In a small conference room on the 34th floor of the old Prudential Building on East Randolph, four architects huddle around a table strewn with drawings, sketches, and photographs. Before them is their firm’s evolving plan for a 22-story office building to be constructed in Santiago, Chile. In four weeks Loebl Schlossman & Hackl’s design will be presented to the client, along with four competing proposals.
Senior partner David Marks asks if the base of the crown atop the building–a huge decorative wedge the architects refer to as an “inverted potato chip”–might hold some of the air-conditioning equipment.
Loebl Schlossman & Hackl is one of the five largest architecture firms in Chicago, with some 110 architects and interior designers on staff. It’s also one of the city’s oldest firms, having been founded in 1925. Yet Loebl Schlossman & Hackl has maintained a low profile for most of its existence. It can hardly compete for name recognition with firms like Skidmore Owings & Merrill, Perkins & Will, Harry Weese Associates, or Murphy Jahn. Even within the profession it’s not well-known. When I asked one architect about the company, he said, “Well, they’re big and quite old, but I really can’t tell you more than that.”
The Santiago building gradually taking form on the meeting-room table is an innovative, almost radical design–an oddly contoured structure with a variety of interlocking shapes and an airfoil at the pinnacle. Though the design is a departure from the firm’s previous work, the time-honored allegiance to collegial decision making remains intact.
So what makes Hackl run? The answer, it seems, is partly in the demands of today’s profession; architects who aren’t flexible will perish. But it’s also something personal with Hackl. He’s responsible for carrying on the legacy of an old firm that he feels has never gotten the recognition it deserves. Loebl Schlossman & Hackl has had a tremendous influence on the changing face of Michigan Avenue. Take a walk north from downtown. The boxy 37-year-old Prudential Building on Randolph, once the tallest structure in Chicago, is now dwarfed by its 64-story streamlined sister, Two Prudential Plaza. The 1992 structure and the plaza between the two are products of Loebl Schlossman & Hackl. Just off Michigan at Huron is 633 Saint Clair Place, a glass-encased, 28-story office building with towers atop its four corners; it was completed in 1990 by Loebl Schlossman & Hackl. The 40-story City Place stands on the corner of Huron and Michigan, a mixed-use tower featuring retail shops, business offices, and the Omni Hotel; it’s another Loebl Schlossman & Hackl creation, opened in 1990. Up the street at Pearson is the firm’s Water Tower Place, the economic anchor of Michigan Avenue. Erected in 1975, Water Tower Place was the original vertical mall. It signaled the transformation of the retail strip and has since spawned a host of less successful imitations. No two of these buildings are alike in architectural style.
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“They’ve always tended to have a collaborative spirit on the staff,” says architect Jim Nagle, president of Nagle Hartray & Associates. “Very professional, very supportive of one another, but not showy.”
