Aesthetics And SOM's New Metra Station

Austerity-minded Metra officials stripped the design of its chief visual flourish, an elegant stainless steel railing. In the process, they destroyed the possibility that the station, which serves Metra's Rock Island District Line and was built using $6.8 million in federal stimulus funds, would match the design standards set by public works built during the Great Depression. At least the station does the urban design basics right. Conveniently located on the north side of 35th Street, it lets IIT students get from the station to their campus without having to cross the heavily trafficked artery. It's also easy to walk from the station to nearby CTA Red and Green line stops, which also are on the north side of 35th. Open since Sunday, the station has already changed the routines of people like Arlanda Seifer-Woods, who used to drive from her home in Beverly to her job at the Chicago Police Headquarters at 3510 S. Michigan Ave. Now she takes the train and even gets in a little exercise on her way to and from work. "A lifesaver," she calls the station, which can be counted upon to take more cars off the roads, reducing energy usage and pollution. Yet such environmental benefits cannot mask the station's failure to achieve an economical but elegant synthesis of form and function. True, basic functional needs have been addressed. The concrete stairs and ramps leading to the platforms appear wide enough to handle large crowds before and after Sox games. The ramps are heated, which should prevent them from turning dangerously icy come winter. And the warming shelters on the platforms will provide a respite from the cold and wind, though I suspect they won't be big enough to protect hundreds of Sox fans waiting for a train during a postgame summer rainstorm. At least the platforms have big plaza-like areas that will prevent overcrowding. Unfortunately, these individual elements don't add up to the aesthetic whole envisioned by Skidmore's chief designer, Ross Wimer. His intelligent concept was to celebrate the movement of people through the station, most notably in a series of stainless steel railings and pickets that would have layered a sense of fluidity and reflectivity on the station's static, stolid concrete walls. This was the project's big move, and everything depended on it. So Metra's decision to replace the stainless steel with its typical and mundane steel railing dealt the design a brutal blow. When you approach the station, it looks awfully grim, a mass of concrete relieved only by clunky black railings. Only the warming shelters, with their precisely detailed, highly transparent steel and glass, retain Skidmore's original design intent. How did this happen? Skidmore claims its railing design was within Metra's budget, while Metra counterclaims that the projected costs of carrying out Skidmore's overall design was more than 75 percent over budget. But the real issue is as much about control as cost. The architects were hired only to prepare a design; contractors then took over. When Metra and its contractors determined the project was over budget, they never consulted the architects, both sides agree. In fact, Wimer said, Skidmore only found out about the change after the substitute railing was installed. Metra's explanation for the change is murky. Spokeswoman Judy Pardonnet said that the agency and its contractor made the railings change to save $900,000 and keep the project on budget. She also suggested that the railings never had a chance: "Even if we had the money to pay for the stainless steel railings," she said, "we wouldn't spend it. We don't do (stainless steel railings) anywhere else." Within the construction industry, this type of cost-cutting goes by the name of "value engineering." To its proponents, it is a way of eliminating frills. But in this case, it engineered the aesthetic value right out of the station. Why bother hiring distinguished architects if you're going to undercut their design? Why accept a design you don't really intend to build? If this $11.7 million station were located anywhere other than 35th Street, just east of the Dan Ryan Expressway, its faults might be overlooked. But the station forms a gateway to the Illinois Institute of Technology, which is stocked with temples of steel and glass by master modernist Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Erecting a mediocre piece of urban infrastructure alongside such a campus is like showing up at a Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert and playing a kazoo. It didn't have to be this way. The Chicago office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill came up with a promising design for the station, one that justified the demolition of a Mies-designed brick hut that reportedly served as the entrance to an underground testing facility for explosives during the Cold War.