Hats off to Marine Terminal building for its rooftop addition

By WHITNEY GOULD

Little dumpy sheds. Ungainly rooftop perches. Clumsy add-on boxes that obscure the once-elegant facades of Queen Anne houses. Wannabes that try to duplicate the originals but cheap out on materials and design. Flashy eye poppers that distance themselves rudely from what came before.

Those are some of the unhappier ways that additions to older buildings express themselves. Brace yourself: As the downtown revival charges ahead, more add-ons are likely, many of them skyward.

For a textbook case of how to do it right, check out Hammel, Green and Abrahamson's reinvention of the Marine Terminal building for the Mandel Group, at 301 E. Erie St. in the Historic Third Ward.

Both firms now have their offices in the building, which was designed by Chicago architect Albert Hecht and built in 1918 as the terminal for the Chicago, Racine and Milwaukee Line, a fleet of freight and passenger steamers that linked the three communities by water.

It was never a fancy address. But with its broad horizontals, multi-paned industrial-sash windows, brick portals and a gentle angle to the southern facade that hugs a bend in the river, the three-story building was a skillful piece of utilitarian architecture, befitting the gritty roots of the ward.

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In adapting the building for condos and offices, HGA architect Jim Shields took cues from the original without imitating it. By setting a two-story rooftop addition back slightly from the old Erie St. façade, and topping it with a cantilevered roof, Shields lets you know this is a contemporary presence. And where the old building is stolid and earthbound, the addition is so buoyant and transparent that it appears to float.

Still, it respects the rhythms and proportions of the original. Both have the same 18-foot bays with three-part divisions, although the newcomer uses wider expanses of glass instead of the old timer's now-restored industrial grid, and slender steel columns instead of the parent's heavy concrete piers. Both have operable windows.

When I asked him how he arrived at this comfortable equilibrium, Shields noted that many architects veer between two extremes in doing additions. One approach is to try matching the original down to the last detail, which can be prohibitively expensive; the other is to ignore the older building entirely, which can result in some strange disconnections.

Here and in other expansions he has designed (the new section of the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist, with its open courtyard, for example), Shields embraces what he describes as "a middle ground, picking up clues from the existing building, yet setting the new addition apart from it."

It's a course that I wish more architects would follow. When it's done well, it creates graceful transition between old and new, allowing us to experience the passage of time without denaturing history.

Continuum Architects + Planners' design for The Social, a stylish eatery at 170 S. lst St., is another success story. The former Kramer International foundry, a plain, Cream City brick box, now has a seamed-metal addition with a playful, uptilted roof, big windows and signage incorporated into its structural I-beams. On a tight budget, design architect Dan Beyer deftly honored the simplicity and scale of the original, as well as the industrial nature of this former factory zone.

A more historicist approach can occasionally work, but only when architects have the skill and the budget to bring it off. With a meticulous matching of materials, proportion and details, Uihlein Wilson Architects' additions to the Basilica of St. Josaphat, 2333 S. 6th St., and the Charles Allis Art Museum, 1801 N. Prospect Ave., show how it can be done.

But more often than not, such efforts falter, leaving us with clumsy imitations of the original. Take a look at that goofy rooftop addition to a bar and office building at 1247 N. Water St., at the intersection with McKinley Ave. Years ago this handsome Romanesque Revival building from 1890 was expanded upward with a shapeless "hat" of tan stucco and fake arches.

The addition is one of the crudest I've seen, disfiguring the Cream City brick parent. It's the sort of mismarriage that a landmark designation might have prevented.

Ditto, Bacchus restaurant's new conservatory attached to the Cudahy Tower, that creamy terra-cotta and glazed-brick jewel at 925 E. Wells St. Made in Canada and erected on site, the painted-aluminum and glass addition doubtless creates a pleasant outdoorsy setting for diners. But as with the Cudahy's earlier metal-and-glass penthouse addition, the cheap-looking materials don't do justice to this lakefront icon.

If we are going to head off more misfires, architects will need to take the design version of the Hippocratic Oath: First, do no harm.