Emerald of the Loop

As the weather warms, it's a lot easier to love Chicago. So I thought I'd devote this entry to something in the city that is, to me, absolutely perfect: an art deco masterpiece known as the Carbon and Carbide Building.

You might know it as the home of the Hard Rock Hotel, or the green building (as in the color, not the building technique) but if you've walked the stretch of Michigan Avenue just south of the river you've probably noticed it.

A bold, streamlined emerald of art deco excellence, it's smaller than many of the boxy glass behemoths that surround it, but it's far from diminutive. Its neighbors up the road include some of the most beautiful buildings in the city--the Wrigley building, the Tribune Tower, the Crain Communications building--but its striking green and gold exterior never fails to draw the eye.

Built in 1929, it's a perfect example of what deco does best--transmits beauty in an efficient, understated way. Somehow both lavish and restrained, its imposing form was rendered in forest green terra cotta and polished black granite, while its abundant details were painstakingly coated with 24 karat gold. The building reaches the pinnacle of its height and its beauty in an elaborate, gilded tower.

As the story goes, the Carbon and Carbide was made to resemble a champagne bottle, with the tower representing the gold foil over the cork. I usually don't put much stock in these types of stories, since buildings never look anything like the objects they're supposed to represent (really, it's modeled after a Peruvian hairless dog riding in an over-sized purse?) but in this case, the resemblance is fairly obvious. And how fitting that this audacious creation of the Roaring Twenties should call to mind the ultimate symbol of decadence.

No less fitting to the spirit of the building is the Hard Rock Hotel, which fills the space with that perfect mix of self-destruction and playboy swagger that only rock and roll can these days. Though the Hard Rock enterprise did not exist when Hubert and Daniel Burnham, Jr., sons of legendary Chicago architect Daniel Burnham, designed the building, they must have had some sense of prescience regarding its future inhabitants, because the design they drew up was far too sexy for a chemical company.

Yet it's the Union Carbide and Carbon Corporation (UCC) whose name is carved above the bronze grillwork over the entrances on both Michigan and South Water streets, and it's the UCC who commissioned the building and set up shop there initially. And even though the company no longer exists as such, the name "Carbon and Carbide" is intrinsically linked to the building in the same way a song title which has nothing to do with the lyrics still forms the mental shell of that song as no other words could.

Maybe it's because I'm a language lover, but that name, for me, has a poetry deserving of the building's beauty--the way the syllables feel in the mouth, the rolling alliteration and toothy, Germanic consonants--it doesn't even matter to me that, for awhile, I had no idea what carbide was, or that when I finally looked it up, the answer was pretty boring ("a binary compound of carbon with a more electropositive element" according to Webster). In fact, I think the mystery was part of the charm; it made the building seem more old-fashioned since no one I know ever talks about carbide.

But the company behind the name had a dark history. As you might have guessed, they dealt in carbon, and carbide, both used for making various old-fashioned lamps and furnaces, and later made certain gases and metal alloys. They had some notable successes, including inventing the dry-cell battery and originating the Eveready brand name, but they also played a big roll in developing the atomic bomb.

Decades later, in 1984, a poisonous gas leak at a site co-owned by the UCC and the Indian government killed 2,800 people in the Indian city of Bhopal, seriously harming thousands more. The famous tragedy has been called the worst industrial accident in history, and the company never rebounded from it, eventually being bought out by Dow Chemical.

It's unfortunate that such a dark shadow now stands over the building and its former inhabitants, especially since those who envisioned it seemed to do so with the brightest of hopes. In a lovely example of the power great architecture once held for people, a UCC promotional pamphlet describing the building noted that "the effect of such beauty in a building upon the morale of the people employed in it is unquestionably beneficial and inspiring; and to clients, business associates, and visitors, it is a constant assurance that the organization they are dealing with are [sic] of the highest calibre."

Certainly this sentiment is still felt by some today, but one would be hard-pressed to find such an eloquent testament to beauty in most media, let alone a chemical company brochure. Such writing rustles my nostalgia for an era when buildings were art pieces, the aesthetics of a workplace were seen as vital to employee output, and even chemical companies held beauty in high esteem.

Some helpful resources:

http://www.architechgallery.com/arch_info/bodies_of_work/carbide_carbon.html

http://www.chicagoarchitecture.info/Building/1015/Carbide_and_Carbon_Building.php http://www.plastiquarian.com/ucc.htm http://achicagosojourn.blogspot.com/2009/01/carbide-and-carbon-building.html