There has been so little new construction in Chicago the past couple of years that when the barricades come down on any completed project — as they have this week at the new DePaul University Art Museum — it’s a momentous occasion.
I have generally been impressed with a lot of what I’ve seen at DePaul’s museum, which until now has only had gallery space in one of its classroom buildings. So it’s disappointing to report that its new building, next to the Fullerton Avenue el stop, doesn’t match the artistic ambitions of the museum itself.
Antunovich Associates designed the building, as it has the bulk of DePaul’s new buildings in the last decade or so. The common design approach the firm has employed there seems discomfitingly similar to the ubiquitous neo-traditional brick multi-unit residential buildings that have infested gentrified city neighborhoods in the last quarter century.
[This one is right across Fullerton from the museum site]
In the institutional setting, the styling is different
— a vaguely modernized version of Collegiate Gothic — but the effect is the same: bland, generic and indistinct.
I think what the designers were shooting for at the Art Museum is a building that looks like a late 19th century brick carriage house which had been repurposed as gallery space. But no one is going to be fooled into thinking this is a re-cycled period piece. The designers have taken a middle of the road approach in which the detailing resembles a tasteful historic revival shopping center, with timidly projecting vertical piers and the suggestion of a cornice, string course, lintels and sills of “limestone.”
The one detail on the building I really like is the sign:
brushed stainless, all caps Futura [thank you Carey Wintergreen for identifying the font]. Maybe the architects could have taken a clue from the graphic designers and devised a correspondingly minimalist building — one with the same window/door composition, but specifying an un-ornamented sheer brick facade.
In addition to its work at DePaul, Antunovich has produced some pretty execrable work, like the ridiculous Bernardin apartment tower at Wabash/Chicago
and the Streets of Woodfield
a particularly theme-park-esque shopping center in Schaumburg
so expectations shouldn’t have been too high for a great design here. But in and amongst the historicist crap the firm has churned out, they produced one really dazzling design, actually at DePaul: the student apartment block at 1239 West Fullerton
It’s dynamic, light and sleek, and a great addition to the street. Regrettably, it seems to have been a bizarre aberration for the firm.
