Inland Steel Curtained Wall

google streetview image of the steel and glass lobby of chicago's inland steel building with two white curtains hanging inside, between the two revolving doors. circa 2022 — Inland Steel Building, 1958, Chicago, as documented in Aug 2022 by Google Streetview

While looking at Skidmore Owings & Merrill’s Inland Steel Building in Chicago, I was surprised to find curtains had been hung in its iconically transparent lobby.

google streetview image of the lobby of the inland steel building in chicago with full unobstructed glass panels between steel mullions, richard lippold's eight pointed star shaped sculpture radiant 1 against the black background of the lobby wall, and frank gehry's cast glass blobs assembled into a security desk against the glass, between the two revolving doors. a bright red pedestal with perhaps a model of the building itself is against the left glass wall. circa 2017 — Inland Steel Building, Lippold, and Gehry, as documented in Sept 2017 by Google Streetview

Installed between the 2017 and 2018 Streetview updates, the curtains entirely block the view of Radiant I, Richard Lippold’s perfect lobby art, a sculpture of webbed wire, steel, gold and copper, hovering above a reflecting pool. But I suspect that is just collateral visual damage, and they were really installed to block the view of the massive cast glass jumble of Frank Gehry’s security desk. Or perhaps they’re really just to give the security guards a bit of privacy in which to check their websites, and blocking the view of Gehry’s desk is just a bonus.

google streetview of chicago's inland steel building modernist steel and glass lobby, with richard lippold's eight pointed star sculpture dramatically lit from a suspended ceiling structure above it, and frank gehry's cast glass security desk sort of lost in the unlit middleground between the revolving doors. circa 2016 — Inland Steel Building, Lippold, and Gehry, with Lippold’s lighting concept ascendant, as documented in Aug 2016 by Google Streetview

I thought the 2017 Streetview just happened to have better lighting for the Gehry, but looks like the suspended ceiling over the Lippold was removed sometime after August 2016. That panel, whose dimensions mirrored the reflecting pool, also contained Lippold-optimized spotlights. [n.b.: proactive degradation of its presentation does not bode well for a Lippold sculpture; just ask the one they ripped out of Lincoln Center.]

Office lobby sculpture. — No one realized it at the time, but Brian Kay’s 28 Sept 2017 photo on flickr of the Gehry Icehenge desk documented the end of the pre-curtain era.

The Gehry desk came to the building in the summer of 2013, and was considered to be provocative enough to warrant a review of its own by the Chicago Tribune’s legendary architecture critic Blair Kamin. Kamin did not take credit for the desk’s nickname, Icehenge, which Lynne Becker’s extended, well-illustrated blog post about the desk attributes to a Facebook commenter.

2011 google streetview image of the lobby of chicago's steel and glass modernist icon, the inland steel building, which is a glass terrarium on three sides, traced with steel mullions, a richard lippold gold and steel star-shaped sculpture glowing against a black background in what folks in the 1950s really thought of as the future, but which now seems really specific to its historical moment. — Inland Steel Building, Lippold, and no Gehry, as documented in June 2011 by Google Streetview

Gehry, it turns out, was part of an ownership group that bought the Inland Steel Building in 2005. The desk, parts of which look like cleaved, fractured shards, is all cast glass, made by the John Lewis Glass Studio [now Christison Lewis, after a retirement/mgr handoff]. Kamin uses terms like “careless” and “clutter” to describe the desk, which, given the intense production process, is literally impossible. More apt is the way Gehry’s explicitly non-linear forms clash with the SOM grid. The lobby and the Lippold are both elegantly defined voids, while the Gehry, in ostensibly the same material, is all chaotic solids. It’s all industrial luxe. And tbqh, the lobby without the Gehry now looks kind of boring.