SPECIAL REPORT: CHICAGO'S SOLDIER OF MISFORTUNE RENOVATED STADIUM STANDS AS EXAMPLE FOR L.A. TO AVOID.

Byline: Billy Witz Staff Writer

CHICAGO - There's an old saying in this town: Ask a taxi driver about architecture and you don't get an answer, you get a tour.

The birthplace of modern urban architecture has begat dozens of world- renowned buildings such as the Hancock Building and the Sears Tower, along with scores of influential architects like Louis Sullivan, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright.

It's a history of which the man on the street, as well as the one in the glass tower, is well versed.

Every bridge, every park, every building seems to have a tale to tell - sometimes even if it hasn't been built yet. A 90-story condo project by Donald Trump, to be built on the site of the Sun-Times offices along the Chicago River, warranted a half-page photo on the tabloid's cover this week.

``There's a kind of lively conversation about projects in Chicago,'' said Howard Decker, the curator of the National Building Museum in Washington D.C. and an architect for 30 years in Chicago. ``As in any city, not every building that's built meets everyone's criteria for excellence - but in Chicago they talk about it.''

The talk lately, which has turned into a tempest even by Windy City standards, has focused on Soldier Field, the centerpiece of a 20-month, $606 million renovation - the most ambitious, costly and contentious stadium project in NFL history.

It has turned an iconic but antiquated stadium into one where there truly isn't a bad (or cheap) seat in the house. But it's the outside that has the neighbors up in arms.

The modern glass and steel structure, which sits inside the old bowl on the shores of Lake Michigan, has been widely panned as looking like a spaceship that crashed atop the Doric columns of the old stadium.

``The exterior is a big-time poke in the eye,'' Chicago Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin wrote. ``Especially the bulbous west grandstand that weighs down brutally on Soldier Field's once-proud columns as if William `Refrigerator' Perry had plunked his ample haunches atop a picket fence.''

L.A. story

Locals got their first interior view at an open house Saturday, two days before the nation gets its first look at the new Soldier Field, when the Bears christen it against rival Green Bay on Monday Night Football.

Yet, those involved in the stadium renovation proposals in Los Angeles - the Coliseum and the Rose Bowl - have had an eye trained here for some time.

Coliseum general manager Pat Lynch has visited three times, meeting with Bears and city officials as well as preservationists who went to court in vain to stop the project. He's been accompanied by Assemblyman Mark Ridley-Thomas and Coliseum Commissioner Zev Yaroslavsky, among others.

For the Coliseum, the parallels with Soldier Field are obvious: each is managed by a public agency, surrounded by museums, is designated a national landmark and located on the edge of downtown.

``The only thing we don't have is a lake,'' Lynch said.

Those involved with the Rose Bowl have watched from a distance, but their viewpoint is no different: This blueprint doesn't work. They want a stadium that blends in with the Arroyo Seco without overwhelming it.

``Our approach was to use the idea of preservation as the important part of the Rose Bowl,'' said Dennis Wellner, who heads all NFL projects for HOK Sport + Venue + Event, the Kansas City, Mo.-based firm that designed the Rose Bowl plans. ``The bowl shape is very pure and elegant and let's work with it. We used Soldier Field as an example of making sure we don't want to do that.''

ALthough the Coliseum's tiered design - developed before Soldier Field's was unveiled in 2000 - strays from the bowl shape, its officials also have courted preservationists and altered their plans in recent months, scaling down the size of the fabric awnings that would hang from each side of the stadium.

The Rose Bowl and Coliseum hope to avoid the court fights Soldier Field has endured and what many believe is a fait accompli: that despite an intense lobbying effort, Soldier Field will be stripped of its status as a National Historic Landmark. The only other stadiums that have been awarded that distinction are the football stadiums at Harvard and Yale.

If Soldier Field's design has had an influence, so too has the project's process.

Los Angeles has long been criticized for its political leaders failing to step up in luring an NFL team or in preventing the Rams and Raiders from leaving. What's happened in Chicago is the other side of that coin.

Mayor Richard M. Daley, with an assist from former Illinois Gov. George Ryan, shepherded the proposal through the legislative process with scant scrutiny. Word of the $400 million bond sale - the financial lynch pin of the deal - didn't get out until five days before it came before the state legislature for a vote.

``The process was so tightly controlled, nobody had any idea how hard-wired this thing was,'' said David Bahlman, president of the Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois, which unsuccessfully went to court to stop the project.

``The problem is that (any) public project of this scale should benefit from all those experts in the areas that have become issues - architecture, financing, a lakefront protection plan. If it's a public building and public land, it should be reviewed by the public.''

For the people

The Bears, who moved into Soldier Field only in 1971 (they previously played at Wrigley Field), have been searching for a new stadium for decades. In recent years, they considered moving to Gary, Ind., or to the suburbs.

Yet, if there is one thing most everyone agrees on it's that the Bears, with a blue-collar ethos exemplified by their heroes - Ditka, Luckman, Butkus, Halas, Singletary and Payton - belong downtown.

``When the cards began to fall in line, with the NFL money (in the form of a $150 million loan), there were a lot of things to make this the moment - it was either going to happen or it wasn't,'' said Lee Bey, the mayor's deputy chief of staff of planning and design. ``This wasn't something that was hatched in the old Chicago backroom.''

To understand the importance of the lakefront to Chicagoans, it's what the beach is to Angelenos - if there were also museums, parks, festivals, golf courses along the sand and an absence of any beach-front property.

It's a place that is open to everyone - be it yachtsmen or fishermen.

``The lakefront here is sacred turf,'' said Kamin, the architecture critic. ``It's public land that stands in contrast to the tumult of the commercial city. It's a place where civic values are supposed to trump commercial ones.''

Soldier Field, located just south of downtown, had fit that bill nicely as one of the lakefront's cornerstones. It was built in 1924 to honor the nation's World War I soldiers and the colonnades that rose atop the sides were designed to complement the Greek facade of the nearby Field Museum of Natural History.

It also was built for the people - for track and field, stock car races, rodeos, presidential speeches, concerts, boxing and even football, though mostly college or high school.

It's egalitarian roots notwithstanding, Soldier Field always has been a lousy place to watch football. The low-slung bowl left most fans far from the field - even by bowl standards. Once the weather turned in the fall, the stadium was dank and the bathrooms in recent years have been as odious as the Bears.

The new Soldier Field has changed that - but, like all new stadiums these days, at a price.

Tickets range from $45 for a corner grandstand seat to a $300,000 annual fee for a luxury suite. Forty-five percent of seats come with a personal seat license fee that ranges from $765 to $10,000.

If the character of Soldier Field has been overhauled, so, too, has the content.

``Soldier Field used to be the last bastion of mullets and zubaz pants,'' said Brad Sherman, 46, in a thick Chicago accent straight out of Da Bears skit from Saturday Night Live. ``All the regular Joes are out now. They want to chase those guys out and get the North Shore landowners in.''

His advertising colleague, Don Avila, noting the Bears abysmal play the past two seasons, said: ``I'd rather they put the money into the team instead of the stadium.''

A modern era

Bears president Mike McCaskey began discussing stadium plans several years ago with Ben Wood, a Boston architect whom he had met at Martha's Vineyard.

Wood and his partner, Carlos Zapata - who never had designed a stadium before - came up with an asymmetrical design, in which all the club seats and suites are located on the east side, with the towering grandstand to the west.

It is considered innovative by football stadium design standards, which unlike baseball - with its varied field dimensions - often finds itself boxed in.

``There's a rather significant challenge here when you take a building that was built in 1924 and use an architectural vocabulary that dates back 2000 years,'' McCaskey said. ``What do you do to bring that into a modern stadium? Do you retain the same vocabulary? Do you go dramatically different? The architects' recommendation was to go dramatically different.''

Also involved in the project has been Dirk Lohan, an accomplished Chicago architect and the grandson of the influential Mies van der Rohe. Lohan was brought in to design the infrastructure around the new stadium and to put a local face on it.

The infrastructure, which accounts for nearly $200 million (a third of the project's cost), includes an underground parking lot, a memorial water wall, a doughboy statue and a sledding hill - the latter inspiring jokes about the Bears' running game.

The design also has left the colonnades open to the public.

``We wanted to highlight and inflame the richly articulated stone of the colonnades,'' Lohan said. ``It seems to me, when you think of any old buildings - older churches, for example - they are being dominated by the new. It's very common that life goes on. I'm not sure that I understand that visual domination is a bad thing.''

In due time

But Lohan finds himself in the minority when it comes to the notion Soldier Field is aesthetically pleasing. In a Sun-Times poll this year, Soldier Field was voted the ugliest building in the city. A survey of 10 people downtown Wednesday didn't find one who liked it.

And because Soldier Field's most prominent feature - the 15-story grandstand - is flush against Lake Shore Drive, the city's main thoroughfare, it is hard to hide. Kamin, using state transportation figures, concluded that more people will drive by Soldier Field in four days than will walk through it all season.

``Every month in the last 15 months, the public has realized what an aesthetic disaster it is,'' said Bahlman, the preservationist.

McCaskey acknowledges the criticism, but believes over time the new stadium will win over Chicagoans. He compares it to the Louvre in Paris, where a glass pyramid entrance, designed in the '80s by I.M. Pei, overcame early condemnation to win admirers.

Lohan, likewise, is hopeful. He urges those in Los Angeles to look forward and not back.

``What I would say to L.A. is don't fear the new,'' Lohan said. ``I think the debate is good. The problem is it's not nice to be criticized. What sustains me is that over time people will come to appreciate it and it will become an appreciated building.''

And that again, it is the football team on the shores of Lake Michigan rather than its home that will be known as the Monster of the Midway.

Billy Witz, [phone]

bill.witz(at)dailynews.com

CAPTION(S):

2 photos, chart

Photo:

(1 -- color) The new edifice of the rebuilt Soldier Field dwarfs the historic west colonnades, which defined the National Historic Landmark.

M. Spencer Green/Associated Press

(2) Chicagoans have lamented the renovation of Soldier Field, which now stands in front of the city's skyline.

Brian Kersey/Associated Press

Chart:

Taxpayer's bills for NFL stadiums

Source: Teams and government authorities

Graphic: Chicago Tribune

(Copyright) 2002 KRT