A Lesson on How To Do Urban Renewal The Right Way

docomomo-us.org/news/hyde_park_a_b_urban_renewal-project

Map of Hyde park
Chicago, Illinois
hydepark.org

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Today's article is about an urban renewal project in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago, Illinois.  Lisa Napoles recently wrote a fascinating article for the DoCoMoMo-U.S. newsletter about efforts to redevelop Hyde Park A and B by I.M. Pei and Harry Weese and Associates.  While some urban renewal projects by mid-century architects failed in their mission, the redevelopment of Hyde Park A and B was one of the successes.  Ms. Napoles writes that the main reason why it was a success because it was able to integrate itself into the neighborhood by responding to the surrounding historic context.  The lesson being, context is a key element in design.

Harry Weese (1915-1998)
52week.rickyberkey.org

Before launching into an interesting discussion of the urban renewal project of Hyde Park A and B, Lisa Napoles provides a brief biographical outline of Harry Weese.  Harry Mohr Weese was born in 1915 in Evanston, Illinois.  He attended the local public schools and was exposed to a great deal of art and music by his parents.  The late Mr. Weese demonstrated an early talent for drawing, earning a Boy Scout merit badge for architecture. He went on to study the subject at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  At MIT, he was inspired by Le Corbusier's applications of modernist principles to architecture, urban planning, and industrial design; as well as the work of Finnish architect Alva Aalto and George Fred Keck the designers of "The House of Tomorrow" at the 1933 Century of Progress Exposition.  Following graduation in 1938, he won a a year-long fellowship to the Cranbrook Academy where he studied with sculptor Henry Bertola, ceramicist Maija Grotell, sharing a drafting table with Ralph Rapson.  During the war, the late Mr. Weese served as naval engineer. Upon discharge, following the war, he returned to Chicago to work for Skidmore, Owings and Merrill before starting his own practice Harry Weese and Associates.  Outside the Midwest, the late Mr. Weese is best-known for designing the Washington D.C. Metro, which opened in 1976.  He retired in 1992 and passed away in 1998.

University of Chicago
Hyde Park, Chicago, Illinois
chicago.about.com

Lisa Napoles then goes on to give us a bit of a lengthy history of the Hyde Park neighborhood.  Hyde Park began its life as a railroad suburb of Chicago.  After annexation by the city in 1893, the neighborhood attracted some of the city's wealthiest residents before settling into middle-class stability.  The establishment of the University of Chicago, in 1891, profoundly affected Hyde Park and played a key role in its redevelopment in the fifties.  Beginning in the forties, poverty, overcrowding, deterioration that began in the South Side of Chicago, made its way to the neighborhood.  Hyde Park responded by forming the South East Chicago Commission. (Bruegmann and Skolnik, 2010)

The University of Chicago officially joined SECC though donations made to support operating expenses and the appointment of faculty to an advisory committee, in order to combat the creeping blight. (Architectural Record, Nov. 1960)  In 1953, SECC began a study to document the deteriorating sections of the neighborhood and create a proposal for redevelopment.  Harry Weese was hired as a consulting engineer and architect.  Through careful analysis, the late Mr. Weese mapped out the boundary surrounding the most severely dilapidated properties that could be classified as "blighted" under the Federal Housing Acts of 1948, 1949, and 1954, thus qualify for federal assistance.  (Bruegmann and Skolnik, 2010)

Based on this study, the SECC produced a report in 1954, "South East Chicago Renewal Project No.1."  This report differed from other urban renewal proposals because, whereas others promoted a tabla rasa approach, the SECC report proposed redevelopment via selective demolition, rehabilitation of distressed properties, and the retention of valuable buildings.  By excluding the most deteriorated properties and the viable buildings, Harry Weese created two irregular shaped zones: Hyde Par A, located at East 55th Street and Lake Park Avenue, and Hyde Park B, located along East 54th Street. ((Bruegmann and Skolnik, 2010)  The project received Federal funding in 1956 and demolition began.  Developers were invited to submit proposals that followed the SECC report.  The New York-based firm of Web and Knapp was chosen as the project developer and the plan was drawn up by their chief architect I.M. Pei with one significant change, the creation of an island in the middle of 55th Street for the placement of two ten-story apartments.  Both architects collaborated throughout the duration of the project.  The project documents attribute the ten-story University Apartments to I.M. Pei as well as the two-story units adjacent to the north of 55th Street.  Harry Weese is credited with the first of the two-story townhouses in Hyde Park B, the courtyard townhouse complex in Hyde Park A, and the shopping center.  Both Harry Weese and I.M. Pei designed the three-story townhouses.

House in Hyde Park
Chicago, Illinois
findingdulcinea.com

The development of the Hyde Park A and B Renewal Project uses features common to similar projects that tried to stem suburban flight by creating an environment for residents through: lower density, greater light and space, private parking, convenient shopping and an overall sense of safety.  Harry Weese drew on English Georgian architecture, as a point of inspiration, for his townhouses as his residential type for its economy of space with occupant's privacy.  In another acknowledgement of English design, both architects incorporated a shared courtyard, whenever possible.

The first completed residences were a row of fifteen townhouses designed by the late Mr. Weese on East 54th Street in Hyde Park B.  The designs featured an open floor plan on the first level, a modern kitchen, two-, three-, and four-bedrooms on the second floor.  Thirty-four townhouses using three different floor plans were completed in August 1962 in Hyde Park A between South Blackstone and Dorchester Avenues and East 54th Place and Rochdale Place.  Each unit has a small front and back garden and the rows of townhouses form square around a central courtyard.  The jointly designed two- and three-story townhouses were built in Hyde Park A with two two-story plans and two three-story plans.  Having never designed townhouses before the Hyde Park redevelopment, I.M. Pei incorporated variations of the Weese-designed townhouse design in subsequent urban renewal projects in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Jackson Tower
Hyde Park, Chicago, Illinois
chicagoarchitecture.info

All the townhouses were built with buff-colored brick, limestone trim, and iron balconies.  Each row of townhouses is a single design type, identical in composition.  The overall effect is an ensemble of buildings that present a refined, cohesive Modernist design, built with contextual Midwestern materials. In the apartment towers, I.M. Pei's office developed a load-bering concrete exterior wall system that creates a sculptural effect when magnified by the proportions of the towers.  The Weese-designed shopping center featured a free-stranding thin-shell concrete arcade roof and central courtyard with fountains and benches for residents to spend time with other.

While mid-century residential architecture is often connected with suburban developments that were expressions of post-war optimism, urban renewal, by contrast, was associated with race and class displacement and the wholesale demolition of historic resources.  As one of the first federally funded urban renewal projects, as well as Chicago's first neighborhood redevelopments, Hyde Park A and B drew national and global critique.  In her seminal book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs stated, "The plan designates and removes these large chunks of blight and replaces with chunks of...Garden City designed, as usual to minimize use of the street." (Jacobs, 1992)  James Marston Fitch commented, "The row hoses at Hyde Park are organized into patterns as formal as eighteenth century..." (Fitch, 1983)  Not everyone was critical of the Hyde Park A and B redevelopment.  Architectural historian Carl Condit called it, "the largest, most thoroughly organized, and most effectively controlled at the local level among similar projects in the United States." (Condit, 1974).

In his landmark book Defensible Space, Oscar Newman described the project,

The [townhouse] units are disposed on their site in a manner similar to the patterns of an older neighboring single-family residence development.  They have been provided with a formal entry area, immediately off the sidewalk, defined by low walls, a paved wall, a set of stairs which leads a half-flight up to the ground-floor level.  These devices serve to designate very clearly the ten feet in the...the dwelling, and to put this area under the zone of influence of its occupants.  Activities on the street are easily monitored from the dwelling unites and from passing vehicles. (Newman, 1973)

Hyde Park
Chicago, Illinois
destinations360.com

Lisa Napoles sums up the article in the following manner: Hyde Park A and B retains excellent physical integrity because of its simplicity of design and continuous economic stability of the buildings, and the maintenance of their overall character at the time of construction.  The plan remains totally intact with no original buildings having been demolished.  However, the Hyde Park Shopping Center underwent extensive exterior alterations in the nineties, rendering it completely unrecognizable.  In planning Hyde Park A and B, Harry Weese tried to integrate the redevelopment into the historic neighborhood.  He accomplished this task via a combined strategy of selective demolition, rehabilitation of distressed buildings, and retention of still useable structures.  In doing so, Hyde Park A and B minimized the loss of its historic fabric and the displacement of residents, a common feature in mid-century urban renewal projects.  It stands in stark contrast with other Chicago-area redevelopments such as Lake Meadows and Prairie Shores, which drew residents into anonymous high-rises set apart from the street by vast lawns.  Hyde Park also stands apart from Sandberg Village and Dearborn Park, which lacks Hyde Park's refined Modernist aesthetic and hides behind brick wall, confirming the worst fears of the period.

Harry Weese's use of brick, limestone, and iron in the two- and three-story homes reflect the building typologies of the community.  This contextualist strategy-Modernist in theory-was central to the late Mr. Weese's design philosophy, which put him at odds with supporters of the [Ludwig Mies Van de Rohe] Miesian approach:

Escapists would have look at architecture as an isolated work cropped from contrast.  Their individual set-pieces are...but when raised to full scale not the stuff from which permanent environment is made. (Weese, 1979)

Hyde Park A and B is the exception among the urban renewal projects because of its pioneering revival of the townhouse, targeted demolition in blighted areas, integration into the historic fabric of the community, and fostering a sense of community without isolating the residents.

Urban life must be maintained, improved, and made attractive again.  But this cannot happen if each generation knocks everything downs and starts over.  Nor can we run away from one mess to create another in a synthetic new town.  We can build the metropolitan area only by...into a large, idealized concept the efforts of many-all devoted to preserving, reworking, renewing, and adding for each generation the...can offer a living continuity on the chosen ground.  This requires a philosophy, a plan, a discipline.  (Weese, 1958)

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