Archimago: Soldier Field: Fusing the Past and the Present

The Chicago Loop is a fascinating architectural artifact. It’s unlike the central business district of any other city in the world. Paris’ business district, La Défense, is a collection of skyscrapers on the city’s periphery that’s totally set apart from the mid 20^th century buildings that comprise the city center. Places like Dubai jumped straight from living in small villages to dwelling within what are now the tallest office buildings and residencies in the world. But not Chicago. Chicago is where the skyscraper was born and the loop was its nursery.

One can trace the evolution of the skyscraper, and of the scale of most modern urban architecture, in the Loop. We usually don’t realize that Chicago in the late 19^th century, like most other industrializing cities, rarely had buildings greater than four or five stories. Due to the introduction of steel frame construction, the need for large office spaces, and the spread of the elevator, buildings got bigger throughout the 20^th century. Much bigger. Figures 1 through 4, taken from a photo of Michigan Avenue, demonstrate the massive difference in urban architectural scale that was created in the space of less than 100 years. A small figure on the right gives some human scale to the buildings.

Orders of Scale: Michigan Avenue

So what does any of this have to do with Soldier Field? Much like the Loop itself, the stadium has one foot in the past and one in the present. Originally built in the 1920s then rebuilt in 2003, Solider Field uniquely posses the architectural scale of both the early 20^th century and the early 21^st century. Its massive Greco-Roman colonnade was probably one of the grandest structures in early Chicago, but those columns are insignificant compared to the scale of the new sleek glass-and-steel structure occupying the stadium’s center. Its old, empty concrete bleachers look helplessly upon the exterior of the new stadium.

On one level, it’s as if a giant hand scooped out the old stadium and built a new one in the resulting pit. The new stadium presents some energetic sculptural forms independent of the vestiges of the old stadium around it. However, on another level I think the styles and scales of the old and new are put in an interesting dialogue. Whether you like its appearance or not, there’s no doubt that it’s hard to find a better exemplar of the past meeting the present and future within a single space.