A Career in Five Projects: Carol Ross Barney

Chicago-born architect Carol Ross Barney started her career in the early 1970s after graduating with a bachelor’s in architecture from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1971. She worked for the Peace Corps planning National Parks in Costa Rica right out of college, before joining Holabird & Root, where she worked as draftsperson and a designer. Her projects included well-known buildings like the transformation of the former main branch of the Chicago Public Library into the Cultural Center and historic train station revitalization projects. In 1981, Carol Ross Barney founded her own firm Carol Ross Barney Architects. A year later, her college classmate James Jankowski joined her and, from 1984 until 2006, the firm was known as Ross Barney + Jankowski.

Carol Ross Barney and her firm have designed many award-winning projects that share the same ethos: design excellence, social responsibility, and generosity. Key projects of the firm include the Glendale Heights Post Office, the Cesar Chavez Multicultural Academic Center, the Little Village Academy, the South Campus Chiller Plant at The Ohio State University, The James I. Swenson Civil Engineering Building at the University of Minnesota-Duluth, multiple Chicago Transit Authority stations including the Morgan Station and CTA Cermak-McCormick Station, the Chicago Riverwalk, and the McDonald’s Chicago Flagship. She became the first woman to design a federal building when she was selected as the lead designer for the Oklahoma City Federal Building in 1997, which replaced the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building destroyed in 1995.

Ross Barney and her work have received more than two-hundred national and international awards, including two AIA COTE Top Ten Awards, the 2005 AIA Award for Excellence in Public Architecture, and AIA Illinois Firm Award and Gold Medal. She has been recognized with the 2021 Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum National Design Award for Architecture and Interior Design and the 2023 American Institute of Architects Gold Medal. In 1974, Carol was a founding member of Chicago Women in Architecture (CWA) and served as CWA’s first president. Her work, ethics, and teaching have influenced countless architects and the profession for five decades.

This past January, Iker Gil talked to Carol Ross Barney about her career, focusing on five built projects from across the decades. These projects represent key breakthroughs in her career, defining new directions for the office.

Glendale Heights Postal Service
Glendale Heights, Illinois
1984–1989

Client: United States Postal Service
Program: New Post Office
Size: 24,000 square feet
Cost: $6,000,000

My first partner, Jim Jankowski, and I worked for the postal service early on. The Glendale Heights Postal Service was the first building that we finished. Before that, it was just all rehabs and parking lots. It was respectable and hard work. I knew the client from working at Holabird & Root. In fact, we had done a work improvement program for the main post office, and I had spent a lot of time there. I had met a lot of the people who worked for the postal service. At that point, they had a fairly large real estate team. They were still building buildings back in the ’80s, and they had a pretty large real estate department. A lot of the people who worked for them that I worked with were architects. When I was out on my own, I called on them. One of the reasons I called on them was that they had just started setting aside projects for architects who were members of minority groups, but they didn’t have a group for women. They only had a group for ethnic minorities. I asked them why they didn’t have one for women, and they said that there weren’t enough women, so I said, “Isn’t that the definition of a minority?” I kept talking to them and eventually they did create a group. They said, “We will set aside one project with preference for women.” I won that project.

Early era post offices were federal buildings, and they usually had some other federal function. Usually, a courthouse would be in a post office. They would be the same, probably all through the nineteenth century. By the time the 1970s rolled around, they were all in industrial parks. Basically, they were warehouses. They had just introduced what they called “letter sorting machines,” LSMs, that read barcodes and stuff like that. They were building buildings to hold these machines, so they were almost always on industrial sites. Our building is in an industrial site in Glendale Heights, Illinois. It was really an interesting project for me. I thought it was interesting because it was in a transitional period. It was in an area, the suburbs of Chicago, that was changing. It was a public service that was changing. It was a technology that was changing.

One of the things I remember distinctly about it was that for a lot of federal contracts we had to have three designs for it. They put it in your contract: “you must give us three alternatives and we will select a preferred alternative.” My observation at that point, and I observe this even more today than I did then, is that when architects did their three alternatives, they usually had a favorite. Then, their other alternatives would be lesser versions of their favorite, not even necessarily different concepts. I think they were trying to be protective so that they wouldn’t have to do something they didn’t want to do. Jim and I talked about it a lot and we knew what they wanted, but we thought there could be an acceptable version of that. We called it the dumb solution. Can you make what they are expecting, reasonable and acceptable? That is where we started our design process. It is crazy because I still do this today. What is the owner expecting and what is the best version you can do of that? Probably, most of the time you can do a better version of it. The next step that Jim and I took was to try to be 180 degrees from what meets every single requirement they have but has none of the preconceived notions of the dumb solution. We gave the client three solutions like that. They had a great project manager that, in fact, was an architect. He is retired from the postal service now. He thought that approach was great, so he went ahead and he picked the 180-degree solution.

We saw the post office buildings as buildings that still had civic importance. People still perceived mail delivery as a public service, but they didn’t have the site and they didn’t have the scale that those buildings had in the past. You couldn’t express their publicness or their public ownership the same way. Every single building in this industrial park was made out of brick. We decided that we would take those bricks and turn them into something that was obviously civic, but not having anything to do with Greek architecture. People loved our building in a crazy sort of way. There were some other opportunities that usually don’t get written about. For example, we popped skylights all over it, which was new for them, so they could work in daylight. We were really interested in the idea of not turning on the lights and conserving energy. Jim was particularly interested in that. We were conscious that this had to be built by a contractor who usually builds postal service buildings. We were trying to not use any new materials, so it has this very sort of garden variety menu, but it was like a crazy building, visually. For us, it turned out to be a really good building because people liked the building. It was like, “This is a crazy building. It’s different in the industrial park.” We used red, white, and blue brick, but it’s still brick. It received a lot of attention. In fact, one of the funny things that happened is that we entered it into the AIA Honor Awards program, and Robert Venturi was the chairman of the jury that year. Needless to say, we won an honor award. The thing that is funny though is that I graduated from architecture in ’71, and Robert Venturi wasn’t being read in school then. I had never read his books or any of his writings at that point. We honestly never thought about it in the way that this project was later discussed. We didn’t do it as a symbolic building. We did it more as a billboard, but later people thought that this was a postmodern building. I never thought about it that way. To me, it was just putting together pieces to try to do an interesting design that was more notable or more appropriate. Appropriate might be a weird word for it. It was the first thing we had that was published at a national level. Deborah Dietsch, at the time editor of Architecture magazine, saw it and published it. She was the first editor who published our work.

Cesar Chavez Multicultural Academic Center
Chicago, Illinois
1988–1993

Client: Chicago Public Building Commission, Chicago Public Schools
Program: Kindergarten to 8th Grade, Public School
Size: 64,000 square feet
Cost: $5,600,000

After we built the Glendale Heights Post Office and it was published, things were much easier. It was really helpful. The Cesar Chavez Multicultural Academic Center and the Little Village Academy followed that project.

The Chicago Public Schools had been in terrible shape financially. The State of Illinois had created a build program for schools in Illinois in the ’70s, and they had given seven or eight schools to Chicago as part of the program. There was a matching contribution that the Board of Education had to make, and they went bankrupt at the end of the ‘70s-beginning of the ’80s, so they couldn’t make the matching contribution. The legislature pushed those projects forward every year, and eventually the Board of Education came out of bankruptcy, and they had enough money to build them. They did a search and Richard Norris was the Board of Education architect. Chicago CPS has almost always had a chief architect. They don’t have one now, but they often did. Dwight Perkins was the chief architect for a long time. Richard Norris decided this was his opportunity to get really famous, so he put out an RFQ that said you had to be a good designer and also had to have a minority requirement. This is the same thing that had happened earlier. I used my portfolio that included a lot of the work I did at Holabird & Root. Some of it was very good. I was one of the designers on the renovation of the Chicago Public Library into the Cultural Center, and it had been published a lot. People thought it was wonderful. I had done some municipal buildings at Holabird & Root that were very well received. I thought, “No problem. They should pick me.” Unfortunately, they didn’t. It’s going to sound like a broken record. I went to see the director of real estate [Vern Feiock] instead, and I said, “If you are going to give work to minorities, you should give work to women.” He laughed and he gave me a project. It’s interesting because I have a rejection and commissioning letter for the same project. They are a couple weeks apart. Selections these days are really formal; back then, they weren’t quite as formal. In fact, one of the things I learned at Holabird, is that a gentleman’s agreement was one of the best things you could have rather than marketing. When I was working for Holabird, they did not have a marketing department. There were no sales, so to speak; the partners just knew all these people. I knew Stanley Tigerman at that point, because everybody knew Stanley. I mean, if you didn’t know Stanley, you were nobody. He would tell you that too. And he told me, “Carol, if I ever find out you are marketing, I won’t speak to you anymore,” which is very Stanley-esque sounding.

Anyway, we got one of those jobs, and it was crazy because it was seven years later, and the budgets weren’t any bigger. The idea that you had to build a building for a seven-year-old budget is crazy. The sites were difficult because they were all infill schools. They were putting more schools in overcrowded districts. The ones that CPS built were almost all on the South and West Side, largely in Hispanic neighborhoods. They would be ports of entry, where 75 or 95% of the kids would be speaking English as a second language. We thought that was great. We liked the challenge of the budget, and we liked the challenge of the culture. Those two things could direct design.

The site we ended up with for the Cesar Chavez Multicultural Academic Center was 100 feet deep and 400 feet long. It was this really shit site and it backed up to a commercial district. It had an alley with dumpsters along one side, and on the other side, was the transition to the residential neighborhood. There were houses with front yards, typical Chicago. We decided that we didn’t want to put a building that looked into alleys and dumpsters, so we single loaded the school, which when we did it, it didn’t seem radical. But it was radical because it produced some cost challenges in a project that already had inadequate budget because we created more building skin when we single loaded it. But it worked really well for the site because it gave us a front lawn and it gave us an acceptable view from all the classrooms.

Then we had to figure out how to make it cheap enough to build it. Again, when I think back, we did some really big things. I’m sort of surprised they let us do them. The project is a bearing wall building. We analyzed the cost and found out that if we could leave the steel out, we could do a cheaper building wall. We forgot that it would take longer, but that is okay, because the contractors did too. The problem with doing a masonry bearing wall building is that they take forever to build. We didn’t have to do ceilings, and fireproofing, and all this other stuff. We did a precast concrete plank. Since our classrooms were 30 feet and our corridor was 10 feet, we found that the maximum span we could get in the standard plank was 40 feet, so we went wall to wall. That is how we made it cheap enough to build it. We used some of the things we learned at Glendale Heights. There is a large amount of glazed brick in it. Glazed brick on these early projects was a good material too, because it is relatively graffiti-proof. You could still buy spray paint in Chicago back then.

Some early schools, such as Anthony Overton Elementary School, had glazed bricks. That was a prototype that was built in all the CHA developments. That had a lot of glazed brick in it, but glazed brick is problematic in Chicago because of our freeze-thaw cycle. If it’s not detailed properly, and if the body of the brick gets wet, the ice crystals will pop the face off and it will fail. A lot of people said we couldn’t use glazed brick in Chicago. We worked with a masonry consultant, who helped us through a whole bunch of stuff. We found out that if we specified a brick that had a dense-enough clay body, it wouldn’t get wet. The other thing we found out is that we had to do a concave or flush mortar joint. We couldn’t do a struck joint, which was super-popular in Chicago because the Prairie School guys loved it. We couldn’t do that, because the water would sit on the top of the brick. You also had to do a bigger air space, and you couldn’t possibly let mortar fall in that cavity, or if it did, it wouldn’t redry. We used the flush joint, and that brick is still intact. Everything that they told us worked.

It’s a real simple building, it’s only three volumes. One is a gym, and it is higher. The reason that volume is different is because it has a different structural system. We used bar joists there, and we have a flat slab concrete with columns at the bottom. There is a cafeteria and a gym that are stacked up, and then this long, skinny building that is nothing but bearing wall and concrete plank. Then, we made what they called a multipurpose room, which is their version of an auditorium and a library. That is in a little volume that sits in the lawn. For that one, we did a fake pyramid and used the skylight.

Back in those days, CPS held only one engagement. They weren’t called “engagements;” they were called “community meetings.” In my meeting, there were representatives from the neighborhood group UNO [United Neighborhood Organization]. UNO brought along a translator. He was very stilted, and I had just gotten out of the Peace Corps at that point, so my Spanish was quite excellent. I’m listening to him translate my words, and I’m going, “He’s not telling them what I’m saying.” He wasn’t translating it. What I was saying was much more passionate than what he was telling them. Finally, I told him, “I’ll present in Spanish.” It got to be a much better conversation then.

Port of entry is always about not getting enough. “We are not getting enough books; we are not getting enough meals.” We also got into the idea of their culture. They inspired me to do something on the building that wasn’t trite, that you could say, “Oh, yes, that’s about our culture.” In the office, we went back and we started talking about what would be symbols of Mexican culture. It wasn’t meant to be literal. It was meant to be a thought that your culture, your heritage matters. It worked out really nicely. They were very happy. I mean, that is not enough for a neighborhood group, by a long shot. They still needed books, and lunches, and breakfasts, and bilingual education, and all that kind of stuff. At least, the architecture could play a role in part of it. That is why we did it.

It has been a super-popular school. I went to the dedication of the school. We have been in contact with the principal for all those years. That same principal was there for probably twenty years, Sandy Traback. We have gone through several principals now. Usually, when they do a new school, they take an assistant principal from a nearby school and transfer them. She knew the neighborhood, so for the opening ceremonies in the gym, she had two eighth graders give dedication speeches, one in Spanish and one in Polish. It was very Chicago.

We haven’t worked with them throughout the years if they needed to make any changes in the school. They have architects on retainer to do changes, but there haven’t been that many changes. I was just there fairly recently and it is pretty intact. They have done some updating, and of course, you always have to keep it clean, but it has weathered pretty well. The changes that they have made to it have been reasonable, and they have made it better. Things change. Technology changes. How the building is used changes, but it still feels pretty good inside.

Cesar Chavez Multicultural Academic Center spawned another school: Little Village Academy. CPS called us and said they really liked Chavez. They had another site that was the same size. They wanted us just to draw the plans for that site. They wanted to build another Chavez, which now I realize is what they have done all their history. If you look around the city, schools are prototypes. Almost every era has a prototype that is duplicated. But we thought that was an outrageously bad idea. We told them that we would really prefer to design another school, because this site was super different. It was on a commercial street, so the classrooms had to face a commercial street. Ironically, the residential street was off the alley. We said, “That doesn’t work on this site. It’s totally wrong. The concept is wrong.” They said, “Fine. You can do a different school, as long as you do it for the same fee.” We did a new one, and it’s good. The plan is different. It is single loaded, but in a different way, because we wanted to leave a big central block park, because this was on a busy street. We wrapped the classrooms around the gymnasium, so they are on the lot line. We did bearing wall construction again to save money. It turned out okay. We used the glazed brick again, because it was very popular. It did a lot of things that the board wanted to do, which is make the buildings graffiti-proof. Also, the district had moved away from doing operable windows, and we found that we could make a more efficient building in terms of the building code, by doing operable windows. All of those have operable windows, which later became their standard. It was a good idea. The pyramid was the entrance to Chavez. In this school we decided to do that again, but here we built the main stair into a big sundial. It has a skylight at the top, so the sun just feeds down. And it works; it is a real sundial. I have this feeling that there has to be a center space in most public buildings. However, so many people—owners and designers—don’t worry about that when they program buildings. You need that space. The orientation tells you where you are and who you are. You remember who you are when you are there. Little Village Academy has a lot of DNA from Chavez, but it is different.

Oklahoma City Federal Building
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
1997–2005

Client: General Services Administration
Program: Federal Office Building
Size: 185,000 square feet
Cost: $35,000,000

The next project that had a big effect on the studio was the Oklahoma City [Federal Building]. We started that project two years after the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Building in ’95. There are two things that really formed that building. One is the tragic event. There had never been an act of domestic terrorism at that scale in the United States. People thought about it a lot, like “Who is doing this?” It was a homegrown terrorist, not people coming from other countries. The Congress made a special appropriation for this building outside of GSA’s normal appropriation. They also stipulated that they were going to rebuild on the site. Right after the bombing, there were a lot of questions about whether they should rebuild. GSA wasn’t building any new general-purpose office buildings. They had turned that over to the private sector, to developers. The federal government was renting from property owners rather than building buildings. That was a bygone era. But the Congress decided they wanted to symbolically say they wouldn’t be chased away from the site, so they decided they would rebuild this office building. The implications that had on design were pretty intense. First of all, how do you do a building that is open and representative of open government, a democracy, but has to be bombproof? The flip side was, how do we make them safe? We have done a lot of work since then that has required security or defensive design. I think it is kind of pointless. If someone wants to destroy a building, they will do it. However, a lot of it is managing fear, finding out what is acceptable, and setting the acceptable level. A lot of the discussion while we were designing this building was determining what the acceptable level was. A lot of the things that you see in courthouses now about being resistant to a progressive collapse, for example, are directly related to the experience at Oklahoma City. The building wasn’t that old. And it was never a courthouse, by the way. It was always an office building. Timothy McVeigh, just got lucky. He filled a rental truck with basically fertilizer and fuel, he parked it in front of the building, and he blew it up. Most buildings would have survived that. But in this case, the building had an auditorium in that particular area. There was a transfer beam that went all the way across the building at that point. His bomb took out that column. If he had been one column to the east or west, the building would have been destroyed, but it wouldn’t have collapsed. It collapsed progressively because that whole transfer girder fell. The federal government decided that we needed to make a building where you could remove any one column from the façade, and the building wouldn’t collapse. Courthouses are still done this way. You do that by making the building more rigid. This was a new design criteria that I hadn’t thought about but we had all kinds of expert engineers researching it.

The people who died in the building died basically by the building falling on them. Most of the injuries, though, came from the glass that shattered and flew through the air. The glass went miles away. There was glass all over downtown Oklahoma City. The GSA was really interested in mitigating that. How could you make safe glass? Most people think that it is going to be bulletproof, but if you want bulletproof glass, it is another animal entirely. You are talking about glass that is literally inches thick. The whole idea is to keep it in the frame or keep it from flying around the building. Those are the two big security requirements for federal buildings through today, which is interesting. That was one side.

This is the other thing that was affecting the building. Right at that point, Ed Feiner, who had been chief architect for the Navy, had joined GSA as their chief architect. While he was at the Navy, he had started this Design Excellence program, where he had this theory that the federal government didn’t get better architecture by picking the architect who had the most experience. He wanted them to pick the architect who had the best experience. In a lot of ways, that was his life’s work. Even when he was working at Perkins&Will later in his career, that was still his thing. He put together a group of advisors, the GSA Design Excellence Peers, that still exist. They had Hugh Hardy and people like that who were really well-known at the time. He used their opinions to get his programs placed. His selections were based on how creative your work was. He always talked about introducing new designers to the federal market. He had done just a few projects at that point. They were all courthouses. This project, the Oklahoma City Federal Building, was in the Design Excellence program.

There was a national call. I can’t remember how many applications they received, but in the end, they shortlisted four teams. I believe it was Stanley [Tigerman] and Margaret [McCurry], Mehrdad Yazdani, Rand Elliott, and me. They picked us because in our portfolio we had shown our Chicago schools. We talked about the idea that these were in really tough neighborhoods. At that point, I think Little Village had the most drive-by shootings. We told them our design objective was to make beacons of safety in these neighborhoods. That is what we did do. The selection committee felt that that if you could do that in an inner-city neighborhood in Chicago, you had a chance at designing a building that was open, but safe in Oklahoma City. That is how we got the commission.

Jim and I had never done anything out of Illinois at that point. We barely had done anything out of Chicago. We thought we would just throw our hat in the ring so we could see if we could get out of Chicago. In fact, we took the trip to Oklahoma City to the pre-proposal just because I had never been there. I thought, “I’ll get one state down.” [Carol was ticking off states to visit] We really didn’t think that we would be considered.

Working outside the state had a huge impact in the office and forced us to change the way we operated. When we got the commission, it hit me really hard. I am a Chicagoan. I am a North Sider, but I still feel I know my city, its history, and its people. My grandparents were immigrants to the city. I thought I understood what was happening. Suddenly, I get to Oklahoma. I don’t know anything about this place. I don’t know anything, and it is scary, because I have always relied on this. This is my wellspring. I went down to Oklahoma and I spent about two weeks traveling around the state. I learned a lot. I saw a ton of Bruce Goff’s work. I saw a lot of Rand Elliott’s work. He is a very good architect. I went all the way over to Arkansas to see some Fay Jones’s work. Generally, I tried to figure out what we wanted to do. We also did a lot of research, starting out with history. At one point, I was so wonky, I knew more about Oklahoma than anybody on the planet. We replaced the knowledge that you have by inhabiting a place by knowledge that you could acquire. It was different. I still didn’t understand Oklahoma like a person who had lived there all their lives, but it was really useful. It really informed a lot of what we did later, and it also informed our design method. Every project that we do now starts with a really intense research period.

We worked with Benham Group, a local architect that we selected. We had to select them as part of the competition. They were very grounded in Oklahoma City. They were very good collaborators. That is the other thing, we had never worked with another architect. Now, that is all we do. I have had some really good and some really bad collaborations. But that is the other thing we had to do: learn how to work with other people. That doesn’t bother me. I’m tremendously insecure and I want everybody’s opinion out there, so at least I know what it is. I want to get the opinions out of the way first.

There was another thing that was really interesting at the GSA. Right after we got the commission, a series of federal agencies who were supposed to go back into the building, who were in the [Alfred P.] Murrah Federal Building when it was destroyed, revolted and said, “We are not going to move back into this building. We have bad memories.” The biggest one was HUD. They had the biggest loss of life. Besides that, they had moved out to strip shopping centers for two years at that point. It was much more convenient to drive your car to a strip shopping center and park right in front of your office than go to downtown Oklahoma City. Ed Feiner and his team decided that we needed to do a series of community meetings as part of our programming. They did this as additional services. They asked us to design open meetings so people could discuss this. And that was a super challenge. We did our first survey ever. We had never written one before. One question I remember distinctly is, “What is the most important thing about this design?” That is a poorly designed question, honestly. The first choice was that it couldn’t collapse. It had to be safe and secure, resistant to bombs. In fact, they got very specific and they said it was very important to them that no cars could park in front of the building because that was what caused the collapse. That was the number one thing that people wanted and that would make them feel comfortable. The second thing that they wanted was parking really close to the building. That was the essential problem to solve, and our stupidness exposed the problem. One of the services that we offer now, even when we don’t do the design work, is engagement. It is something that we have been developing for a long time. I think that we do it probably with more tools than anybody else right now. It is a wealth of information for a designer and it is a wealth of information for a community. But the most important thing, and this is particularly true in Oklahoma City, is when people have the chance to express their opinion. If you handle that right, if you keep the table open, you grow advocates, and no building becomes beloved or successful without advocates.

One of the things we did learn is that they had to be able to advocate about something they knew. I think a lot of designers ask them to advocate about building appearance or style. That doesn’t usually make any difference. We are now working on a project as part of the INVEST South/West initiative and it was a classic. The neighborhood organized against Maurice [Cox] and Lori [Lightfoot] and this project. They said, “We are not having this project.” Our developer won it, and it was at a total stalemate. Maurice decided to do an additional engagement, and it totally changed what it was going to be. The units stayed the same, so the city objective was met, but how we were going to accomplish it was totally different than what their original prospectus showed. This is in the Auburn Gresham neighborhood, and it turned out that their biggest fear was that when you have renters, they don’t buy into the neighborhood. They wanted homeowners. Overcoming that idea and making advocates out of the community took a whole summer of meetings during COVID and it was really hard. But you have to do that. You can’t try to change their minds or convince them. You have to make them advocates for common values and goals. Asking about the history of a place exposes a lot of prejudices. I’m using prejudice in the sense of preconceived notions.

Going back to the project in Oklahoma City and Ed Feiner, he was great at commissioning additional services, like studies for us to do. He was really interested in energy efficient mechanical systems. That building has under floor air distribution, and it was one of the first ones that the government ever built. They just retrofitted it with a complete solar array and did a whole bunch of other energy improvements. I talked to the administrator recently, and she said it was easy because of the way the building was designed and constructed. That was another one of Ed’s things. He also was huge on workplace improvement, so that was quite fascinating.

Chicago Riverwalk
Chicago, Illinois
2001–2016

Client: City of Chicago, Chicago Department of Transportation, Department of Facility and Fleet Management
Program: Linear park along the Main Branch of the Chicago River
Size: 1.25 miles
Cost: $120,000,000 (Phases 01–03)

When we started working for CPS and for the postal service, we realized that it would be really nice to have some work in our office all the time to pay the bills, and that a large portion of the work that our clients were doing, they were doing it with architects that were under contract. They have different names for them: general engineering contracts, indefinite quantity contracts… everybody calls them something different. But basically, you make an agreement with your client and then you get assignments. I think a lot of people don’t know that that is how architects get even huge projects, like the border station that we did up at Sault Ste. Marie in Michigan. That was in an indefinite quantity contract with GSA. All the projects that the US Department of State, Office for Overseas Building Operations, does are indefinite quantity contracts. They select the architect and then they make assignments to you later. We have one in the city of New York right now. It is almost like a bakery line. You get a number and you get the next project. That is how Steven Holl did that lovely library that people like in Brooklyn. We started to think, “We have to look for these contracts.” It is not just finding a great project and saying, “I want this one.” Between Holabird & Root and my own company, I worked briefly for Orput Associates, who did a lot of schools. Those were those contracts too. They would hire an architect and they would do all the work for the school district. It would be new schools, it would be life safety improvements, it would be everything. We were really tuned into that stuff. Jim and I made a conscious decision that we didn’t want to do our best friend’s porches and house additions. I don’t know if that was a good decision or not, but we decided not to do them.

We had a contract with the Chicago Department of Transportation (CDOT) doing just about anything they asked us. Actually, half the stations came out of CDOT. They are under contracts like that. They don’t select the designer by saying, “We are going to build this great station at this or that area.” They have existing contracts. We started looking at those very seriously. For CDOT, architects are usually not the prime. I think on the CDOT Chicago Riverwalk project, Collins Engineers was the prime, but when they need an architect, they talk to the architect team member under that prime contractor. Stan Kaderbek was the commissioner at that point and he was really interested in the riverwalk. The reason he was interested in the riverwalk was because CDOT had a big project that was not ours, which was the renovation of Wacker Drive, which was funded by a huge TIF. They had to renovate Wacker Drive because it had been in use for seventy-five years and never maintained. The concrete was in terrible condition. Part of that TIF had some leftover money, and Stan could spend that on the riverwalk.

The truth of the matter is Chicago architects and planners had been thinking about the riverwalk for literally a century at that point. Burnham wrote about it in his 1909 Plan. There is this really great drawing of a huge turning basin and a two-level walkway. I think it is obvious from the things Burnham wrote about that he thought the water would be important, mostly as a civic asset. It didn’t turn out that way because the river had been so polluted, but architects and planners kept on writing about it and talking about it. SOM did a plan. OWP/P did a plan. There are just tons of plans. Some of them pro bono, some of them commissioned by different city agencies. But the reason we got lucky is that Stan had this money left over from the TIF in his pocket when we were working with him. He had done a lot of little projects, for example the railings on the DuSable Bridge, the Michigan Avenue Bridge. Originally, they were riveted flat pieces of steel and the vibrations from cars going over it had shook all the rivets out, so they were falling apart. That is cast aluminum now. We did that, and this is all in that same contract. We did the stop for the Wendella Boats. We were doing all these little projects, and one of the projects that Stan wanted was a master plan for the riverwalk. There was a guy who had the idea that it should have a nautical theme. He wanted rope cap stands and all this sort of stuff. Stan and I spent a lot of time fighting about what it really should be. Then, Mayor [Richard M.] Daley decided he wanted to spend the money on the first phase of the riverwalk. It had already been drawn by Diane Legge and her partner Howard Decker. They had done this in the spirit of the original architecture, very modern classical design. Stan gave us that as a blueprint and also let us know there were still pieces of it to develop. We developed phase one of the riverwalk, and we kept the Decker and Kemp classical design at the very top. We made it progressively more contemporary as we got toward the river. The biggest problem to solve wasn’t the architecture. It was that there was no way to get past the bridge houses. You could only walk a block, then you had to go up, walk over the street, and go down again. It was a legislative problem because all the shoreline and the waterways in the United States are controlled by Congress under the authority of the Army Corps. If you want to change the shoreline, you need to change the legislation. It’s called the Rivers and Harbors Act that was originally introduced in 1899. To change it, we either had to do temporary construction, like a floating bridge underneath the bridges, which we looked at, or we had to go to Congress and ask them if we could change the shoreline of the river. Eventually CDOT decided that the latter option was what they were going to do. Our first task was to draw that. It was proposed that we could add twenty feet under the bridges and twenty feet between the bridges. That was a eureka moment and it was also why it took phase two so long. We did the first part of phase two, and then they came back and built the connections under the bridges. That was because the legislation wasn’t in place. It took over a year to get it in place.

When they rebuilt Wacker Drive, the city decided they wanted to make a park at river level. Wacker Drive was rebuilt to create the Vietnam Memorial, but that was a separate piece. We did that separately from the master plan. The master plan picked up from there. It was continuous in the sense that we were the architects for both and there was a continuity that way, but the assignments were not the same. There were some very radical solutions for the Vietnam Memorial. There were some more conservative ones too. The one built is the middle solution. Miguel d'Escoto was the commissioner at CDOT and he was not a risk-taker. They always wanted the fountain going down the wall the way it does now. There is the Vietnam Medal of Honor in the middle of it now. But what we did is we decided that we would make a US flag out of red, white, and blue, as well as brass, and we would cut channels from the wall all the way to the river. We liked the idea of people walking over the water feature. Basically, it would be a flag and the illusion would make it fall into the river. It came down the wall, went across the plaza, and we were going to put the names of the dead war heroes on the stripes that you would walk over. That is how you would recognize them instead of the little bridge with the events and then the backdrop. But it was understood as a weeping flag. I think it was much more immersive. I am not unhappy with what we did, but it was much more immersive. And I think it evoked the period more, honestly.

That first section was so popular that when Rahm [Emanuel] was elected as Mayor, he wanted to build the rest of it right away. He is really the reason it got done. Without Rahm, it would have never got done.

The plans go all the way from the Vietnam Plaza Memorial to the confluence of the North, South and Main branches of the Chicago River. The reason that that was the site is that is all City of Chicago property. Before 1926, when Wacker Drive was built, that was called Water Street, and those warehouses had docks on the river, and then they output into Water Street. The city acquired that for Wacker Drive, and so they own all that property. Between Wacker Drive and the river is owned by the city. In a way, it is interesting to see the future of the riverwalk now because it is going to be working on privately owned property. This is just about the only publicly owned property in the Loop. When you get out of the Loop, a lot of it is owned by the MWRD [Metropolitan Water Reclamation District], but in the Loop, it is owned by private people except for that piece that we worked on.

After we did the first phase, we had to compete for the second phase. Fortunately, they said we were good enough, I’m not sure how that happened. But right about then [2009], we had the great recession. The federal government had a lot of programs for shovel-ready projects. Rahm decided that his shovel-ready project was going to be the riverwalk. He commissioned us to do the design and the drawings for it. In the end, he was successful at getting money. Not a lot of people know this, but the riverwalk was paid for by a loan from the Department of Transportation and Ray LaHood, who was the secretary under President Barack Obama. He was a good advocate for the city. This loan program, which has a very low interest rate and that is why it is so attractive to cities, had always used for transportation innovation before. Rahm had to convince him that the riverwalk was transportation innovation. He actually got two projects, which we did the design for both of them. The other one was the new intermodal terminal at O'Hare, that was also a TIFIA [Transportation Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act] loan.

Rahm Emanuel borrowed about a little less than $200 million from the feds to do that, and it is being paid back by fees from the riverwalk. The city never used any taxes to pay for the construction after the TIF for phase one. The TIFIA loan was never city tax dollars. This is not about design, but how the public will to do projects like that is really an important discussion. If you look at New York, even the projects that are really great, like the High Line and Little Island, are all paid for by donors. People are not paying for this project. Is that a good thing or is it a bad thing? Is it a good thing to have rich guys gift you your public spaces? I am not sure it is.

The projects we have worked on in Chicago make the city unique. I mean, even if you go to San Francisco and look at the bus terminal there, which is really beautiful, that was built by a company for the city as a gift.

Other stuff that this TIFIA loan program would be used for is to build bridges and highways. One of the big things I do remember struggling with is that we had to prove that we could pay it back by fees. CDOT was really taxed. They don’t usually do that kind of stuff. It was hard for them to do that. And in the end, it’s politics too. You get the loan or you don't.

The riverwalk constantly surprises me. I loved the project from day one. I am a Chicagoan, so I know how polluted that river was and how despicable it was. It’s a leap to ever think that that would be a public park, that you could make it better, or that it would be wildly popular and everybody would be rushing down there. It was not a nice place. It had two or three really slow years and then it just took off like crazy. I wasn’t sure that it would ever be more than a nice park, and instead it has become the symbol of the city. I watch news reels about Chicago and see my work, it is incredible. I am not sure I thought that far forward, but we always knew that the changes that are happening now, the viability of businesses down there, would need some additional change. Even going forward, it will need additional change. We just wrote last year a white paper for the city that suggested that they take two lanes out of Wacker Drive, both lower and upper, and turn it into back of house at the river level and then turn it into another greenway at the upper level. It hasn’t got a huge traction yet, but if I keep on pushing it, maybe someone else will see it and do it. Active Trans is working with us on that. They were our sponsor.

I think it is inevitable that it will continue to change. Michelle Woods was the project manager at CDOT; she is the mother of that job. CDOT couldn’t get anybody to rent space in the first year. We got City Winery, but all the rest of the businesses were like, “We don’t really want to be down there.” One of the reasons is the city only offered one-season leases, so how is anybody going to improve a space for one season? The reason you are seeing all that back of house infrastructure being built out is that they now have long-term leases. I think they are seven years now. A lot of times architecture doesn’t change stuff. It’s administration and policy.

In a way, the riverwalk is more hospitable to people and in another way it is not. We always thought it was something you just flowed through. It was like a city street. But CDOT and the business owners now have decided that it is not. It is like Navy Pier. It is a zone. You can see that some of the access points that we planned, are now closed off so they can close it at night. Whenever those businesses close, the riverwalk is locked down. We never saw it that way. We always saw it as a right of way, a public way. They have done a nice job on the pieces they have closed, but I really wanted people to be able to just penetrate it much more. The changes are good because it has made it much more hospitable, much more popular. On the other hand, maybe this is an intermediate step.

When I did the riverwalk, we didn’t do the landscape architecture. We had Terry Ryan [of Jacobs/Ryan Associates] do most of the plants, and we also worked with Sasaki on phase two. They were very good, but it also inspired us to be able to offer integrated design services from our studio. That really changed how we thought about what we did and how we worked. Now, in almost all our projects, we are the landscape architects and often the planners. Our last project is Railyard Park in Rogers, Arkansas, and we are the landscape architects. That is a landscape architecture job. It has really changed our practice. I don’t think it has changed our focus; it has enlarged it. The values and the principles are still the same ones that interested us, but having a project that wasn’t strictly making buildings has let us think about the environment on a whole different scale. The other thing in the studio is that, so far, we have not made a landscape studio and an architecture studio. They are interchangeable. I do have a director of landscape architecture, very talented, but we have projects now that they are really crazy because they are barely architecture or landscape architecture. We are working for the Forestry Service at the USDA [United States Department of Agriculture]. They have seven nurseries across the country, and they are not producing enough seedlings because of all the forest fires we are having now and climate change. They hired us to analyze all their nurseries and make recommendations about how they can increase their output. These are fascinating projects. They are kind of architecture, they are kind of planning. They are problem solving. In the end, we may get beautiful architecture out of it. It is likely that we will build a whole new nursery in the Southwest because that is a region that is underserved right now. But the answer for us, is that the point of design is problem solving.

CTA Morgan Station and CTA Cermak-McCormick Place Station
Chicago, Illinois
2010–2012
2013–2015

Client: Chicago Department of Transportation, Chicago Transit Authority
Program: New elevated train station and station houses at grade
Size: Two 480 feet platforms, 12,500 square feet station houses
Cost: $35,000,000

Client: Chicago Department of Transportation, Chicago Transit Authority
Program: New elevated train station with at-grade facilities
Size: 480-foot platform, 12,000 sf station houses and covered walkways
Cost: $50,000,000

We have probably done thirty CTA stations altogether. They are parts of stations. Some of them are totally new stations like Morgan and Cermak-McCormick Place.

In the ’70s and ’80s, the planning department thought that mass transit was not the future and all their attention was really spent on interstate highways. I mean, there was that whole twenty years from the Eisenhower administration on. Roads are the thing. Whole sections of Chicago were dying and both the Department of Planning and CDOT were concerned about that. Architects were concerned about that. The biggest swaths of land, if you look at the city, were used for public housing. Look at River North and the Near North Side. When you went a little bit farther west, just west of the train stations, all that had been depopulated. It was Chicago Skid Row. There were a lot of single occupancy hotels, but really underutilized. Toward McCormick Place it was the same thing. Basically, buildings not used, residential gone. As that started to change and it was redeveloped, first on the North Side, but then moving around the whole city, CTA looked at those areas and they saw sites where they had demolished stations. They still owned the property, but they had demolished the stations. Both Morgan and Cermak had stations and they were both original stations to the private entrepreneurs that built what became the CTA. I think they were both built in early 1890s but they had both been demolished. Our projects were to do these infill stations and they were, more than anything, like the regrowth or the coming of age of the city. I think of US cities as being almost like teenagers. They are not very old, but they have seen a lot of change, and they are just now mature.

We didn't work on the two stations simultaneously: Morgan was first and Cermak-McCormick Place followed. Again, these are projects that we are not the prime consultant for. We are working for big, big, big engineering architecture firms. But at this point, since we have done so many stations for the city, we have very good relationships with both CDOT and CTA. That helps when you are looking to make solutions that are better suited for a particular site and more integrated into the city. For both of those, we went through a lot of design studies. They were both complicated by the fact that you had to selectively decide what part of the existing infrastructure you were going to use. For example, on Morgan, all the elevated structure is existing. We didn’t change any of the columns or the beams or anything else. They do carry the new station. The new station platforms are built on that. You would think that you would be able to put stations and a platform on there because there used to be one. But the truth of the matter is that structural codes have changed so much that usually you can’t do that. They are more stringent now. We usually have to figure out where we are going to put a station like that. For Morgan, we decided we could put it on the existing structure, but the existing foundations were inadequate. All along the whole extent of that station, and they are 200-foot-long platforms, 20-car platforms, we underpinned every single one of those foundations. Then we built on top of it. That affects how that station looks and works. The other complication at Morgan is that we didn’t have a place for fare control. We could have built it over one of the streets, either north or south. CDOT was not willing to do that. We looked for a different solution. The city bought back some parking spaces from the terrible parking deal by the City of Chicago and we have fare controllers in parking spaces that the city purchased on either side of the street. One of the design complications was that you had to design a whole station in a parking space. We made that into an opportunity. We simply extruded that footprint up and it became its identity. This is the landmark. One of the things we have thought about a lot is that the CTA needs to be a brand. If you are searching for a station in the city, you have to recognize that it is a CTA station. I object strongly to where they make them all look like the neighborhood or something like that. They actually have less to do with the neighborhood than they do to the system. However, if you are riding the system, it is important that each one be distinct because when you are riding the system, you have to recognize that you arrive at a neighborhood. It’s this inside out relationship. The Morgan stop does that particularly well. It uses the palette of CTA, but it has this very industrial feel to it too. You know where you are. You know you are in River West and Fulton Market, but you also recognize that this is CTA infrastructure at the street level as you walk or drive by it. The stations that we do really try hard to do that.

Cermak-McCormick Place is the same. There, we decided that we couldn’t support the station on the existing bents. If you go there, there is a whole set of new concrete bents that are carrying the station, so they are integrated into the original steel structure. I think it is so interesting because you see the 1895 structure, which is all riveted, small steel parts, and then you see these modern concrete bents carrying the station.

You also have the perforated metal that we have been working on for CTA for years. Originally, they asked us to come up with a design that was graffiti proof. The problem was that we always built windbreaks out of glass for CTA. When we started this work, we had already the stations at Belmont and Fullerton. Originally, we were going to put in glass windbreaks because that was such a durable material. It is really easy to take graffiti off glass. This was in the [Richard M.] Daley administration, when the city outlawed spray paint. Graffiti artists started to buy diamond dust or they would buy those little engravers and engrave, or they would scratch the glass. CTA had a whole different problem now, so they asked us to think about new ways to make it graffiti proof. We covered the glass with perforated metal so you can still see through it, and it feels very open. But it was really done as a practical move. John Fried in my office is particularly responsible for it. CTA has adopted it as a standard through the system. It is really interesting because it just gets more sophisticated the longer they use it.

At Cermak, there is no glass. What we did is we researched surface tension. We looked at how big we could make the hole before rain would come through it. That screen has perforations only big enough to still keep the rain out. There are wind breaks and rain breaks without glass. It has been a continuous evolution and it is pretty interesting.