The construction barricades at the Poetry Center building in River North came down sometime recently, revealing its gleaming glass window wall. But if you want to see in this state, you’d better hurry over there, because the final design from John Ronan Architect calls for a screen of pierced anodized metal to cover most of it. It’s kind of like a reverse strip-tease.
Despite the fact that you’re never supposed to judge a work of art before it’s finished, people love to assess buildings from the moment they see the renderings. This is especially dangerous because buildings so often turn out to be very different from what the drawings might suggest.
Here, I think there’s a different — possibly singular — situation. Looking at the building as it is, you see what looks like a finished product [well, almost — you can still see bare insulation at each end of the building, which will be covered in solid metal panels], but the facade that ultimately will cover it will radically change its appearance — certainly it will lose its powerful reflective quality.
That said, there are many observers who look at the whole reflectivity thing not as timelessly minimal but as ubiquitous, tired and cliched.
I am closer to the former camp — it’s really the saving grace of the Block 37 building
but I get why a lot of people reject it as an overall design approach.
Despite any of this, I am pretty sure that the metal screen on the Poetry Center is going to make it a real gem — in a category of its own. But we’ll all have to wait to decide.
