Blog

By Ed McDevitt, Class of 2010

After months of work on the Aon Building’s south plaza, the dedication of the plaza took place on September 23, 2021. Matt Amato, General Manager of the property for Jones Lang LaSalle, cut the ribbon, officially opening the plaza to the public.

In a most important gesture to the history of the building, three of the remaining six segments of Harry Bertoia’s Sound Sculpture have been returned to the lower plaza, where they and eight other segments first resided in 1974. They have been restored and placed in a prominent location near the center of the plaza. The three segments had been on the upper east plaza at the southeast corner of the building. The other three remaining segments are still on the southwest corner of the upper plaza, where they have been for decades.

The three Bertoia segments are placed in an open box configuration, with LED spotlighting in the stone on their long sides. The original placement of the eleven segments had them in a reflecting pool. The new placement has their bases planted directly on the plaza.

The eleven original segments of what was known as the “Standard Oil Commission” (the Edward Durell Stone building was originally known as the Standard Oil Building) stood in a reflecting pool in the center of the south plaza. Standard Oil was renamed Amoco in 1985. The Bertoia sculpture segments and all outdoor art works around the building were removed prior to the 1990-1992 recladding of the building. All segments were stored off-site at Amoco facilities in Lisle and Naperville.

At the time of the recladding, the south plaza was totally redesigned and did not include the Bertoia Sound Sculpture. When the building and plaza work was completed in 1992, only six of the eleven Bertoia segments returned, to be placed on the two south corners of the upper plaza. The other five remained in storage. Amoco was acquired by BP in 1998. Prior to the acquisition, Amoco sold the building to the Blackstone Group, but the sale did not include the Bertoia segments still in Lisle. They were, in fact, totally forgotten by the Amoco attorneys working on the building sale. The Lisle properties, part of Amoco Chemical, became BP properties. Those five Sound Sculpture segments ultimately became BP property and remained forgotten for years. Three of them surfaced again in 2013 at Wright Auctions in Chicago, and two of them were sold. The largest of the original segments was later sold privately. The remaining two were sold later at auction as well.

The new configuration of the Aon south plaza is elegantly designed, with grassy slopes adorned tastefully with floral plantings up on the south area where the tiered fountain was before. The total landscape design is the work of Brit Erenler, Senior Associate Landscape Architect at architecture and engineering firm HGA. She is based at HGA in Minneapolis.

According to BEAR Construction, the demolition of the existing plaza required the removal of 1500 tons of material. A significant problem with the removal was how to accomplish it without clogging upper Randolph with a steady stream of dump trucks. The solution was unique: BEAR dug a “hole” down to Lower Randolph at the southeast corner of the existing plaza and dumped all of the debris to trucks below.

Multiple benches are placed around the plaza, particularly near the Bertoia sculpture segments. The sculpture is intended to ring with the sound of the rods as they are swayed by the wind. The benches invite sitting and listening to the sound of the wind’s work, which would greatly have pleased Harry Bertoia.