Chalk up at least one for the preservationists. They scored a first-round victory last week, when the Commission on Chicago Landmarks finally committed to putting Bertrand Goldberg’s Prentice Hospital building on its agenda this fall.
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The landmarks commission’s announcement, made by chairman Rafael M. Leon at its September 6 meeting, comes after a year of lobbying by preservationists and in the midst of a massive counteroffensive by Northwestern. The university’s been scrambling to make its case with the public for the last few weeks, since more than 70 well-known architects, including six Pritzker Architecture Prize winners, signed a letter asking Mayor Rahm Emanuel to save the building, which, as structural engineer William F. Baker wrote, is the result of a “revolutionary” design process and “the only example of its type, anywhere in the world.”
The day before the commission meeting, NU’s own, considerably shorter, list of architects in favor of demolition showed up in the Sun-Times. Columnist Michael Sneed reported that the mayor had received letters urging him to let NU take Prentice down from James Goettsch and Michael Kaufman of Goettsch Partners, Jeff Case of Holabird & Root, Charles Smith of Cannon Design, HOK’s Dan Mitchell and Todd Halamka, and James R. DeStefano, founding principal of DeStefano Partners.
The study was conducted by an outfit called Purple Strategies. That sounds like something NU, which bleeds purple, dreamed up, but in fact it’s a Virginia-based political public relations firm that just this year opened a Chicago office headed by Chris Mather, Mayor Emanuel’s former communications head. Purple Strategies drew its results from phone interviews with 507 people.
He doesn’t mention a cure for lost integrity.
