than through facile imitation.

There is no tacked-on brick and limestone here to "blend in" with the mighty row of historic buildings across from Grant Park. Nor are there Stars of David or other overt religious symbols.

Instead, the building's wall stands, like so much glass origami, for the power of lifelong learning in -- Jewish culture and the rich complexity of that culture -- its tragedies, triumphs, wisdom and marvelously self-deprecating wit. If there is overt symbolism in this building, it can only be seen in what is not present: No concrete barricades, no off-putting walls of stone, no barbed wire. Howard Sulkin, the institute's ebullient president, had the courage and foresight not to turn this building into a fortress after the calamitous events of 9/11.

Located on a former vacant lot just north of the institute's old home, a banal glass-faced building at 610 S. Michigan, the new Spertus provides more space for each of the institute's three main divisions -- Spertus College, the Spertus Museum and the Asher Library -- and adds such attractions as a 400-seat theater and a Kosher cafe (said to be the only one in downtown Chicago).

Well-connected

In the old building, these uses were stacked like flapjacks on separate floors. Ho hum. The new offers a spatial surprise: The architects punched a soaring lobby and a meandering atrium through the building's steel floors, symbolically connecting its functions in a series of grandly scaled rooms that borrow light, space and vitality from each other.

To be sure, the new Spertus is neither faultless nor wholly original. Modernist architects have for years been playing with the idea of folded facades as an alternative to the postmodern custom of slathering building with decoration. And the Pritzker Prize-winning Paris architect, Christian de Portzamparc, completed a much-praised facade of folded glass in his slender, 23-story LVMH Tower in Manhattan way back in 1999.

But this is the first time such a treatment has been pulled off in any significant way in Chicago and it truly occupies center stage. It marks the first insertion of a contemporary design into the clifflike wall of buildings that extends along the western edge of Grant Park since Mayor Richard M. Daley pushed through city landmark status for the strip in 2002.

At the time, architects fumed that giving city bureaucrats tight rein over this so-called Historic Michigan Boulevard District, which includes such masterpieces as Adler & Sullivan's muscular Auditorium Building, would put a crimp on their creativity. But Krueck and Sexton have shown that accepting constraints, opposed to unbridled freedom, is an essential part of the creative process.

So, like the other buildings in the Michigan Avenue historic district, theirs has a bottom, a middle and a top, and is deeply three-dimensional, not just a flat plane.

And yet, its startling wall of glass is every bit a product of computer age and the freedom it gives architects to customize forms rather than standardize them, as in the industrial age. The new Spertus facade is composed of 726 pieces of glass, formed in 556 different shapes, including parallelograms that tilt in two ways, not one. The glass pieces are clipped onto extruded aluminum frames whose three-legged, twisting profile resembles human femur bones. The pieces project outward over the sidewalk by as much as 5 feet and inward toward the center of the building by as much as 2 feet.

Far too often these days, such technical wizardry seeks only to produce "wow" buildings, as if architecture's job was to make us yelp. But in the capable hands of Krueck and Sexton, whose resume includes award-winning modernist houses and a supporting role in the design of Millennium Park's Crown Fountain, the new Spertus is no one-liner, like the clunky, slice-topped skyscraper at 150 N. Michigan Ave.

The building's crystalline forms are dramatic enough to stand up to the heft of such muscle-bound neighbors as the Chicago Hilton. Yet they do not seem jagged and aggressive, as silvery, sharp-pointed buildings of Daniel Libeskind can. Rather, they appear soft and billowy, like folds of drapery or a woman's body. The building even has a "skirt," a sheltering projection of glass that playfully sweeps over the sidewalk and lets you discover the structural girdle that makes it all stand up.

Mirrors surroundings

To the architects' credit, they have extended such elegance down to the minutest details, such as the thickness and low-iron content of the building's glass, ensuring that the glass handsomely mirrors its surroundings -- the clouds, the sky and the trees across the way in Grant Park -- rather than reflecting them in the equivalent of a fun-house mirror. The overall result is that the design thrillingly but nobly transports the Michigan Avenue wall into the 21st Century.

Yet the beauty of the new Spertus runs deeper than that voluptuous glass facade. It isn't showoff architecture that fails to back exterior style with internal substance.

For starters, the building's transparency communicates far more effectively than the opaque glass of Spertus' former home that this is a public place, a cleft in the wall of stone buildings along Michigan Avenue. Here, the architecture democratically seems to say, passersby are welcome to venture in, partake of what's offered (there is a museum admission fee) and glimpse the over-the-treetops views of Grant Park, which Sulkin refers to as "Eden."

After visitors pass through metal detectors -- these and non-shattering laminated exterior glass are among the few visible responses to post-9/11 security concerns -- they will find themselves in a striking, three-story lobby dominated by a folded, fragmented wall of white plaster that reprises (somewhat heavy-handedly) the glass exterior.

There's much to like here, starting with the mix of uses that pinwheel around the lobby -- a gift shop, a kosher cafe, classrooms and the theater -- and the way the architects have threaded them together with an elegant, steel and glass switchback stair. As in a good city, one activity promises to feed the other.

Even so, it's disappointing that the lobby's burst of open space stops at the third floor instead of extending all the way up the building's north side, as the architects had originally planned. Soaring prices for steel and other materials put the kibosh on that dream, which, if realized, would have raised the building's interior to a whole new level.

Krueck and Sexton have nonetheless delivered some superb spaces that retain the core of their original idea, most notably on the four upper floors. There, their sky-lit atrium meanders marvelously downward, from changing exhibition galleries on the 10th floor to a grand, multipurpose hall on the 9th floor to a soaring reading room on the 8th floor and finally to a student lounge on the 7th floor. These spaces, some of the most powerful and magical interiors in Chicago, make vertiginous hotel atriums seem like barns by comparison.

Naturally bright

The architects use skylights, light wells and open floor plans to make the building, just 80 feet wide, seem far more spacious. Natural light even reaches to the back of the building, where, on the 9th floor, a monumental horseshoe-shaped wall of glass encloses what promises to be a memorable open-storage display of menorahs, holy arks and more than 1,000 other objects of Judaica. The building enhances its contents rather than overwhelming them.

The architects have excelled equally at handling the hidden structural and planning moves that should make the steel-framed building a well-functioning vertical village. As visitors sit in the column-free theater, which is made intimate by an unusual partitioned balcony, they will likely be unaware that 14-foot-deep trusses are bearing the weight of everything above them and transferring those loads down to the foundations.

Perhaps some visitors will not like the new Spertus' absence of in-house parking, though valet service is available and there are parking lots and garages nearby. But I suspect that the building will prove a hit with the public and will extend the cultural vitality of Michigan Avenue further southward, creating a new anchor of activity between Millennium Park and the Museum campus.

More broadly, the new Spertus can be understood as an expression of the cultural confidence now felt by once-marginalized American Jews -- "a certain people," as the author Charles Silberman has called them. It is significant that this bold building faces directly onto Chicago's front yard rather than being shunted to the shadows. An uncertain people could not have pulled that off. The new Spertus is a triumph of architecture and -- ironically, coming from a people who have borne witness to so much darkness -- a gift of light.

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The Spertus' new exhibit, "The New Authentics: Artists of the Post-Jewish Generation," 16 contemporary American Jewish artists dealing with issues of ethnic, cultural and religious identity in the U.S., opens Nov. 30 and runs through April 13. Information at 312-322-1773.

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bkamin@tribune.com

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See more photos of the Spertus Institute oneline at chicagotribune.com/ spertus.

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