Chicago's new Apple StoreTown Center, designed by the firm of Sir. Norman Foster, opens Friday, October 20th.
Workers were finishing up transforming Pioneer Court for a official grand opening festivities scheduled for 5:00 p.m. Friday
The site, where Michigan Avenue meets the Chicago River, has a long history. Until choosing relocation after the Great Chicago fire of 1871, this was where the iconic McCormick Reaper works was located. Through the 1920's, it was home to the Jap Rose soap factory, back when the riverfront was industrialized and filthy. The development of Wacker Drive and the Michigan Avenue bridge, both keystones of Daniel Burnham's 1909 Plan of Chicago, changed all that.
When the old soap factory was demolished, for decades the site remained a surface parking lot.
It wasn't until 1965 that the Equitable Building was constructed on the site. Designed by Skidmore,Owings and Merrill's Bruce Graham, the 35 story tower was a classic Miesian glass box, clad in anodized aluminum. And just like Mies's Seagram Building in New York City, the building was set back from the street to create a 175-foot-deep plaza along Michigan avenue, centered by an elegant Miesian pavilion protecting escalators and stairs leading down to the shopping arcade beneath the plaza.
When new owners took over, the pavilion and fountain were demolished in a remodeling of the plaza, which in more recent years became home to a succession of super-sized J. Seward Johnson sculptures, perhaps most (in?)famously by the glowing and creepy Forever Marilyn.
In press materials for the store opening, Apple Chief Designer Jony Ives describes the plaza "that had been cut off from the river," which is false. This elegant winding stair took people down to the riverfront, if only to a cramped dead-end stump of the riverwalk. (Note: this is not the Chicago River's natural color.)
It all had to go, of course. By August of last year, the rivermost section of Pioneer Court had been demolished and the old, long-closed food court beneath the plaza cleaned out.
Construction continued; the plaza filled out and up.
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Like the incredibly complex innards of a Macbook Pro or iPad, the new Apple Store has an intricate and abjectly practical matrix of components that lie just beneath . . .
. . . the spectacularly polished surfaces.
And beneath the seemingly thin-as-a-razor-edge, pristine rooftop?
Construction continued.
The huge glass panels, 10-feet wide and up to 32-feet high, were installed and quickly covered over.
This is the original rendering of the store from above.
And this is the actual building,the weekend before opening. As the big day grew near, the glass was wrapped all-in-white, with the slogan "Where Ideas Sing" written across the front facade.
Where Ideas Sing, is, in fact,the name of the anthem written for Apple by hip-hop artist Saba, whose words were scripted in white on the black temporary wooden fence surrounding the construction site.
By Thursday's preview day, the fencing had come down, and the coverings removed to reveal the amazing super-transparent, low-iron glass.
As promised, the new twin staircases gently roll down to the river, creating what no doubt will be a popular gathering spot to relax and watch the tour boats boarding on the opposite bank of the river.
Apple press materials say the building "pays homage to Frank Lloyd Wright's Prairie Style homes." Did the person writing this even look at the building?
"Here I am Philip, am I indoors or am I out," was Wright's reported gently mocking reaction to first encountering another famous, far earlier glass house, designed by Philip Johnson to be his home. "Do I take my hat off to keep it on?"
The Apple Store is, indeed, relentlessly Miesian, transparent beyond even the master's dreams. The 111 by 98 foot carbon fiber roof rests on just four supports - two steel columns, and two thicker steel columns covered in stone. The entire perimeter is an almost seamless envelope of glass. The Chinese granite floors flow from interior to exterior, another Miesian signature. Project architect Stefan Behlin calls it "almost not a building." You can't get any closer to Mie's famous odeal of a structure that is "almost nothing."
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the Apple Store is that it is a low building surrounded by a museum of iconic tall towers. In a way, the proportions between them mirrors the relation of Mies's single-story Federal Center Post Office with the two skyscrapers that make up the rest of complex. In being both a backdrop and a foreground, the Apple Store brings a previously missing reference of scale, one whose contrast gives greater definition to each building and unites all of them into graceful whole.
In a sense, it 's almost less of a building than a bridge, giving perspective to its neighbors and a clear and inviting connection between the upper level of streets and plaza and the lower, nature-focused level of the river.
