The Invisible Superblock

Sarah Whiting

Had Skidmore Owings and Merrill's widely published initial scheme for the Lake Meadows housing development on Chicago's Near South Side been built, even Ludwig Hilberseimer, author of those haunting, post-humanist visions of the 1920s, would have been more than a tad nervous.(1) As Ambrose Richardson, SOM's chief of design in Chicago at the time, reminisced, "[lt] was a very controversial design. I remember showing it to Hilberseimer, the great urban planner cohort of Mies. He made some comment about it being too big."(2) Too big for Hilberseimer? What can that possibly mean? How big is "too big" in Chicago, the city of "big shoulders" and "no little plans"? A description accompanying the project at a 1950 Museum of Modern Art exhibition of SOM's work offers some clues:

This spectacular architectural concept will do much to change the face of the city. To realize the daring arrangement and overwhelming scale of the Skyscrapers, try to imagine a single building rising 23 stories straight above a typical New York City street from Fifth to Sixth Avenues. The Chicago Skyscraper is almost 200 feet longer than the distance of this city street.(3)

More than a third again the length of a typical New York City block, the project's twenty-three-story building stretched 832 feet long, but was a mere forty feet deep. This slender, extra-long bar was twinned by a second identical bar separated from it by about 1200 feet. Extraordinarily elegant, but somehow unsettling: "too big." This initial superblock scheme, which also included eleven two-story garden apartment bars, a shopping center, a school, church, recreation center, and park, was ultimately replaced by a more conventional proposal built by SOM between 1950 and 1960: ten double loaded corridor slabs of typical dimensions in a reconfigured superblock plan containing those same community amenities.

(1) I would like to thank Nicholas Adams for his generous help with my research on Lake Meadows. I would additionally like to thank Karen Widi and Philip Enquist of SOM Chicago for their assistance, and Scott Duncan of SOM New York for inviting me to write this piece and then for his patience long after doing so. This research forms part of my forthcoming book Superblockisms, which examines the history and execution of the Near South Side plan in the 1940s and 50s in Chicago.

(2) Oral History of Ambrose M. Richardson, interviewed by Betty J. Blum (Chicago, 1990), p. 168.

(3) Exhibition of Recent Buildings by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, MoMA September 26-November 5,1950, p. 14.

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Sarah Whiting is an Assistant Professor at Princeton's School of Architecture. She was previously Associate Professor of Architecture at Harvard Graduate School of Design, and she has also taught at the Illinois Institute of Technology, the University of Kentucky, and the University of Florida. Her work focuses on the intersection between space, form, and the subject in the context of 20th-century modernism. Whiting is also a design principal in the architectural firm WW. She was the editor of Ignasi de Sola-Morales' book, Differences: Topographies of Contemporary Architecture; co-editor of Fetish; and the Reviews Editor of Assemblage. Her own writing includes articles in: Eleven Authors in Search of a Building: The Aronoff Center for Design and Art (1996); An Architecture for All Senses: The Work of Eileen Gray (1996); Between War and Peace: Society, Culture and Architecture after World War II (1997); and Mies in America (2001).


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