The Battle of "Starship Chicago"

By Richard Lacayo.

No wonder residents call it Starship Chicago, when they are not calling it ruder names. It seems not so much to have risen in the Loop as to have landed there. The outside of the futuristic new State of Illinois Center has three tiers of curving glass setbacks fanning out in a vertically striped polygon. A canopy of pink and white glass panels dresses the base; a sliced-cylinder skylight emerges at the top. Inside, in a light-filled atrium, salmon pink terraces climb for 17 stories around a circular plaza. Glass elevators rise and fall along the outside of two towers. As little Dorothy once said, "Toto, I have a feeling we're not in Kansas any more."

Exactly, says the architect, Helmut Jahn: "Technically, spatially, functionally and symbolically, this is something new." That was what Illinois Governor James R. Thompson wanted when he ordered the building in 1979 as a workplace for some 3,000 state employees. Thompson, who chose the design from three offered by Jahn, has already moved his Chicago office there, although the $172 million structure does not officially open until May. "It was a lot of money and a radical design," says Thompson. "But I felt that sometimes only government can afford to take the chance to do something really different."

In Chicago, where the skyscraper was born and raised, they try to greet new buildings with an open mind, if not always with open arms. But confronted with a civic structure that looks a bit like a celestial sports arena, Chicagoans have vacated the middle ground and formed vehemently opposing camps. John Zukowsky, curator of architecture at the Art Institute of Chicago, thinks "it has the potential to be the next 'image' of Chicago." Heaven forbid, says Architect Harry Weese. "Tinselly and decadent," he growls. "The building will be an oddity, like the Brown Derby restaurant in Hollywood." People are choosing up sides that way all over town--at parties, in editorial columns and on the plaza outside, where the curious come to praise Jahn or to bury him.

For all its novelty, the Illinois Center is not new in all respects. It draws on ideas that have had currency among architects for more than a decade: the adventurous geometry of "late modernists" such as I.M. Pei and Edward Larrabee Barnes; the office atrium pioneered by Kevin Roche; the glass- , enclosed elevators popularized by John Portman's Hyatt hotel designs; and the spirited use of color epitomized by the Miami firm Arquitectonica. The German-born Jahn, 45, an architect celebrated--some would say notorious--for his arch flourishes with high-tech elements, had applied some of the same ideas in his own earlier work, notably his 1982 First Source Center atrium in South Bend, Ind. Moreover, in such designs as his witty 1982 addition to the Chicago Board of Trade and his romantic Southwest Center, soon to rise in Houston, he has moved toward an ever more fanciful treatment of modernist themes.

What is new here is the brashness with which Jahn has combined these elements and his audacity in applying them to a government building. He makes a daring and largely successful attempt to draw stark materials into a tumultuous play of form and light. The skeins of trusswork, the rippling stairways and the wafflepatterned underside of the terraces combine in an optical tangle compounded by a riot of reflecting surfaces. Without resorting to molded ornament, the atrium reaches toward a rococo extravagance. Says Jahn: "Elements that break the norm --romance, fantasy, surprise--are what put architecture beyond engineering."

His critics fault the building for its failure to blend with its neighbors, especially the colonnaded City/County Building, built in 1911, and the Richard J. Daley Center, a Miesian steel high-rise completed in 1965. They also charge that it is too frivolous for a government office. Although its inverted-bowl silhouette evokes the traditional rotunda, Jahn has transcended the two styles that dress most government structures: neoclassicism, with its air of judicious civic doings, and modernism, with its sober grids that speak of rectitude and rationality.

The results are mixed. Jahn's freewheeling sense of fun threatens to trivialize the earnest symbol of open government that he sees embodied in the luminous atrium, with its office tiers open to view. The free-flowing work space is rarely impeded by walls or doors; at one time, he even had hoped to leave visible the machinery of the escalators. Jahn also sees a democratic statement in his plaza and concourse, where a theater, shops and restaurants will bring rental income to the state while ensuring that this is a government office center that goes on living after 5 p.m. "The building ends up as a modern-day crystal palace," says Jahn. "But at the same time it is a people place."

Even some who admire Jahn's use of form wince at the materials, like the strips of aluminum and the tacky-looking colored panels, "popular" elements that confound his gestures toward the ideal. Jahn protests descriptions like "cheap" and "glitzy." "The materials look unusual, but they are not cheap," he says. "This is the type of building that takes time to digest and to understand." Indeed, the architect feels confident that he has designed a landmark. "Just wait 20 years," he grins. "Someone will try to replace the blue panels, and it won't be allowed."

With reporting by Christopher Ogden/Chicago