Blog

By Ellen Shubart, Class of 2006

Two years ago, Mary Jo Hoag and I designed a one-time bus tour to showcase women in Chicago’s architectural history. With our audience, we viewed buildings designed by women architects, ranging from pioneering Natalie de Blois’ work at Michigan Avenue’s Equitable Building to Carol Ross Barney’s designs for the Riverwalk (2016-18) and the Morgan Street CTA station (2012). We investigated buildings designed by Jeanne Gang by walking around Aqua and as well as viewing the rapidly rising Vista. And we showed off some other designs perhaps not quite as famous, like McDonald’s Millennium Park Bicycle Commuter Station (Cindy Muller, design partner, Muller and Muller LTD, 2004). Our last stop was a B&B in the West Loop; Publishing House, a gut-rehab and redo of a former publishing firm, was re-purposed as an 11-room bed and breakfast. It was designed by two women from the firm Nushu, a word that references a language that Chinese women spoke to one another in private.

This tour was an eye opener for our 50 tour takers. Their comments acknowledged that most had not heard of many of the women behind these iconic and interesting buildings. Some were surprised by the number of designers, others by the buildings’ designs, and most everyone by the fact that these downtown and near-West Side structures were designed by women. Mission accomplished! We succeeded in teaching about the role of women in architecture, a role that is increasing as the years pass.

Last spring, I used this same material for a similar tour for girls enrolled in CAF’s Girls Build! This program is designed to interest young women in careers in architecture, engineering, planning, interior design, and related fields. The sessions met on four Saturdays, and the girls worked with CAF staffer Angela Esposito. The girls were tweens and teens of junior high and high school age. They were finishing up their “course work’, and the tour was one of the culminating activities. This time the tour was conducted on a trolley with a full load of 25!

Interestingly, these young tour takers didn’t consider women architects to be unusual or unique. They had already learned about Jeanne Gang and others in their Girls Build! classes, and they knew women drew the plans for some of the best skyscrapers in the city. They had not, however, heard the stories about the discrimination in the field. They were not aware of Natalie de Blois, about how integral her designs were for the Equitable Building or that she never was made a partner at Skidmore Owings and Merrill. At that time, SOM’s partners were all men.

The girls appreciated the bicycle storage and rental shop in Millennium Park, pleased it was designed by a woman. And they felt much the same about Carol Ross Barney and her contributions. They found the Riverwalk more impressive than the Morgan Street CTA station, but I suspect Carol Ross Barney thinks that, too. Mostly from the south and west sides of the city, the girls loved walking over the bridge on Clark Street to see both sides of the Riverwalk, appreciating its appeal. Below them, on a chilly but lovely spring day, they were attracted not only by the design of the walk, but also to the dogs, the walkers, the ease of following a jogger from one side of the bridge to other – just the quality needed to talk about that unique aspect of the Riverwalk.

What intrigued them the most, though, was none of these buildings, but rather for these girls it was the GEMS World Academy School, designed by Lynn Sorkin, project manager at bKL Architecture. Sorkin, a mother with three kids, has been at bKL for about five years and specializes in the educational sector. She has done some design work for the Chicago Public School in addition to GEMS. The existing GEMS ultimately will become the lower school of a two-school campus; the new high school, located to the north along Wacker Drive, will be completed in two to three years.

Mary Jo and I interviewed Sorkin to write the tour manual. She said the GEMS building was designed to be “something playful”, a multiple-colored building set against the green of the park. The building’s silver façade is striped with primary colors – blue, red, yellow. Using the information from the client, which has schools in the GEMS system around the world, this Academy’s roof has an open-air garden. A single corridor along the south wall allows children to use it both as a transportation route from room to room and also as an indoor play-area; staff can use the area for small meetings. The corridor allows an “openness” and “airiness” in the school. Entrances and access to buses or cars is on the lower level of Wacker Drive, away from the park setting that it faces on the south.

Even without going inside, the girls reacted to the look and feel of the buildings. “I’d love to go to school there,” many of them said. Instinctively, the architecture touched a nerve, and most of them talked about their own Chicago Public schools, most of which are older and far less open than what they saw at GEMS.

Sorkin wasn’t there to take the accolades, but perhaps if we take next year’s group of Girls Build! program to see the second school, now rising along the Riverwalk, she can join us.

On the way back to CAF, Esposito asked the girls what they had learned from the tour and what they might want to do in the future. Many talked about going into planning to do projects like the Riverwalk or the park while others mentioned doing something like making schools more attractive. One or two might become architects.

We’ll see what happens. But it’s nice to know that architecture is something they all felt close to, that they learned it is one of many fields women can aspire to, and that they favored the building that was closest to their everyday experience – a school, for kids like them.