Finding the Extraordinary in the Ordinary: The Equitable Building
Some buildings have a very obvious beauty, a beauty immediately visible due to the details, or the colors, or the style. This week’s building does not fall into that category: too often, when passing it on my walking tours, I have heard the unfortunate opinion, “Why did they get rid of all the beautiful, old buildings to make room for that?” Poor Equitable Building: no longer considered revolutionary, as when the famous Bruce Graham designed it in the mid-1960s, but commonplace and unimaginative as compared to both the older and newer buildings that surround it. At least to those who don’t know much about it, which is admittedly most people. Just another boxy, boring office building: Chicago’s got plenty. But I like rooting for the underdog, and I also like teaching people to see what’s extraordinary about a building that’s seemingly unextraordinary. So, let’s do what I do with my tour participants: let’s peel back the layers of context for this seemingly plain-Jane building, and discover its beauty through its details and history.
First: location, location, location. Now simply known by its address, 401 N. Michigan Avenue, this building not only stands at the touristy heart of the city, marking the entrance into the Magnificent Mile, but it also stands at a site rich in history. The “Father of Chicago” himself — Jean Baptiste Pointe Du Sable — settled at this spot when he came to the area in the 1770s. Here, he had a small farm, sold furs and other goods, and essentially served as the first non-native settler in the area: it is for this reason that the plaza at the base of the Equitable Building is called “Pioneer Court,” for that pioneering French-Haitian settler. You can even see a handsome bust of him out there.
This is also where the McCormick family legacy began in Chicago: Cyrus McCormick, who patented the reaper (which he and his family developed back on the East Coast), built his first reaper factory on this spot in 1847. Legend has it that after the Great Fire of 1871, which destroyed McCormick’s first factory, he was ready to cut his losses and leave Chicago, but his wife convinced him to stay and try again. And stay they did: indeed, by the end of the 1800s, there were so many wealthy McCormick’s in River North that the area was nicknamed “McCormickville.”
The location, then, is historically important. But even the very ground this building stands on carries a fascinating secret: being so close to the river, and with the water table being so high, the building’s caissons were actually formed using train cars — cylindrical train cars — that were then incorporated into the foundation itself. In essence, as I tell kids on my tours, it’s like there’s a “graveyard for trains” underneath the building.
But what’s perhaps loveliest about this building — and yes, I did say “lovely” to describe this building that some have called “hideous” — is the subtle details of the design. As Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the famous German Modernist architect, famously said, “God is in the details.” To really appreciate this building, you need to experience it at ground level. You’ll notice, for instance, how the lines of the plaza melt into the lines of the building itself. You’ll see this in many Modernist-style buildings, in fact. You’ll also see the transparent ground level of the building, seemingly magically supporting the massive weight of the building on a system of narrow pilotis. As I tell people on my tours, it’s this wonderful meeting of presence and absence, of space and matter: the solid mass of the building floats atop an ethereal cloud of open space. But we don’t really notice that. We see the hustle and bustle of whatever’s in the plaza on a given day, or we notice the much snazzier and much newer Apple Store down below. (A side note: I miss Bruce Graham’s helical staircase that used to sweep beautifully down to the riverfront from the plaza. This was removed in the Apple Store project — I’ll include a picture of a view from before.)
To really appreciate the role this building plays in its context, take a trip to Pioneer Plaza, and stand somewhere toward the middle of it. Then look around. Take in that sweeping, dramatic, gorgeous view of the riverfront — the Michigan Avenue Bridge with its stately bridgehouses, the 1920s building boom that gave us popular favorites like the Tribune Tower, the Wrigley Building, the Carbide & Carbon, and the London Guarantee and Accident Building, the never-ending pedestrian activity at the base of the Mag Mile. Sometimes, if you’re there at the right time, you’ll catch a magnificent dusky sky that just seems to roll west over the skyline. And here’s the thing: you wouldn’t get that spectacular view were it not for this Modernist, “hideous” Equitable Building taking its physical step back and giving you that space. That’s one of the elements of good Modernist architecture that I like to explain to my tour guests: you might see a boxy building like this as “uninspiring” or “unwelcoming,” but the welcoming aspect — indeed the humanizing aspect of Modernism — is, if nothing else, the vast open public space that it purposely leaves at its base. Think of the plazas in the Loop that have the great works of public art — the Calder, the Picasso — and look where they’re located. A “prettier” building to most people might be something like the Tribune Tower; in fact, part of the reason the Equitable Building was set back was so that the Tribune Tower could be seen from the best angles as much as possible, at the request/negotiating power of the Chicago Tribune company. But that building doesn’t make any allowances for buildings around it, and certainly not for people to gather at its base. There’s no space left to have your public art, your protests, your farmers’ markets, your festivals. No, those happen in Modernist plazas like Pioneer Plaza, thanks to the space afforded us by the underappreciated Equitable Building.
So three cheers for the uncelebrated, the underdog, the one that steps back to let everything else around it have the glory. It really is quite wonderful when considered from this point of view, if you ask me.
The “Father of Chicago,” Jean-Baptiste Pointe DuSable.
Long before the “Mag Mile,” there was the McCormick Reaper Factory. Note the boats in the background: this is a view looking southeast from what’s now the Mag Mile, across where Pioneer Plaza is today.
Anodized aluminum makes the surface harder.
How it used to look before the Apple Store, with the helical staircase.