DePaul's proposed new arena, next to McCormick Place...
http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/breaking/chi-depaul-arena-promo-20130920,0,7309101.story
It appears DePaul students will now have a hill to sled on in the winter months.
Provided they can afford the $15 cab fare to get there.
Two articles from Chicago Tribune
The expected winner of a design contest for a controversial DePaul University basketball arena next to McCormick Place is a low-to-the-ground, glass-sheathed hall with an undulating roof sliced with skylights. The airy design aims to dispel neighborhood fears that a concrete hulk was in the offing.
A nine-person advisory board, assisted by three design experts, on Monday will recommend the concept by Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects to the board of the Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority, the state-city agency that owns McCormick Place and is pursuing the $173 million project in a joint venture with DePaul.
"The concern of the community was a black-box arena," said Jon Clay, the authority's director of design and construction. "We've really got a well-lit, glass, jewel box of a building."
The arena, also expected to host concerts, graduations and assemblies for conventions, will front on Cermak Road to give easy access to fans who choose to walk from a CTA Green Line station expected to open a couple of blocks to the west in late 2014, two years ahead of the planned arena opening. From Cermak, pedestrians will get a view of the sunken arena floor and the scoreboard.
Many back-house functions, from locker rooms to media facilities, also will be below-ground, leaving the ground-floor perimeter open for special events, restaurants, coffeehouses and gift shops. A bridge would connect the arena, with its 22 skyboxes, to the McCormick Place convention center.
New Haven, Conn.-based Pelli Clarke Pelli, whose Petronas Towers in Malaysia were once the world's tallest buildings, has a track record with DePaul, having designed its new theater school.
Jim Reilly, chief executive of the authority known as McPier, said Pelli's previous connection to DePaul was not a factor in the selection of the firm from among six finalists.
"It's an elegant design that is respectful of the neighborhood," he said. The cantilevered entry and flowing rooftop design will be visible from reception areas in the McCormick Place West building.
Along with the renovation of Navy Pier, which will begin this fall, the 10,000-seat arena is part of Mayor Rahm Emanuel's strategy, announced in early 2012, to boost tourism. City officials want to build the arena by late 2016 as the centerpiece of a planned McCormick Place entertainment district envisioned as having two additional hotels, restaurants and bars. Officials say the arena will help retain and attract more convention business, helping Chicago compete with cities such as Las Vegas and Orlando, Fla.
Neighbors in the Prairie Avenue historic district have expressed concern that an arena would be a poor fit for their residential neighborhood, saying it would cause traffic jams and game-day rowdiness.
Ald. Pat Dowell, whose 3rd Ward includes McCormick Place, said she pulled together a committee of neighbors and elected officials from the area that reviewed the six proposals and aired concerns with McPier officials during a two-hour meeting this summer.
She said that the selected design appears to be respectful of the adjacent community but that she is not ready to sign off on it.
"We still need to look at the nuts and bolts," she said. "It needs to increase vitality at the ground level, be pedestrian-friendly and have no hard edges."
She expects that the community advisory group will meet again with McPier officials to offer thoughts on the winning design. As well, a public presentation will be made before final City Council decisions related to the project, said Tom Alexander, a spokesman for the mayor's office.
Critics have questioned whether there is a need for an arena north of the convention center, on the block bounded by Cermak Road, Prairie Avenue, Indiana Avenue, and 21st Street.
Ald. Bob Fioretti, 2nd, who represented the convention center area before wards were redrawn last year, has questioned the use of public funds for a venue that would get only limited use. McPier and DePaul each will provide $70 million toward the construction, and the city is expected to provide about $33 million in special taxing district funds for land acquisition.
A study commissioned by McPier estimates the arena will host 58 events in its first year, many of them DePaul men's basketball games, concerts and graduations. Only four conventions or religious gatherings are expected to use it.
Reilly said if the center brings in five new trade shows, that could add about $300 million to the local economy. There is increasing demand among trade shows and conventions for spaces, he said.
Another issue is whether DePaul will draw enough to help enliven the area, particularly since the arena could be a 30- to 40-minute "L" ride from the university's Lincoln Park campus.
A study by consulting firm HVS found that DePaul men's basketball, on average, will draw 9,500 fans per game. This may be a stretch. DePaul said ticket sales averaged 7,939 per game last season. But some tickets go unused. Rosemont's Allstate Arena, the team's current home, reported that attendance averaged 2,900 during the past three seasons.
Jean Lenti Ponsetto, director of DePaul athletics, anticipates several factors will lead to better attendance: a reconfigured Big East conference with more Midwestern teams, more television coverage, easier public transit access for students and a more accessible location for alumni.
The arena would share the block with a 500-room privately developed hotel, which the Pelli plan envisions along Prairie Avenue. McPier still needs to acquire three more parcels on the block, and it has filed eminent domain lawsuits to gain two of those.
A 1,200-room Marriott Marquis hotel owned by McPier is planned for the southwest corner of Cermak and Indiana. The city of Chicago is trying to acquire that land, but the proceedings have spurred a lawsuit by the property's owner.
Five other architects — including three from Chicago — competed for the project.
The Chicagoans were John Ronan Architects, designers of the Poetry Foundation headquarters here; Krueck + Sexton Architects, which designed the gemlike Spertus Institute on South Michigan Avenue; and Ross Barney Architects, whose credits include the CTA's Morgan Street Station.
The outsiders were London-based Grimshaw Architects, designers of the Waterloo international terminal in its home city; and Rotterdam, Netherlands-based OMA/AMO Architecture, which recently won the job to design the Miami Beach Convention Center.
For months now, the proposed DePaul University basketball arena at McCormick Place has seemed as dubious as the notion that the Cubs might rally to win the pennant. After all, DePaul no longer draws the big crowds it did in the glory days of Ray Meyer, and the arena would be an inconvenient "L" trip away from the school's Lincoln Park campus.
If they build it, will anybody come?
Taking note of Chicago's rash of public school closings, critics also have questioned the wisdom of spending about $33 million in city funds on an arena whose beneficiaries will include a private university. Neighbors worry that the arena would inundate them with traffic and drunken fans. Their questions were: Should they build it? And, if so, where?
Sometimes, a design can be seductive enough to quell such debate. But the release of the expected winning design for the $173 million arena is unlikely to do so.
The plan, by the well-regarded New Haven, Conn., firm of Pelli Clarke Pelli, has several good strokes, including a transparent public face and a striking, skylight-pierced humpback roof that will shelter a could-be-fabulous interior. Yet it isn't strong enough to forestall the debate swirling around the arena, as leaders of the Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority, the city-state agency known as McPier that runs the convention center, undoubtedly had hoped.
The authority's board is all but certain Monday to approve a recommendation that it accept the plan, which emerged from a field of six finalists.
For an architecture buff, it's impossible to consider the winner without thinking of the "Yale Whale," a 1958 Eero Saarinen hockey rink in New Haven with an even more spectacular humpback roof. Cesar Pelli, a Saarinen protege and Pelli Clarke Pelli's founder, is intimately familiar with the "Yale Whale," whose official name is the Ingalls Rink.
The rink's great strength is that it is a total package of modern Expressionism. Its swooping, cable-supported roof, suspended from a reinforced concrete arch, evokes the motion of the skaters inside. Its oval floor plan has the practical advantage of putting everybody close to the action and enhancing the building's sculptural presence. If the rink has a fault, it's that it's more sculpture than architecture, ignoring the neighborhood around it.
The DePaul arena design goes too far in the other direction: It is better at embracing its environs than speaking in a coherent, compelling voice.
Planned for the northeast corner of Cermak Road and Indiana Avenue, the arena would rise just north of the sprawling convention center, an architecturally solid, if rather sterile, complex of buildings that has always seemed an island unto itself.
To its credit, McPier is trying to stitch the convention center into a vibrant entertainment zone that would be woven into the Motor Row historic district to the west. It also wants to use the arena, which it calls an "event center," for high school basketball tournaments, concerts, boxing matches, rodeos, meetings and speeches that won't fit into the convention center's 4,250-seat Arie Crown Theater. Two new hotels also are planned, including a projected 500-room facility on the same block as the arena. Because that building will serve as a vertical marker that calls attention to the arena on the skyline, it is essential that great care be given to its design.
There are a lot of parts here, and the fundamental challenge for the architects was putting them in the right place. At that, they've done well.
By shifting the planned hotel to the block's northeast corner, they prevented a high-rise canyon along Cermak. And by placing the arena's seating bowl more than 20 feet below street level, the architects make the building's profile less tall — and thus less domineering. McPier officials say a cul de sac and other traffic-control measures, such as one-way streets, will likely help buffer neighbors in the nearby Prairie Avenue historic district from being overrun with cars on game days.
The arena itself is correctly conceived as a block-filling, "streetwall" building, one that seeks to engage the sidewalks around it rather than retreating behind a moat of parking lots, as at the United Center. The vision is to have uses like a sports bar ringing the building's perimeter. You'll be able to look right through the bar into the arena's heart. Small pavilions, aglow at night, might contain restaurants and stores.
But it is easier to build storefronts than to fill them, as the empty spaces at Donald Trump's riverfront skyscraper show. And a planned sky bridge linking McCormick Place to the arena would contradict the idea of enlivening the streets.
The big move, the humpback roof, is meant to give the arena a sculptural "fifth facade," visible from surrounding hotel rooms or blimps (assuming DePaul basketball would again warrant such television coverage). Supported by gently curving steel trusses, the roof could look dazzling, both from above and from within, creating a great interior space whose robust curves would be accentuated with skylights by day and artificial lighting by night.
And yet, renderings of views at street-level reveal a disappointing disconnect between the roof's curvilinear drama and the building's pervasive right-angled geometry. It's as though this were two buildings — or, perhaps, a conventional, flat-roofed one with a big mountain stuck on top for effect. Compared to the masterful "Yale Whale," the result is an architectural hybrid, not a persuasive synthesis that gives us architecture with a capital A. Competition-winning designs are often revised for the better; that should happen in this case.
Why does this matter? Because a public building should meet the highest standards of architecture as well as urban design. This one is heading in the right direction, but it's not there yet.
looks awesome
It's a lot of money for only 10,000 seats.
"A reconfigured Big East conference with more Midwestern teams?" Where are they getting that?
2013 Big East (Midwest): DePaul, Marquette, Creighton, Xavier, Butler
Pre-2013 Big East (Midwest): DePaul, Marquette, Notre Dame, Cincinnati, Louisville (Maybe Pittsburgh).
"Is that a bulge in your arena or are you happy to lose a game?"
Looks good.
Everyone knows the Yale Whale. Cesar Pelli also did this one, The Connecticut Science Center in Downtown Hartford.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connecticut_Science_Center
Here are the sketches
http://www.suntimes.com/photos/galleries/index.html?story=22749049
I like it. Has a strong resemblance to the other McCormick Place buildings, but still creates it's own identity.
Love it.
Looks great. Beats the hell out of the dump in Rosemont.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%C3%A9sar_Pelli
Quote from: Bleuteaux on September 24, 2013, 12:55:59 PM
Looks great. Beats the hell out of the dump in Rosemont.
you mean the airplane hangar?
Need a name for it....especially the bump in the roof.
A few ideas
The Mound
The Zit
The Wart
The Mole
The Hump
The Bump
The Anthill
The Knoll
The Pile
(http://www.suntimes.com/csp/cms/sites/dt.common.streams.StreamServer.cls?STREAMOID=vHj2ODOoyhBt9CUSlBPww8$daE2N3K4ZzOUsqbU5sYtES4Tep9VROhLM69ebFlNe6FB40xiOfUoExWL3M40tfzssyZqpeG_J0TFo7ZhRaDiHC9oxmioMlYVJD0A$3RbIiibgT65kY_CSDiCiUzvHvODrHApbd6ry6YGl5GGOZrs-&CONTENTTYPE=image/jpeg)
As mentioned earlier, "The Bulge" fits the bill.
The Hump Dump
they should paint a face on it, Hellraiser would work
Quote from: Buzz Williams' Spillproof Chiclets Cup on September 22, 2013, 08:06:19 AM
"A reconfigured Big East conference with more Midwestern teams?" Where are they getting that?
2013 Big East (Midwest): DePaul, Marquette, Creighton, Xavier, Butler
Pre-2013 Big East (Midwest): DePaul, Marquette, Notre Dame, Cincinnati, Louisville (Maybe Pittsburgh).
Maybe they're going by percentage of teams in the league?
Quote from: ChicosBailBonds on September 24, 2013, 02:52:19 PM
Need a name for it....especially the bump in the roof.
A few ideas
The Mound
The Zit
The Wart
The Mole
The Hump
The Bump
The Anthill
The Knoll
The Pile
(http://www.suntimes.com/csp/cms/sites/dt.common.streams.StreamServer.cls?STREAMOID=vHj2ODOoyhBt9CUSlBPww8$daE2N3K4ZzOUsqbU5sYtES4Tep9VROhLM69ebFlNe6FB40xiOfUoExWL3M40tfzssyZqpeG_J0TFo7ZhRaDiHC9oxmioMlYVJD0A$3RbIiibgT65kY_CSDiCiUzvHvODrHApbd6ry6YGl5GGOZrs-&CONTENTTYPE=image/jpeg)
Happy To See You
Comcast SportsNet released some new drawings of the proposed DePaul arena. The article says that it would open for the 2016-2017 season.
http://www.csnchicago.com/ncaa/depaul-releases-latest-drawings-new-arena (http://www.csnchicago.com/ncaa/depaul-releases-latest-drawings-new-arena)
Quote from: Buzz Williams' Spillproof Chiclets Cup on September 22, 2013, 08:06:19 AM
"A reconfigured Big East conference with more Midwestern teams?" Where are they getting that?
2013 Big East (Midwest): DePaul, Marquette, Creighton, Xavier, Butler
Pre-2013 Big East (Midwest): DePaul, Marquette, Notre Dame, Cincinnati, Louisville (Maybe Pittsburgh).
Creighton is one of the best traveling fan bases around. Xavier and Cinci is a wash as far as closeness. Notre same hurts but butler isn't much farther so I'm calling that a wash to.
I think the theory is that the new schools will have a greater amount of alumni near Chicago or within driving distance than the old schools (minus ND)
I still think it's too far away from campus.
Quote from: MU82 on June 10, 2014, 02:42:38 PM
I still think it's too far away from campus.
But the RTA trip planner shows that it is an easy 40 minutes via red line train and bus!
Quote from: barfolomew on June 10, 2014, 03:23:20 PM
But the RTA trip planner shows that it is an easy 40 minutes via red line train and bus!
Gee, you could travel half way to Madison in 40 minutes.
Quote from: ChicosBailBonds on September 24, 2013, 02:52:19 PM
Need a name for it....especially the bump in the roof.
A few ideas
The Mound
The Zit
The Wart
The Mole
The Hump
The Bump
The Anthill
The Knoll
The Pile
(http://www.suntimes.com/csp/cms/sites/dt.common.streams.StreamServer.cls?STREAMOID=vHj2ODOoyhBt9CUSlBPww8$daE2N3K4ZzOUsqbU5sYtES4Tep9VROhLM69ebFlNe6FB40xiOfUoExWL3M40tfzssyZqpeG_J0TFo7ZhRaDiHC9oxmioMlYVJD0A$3RbIiibgT65kY_CSDiCiUzvHvODrHApbd6ry6YGl5GGOZrs-&CONTENTTYPE=image/jpeg)
Looks like a fish gill to me.
A funny thing we have enjoyed on the Creighton board about the pictures that were released is the apparent additions of Wisconsin, Texas, LSU, and Notre Dame to the conference in 2016.
(http://grfx.cstv.com/photos/schools/depa/sports/genrel/auto_original/7963683.jpeg?1402418357)
Something's wrong with the photo. It's a full house and all the fans are wearing DePaul blue t-shirts?
Quote from: MU Fan in Connecticut on June 17, 2014, 12:13:52 PM
Something's wrong with the photo. It's a full house and all the fans are wearing DePaul blue t-shirts?
They did nail the lack of any TV presence.
https://cbschicago.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/2014_04_15_basketball_1.jpg (https://cbschicago.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/2014_04_15_basketball_1.jpg)
Zoom in on the scoreboard. DePaul is down 49-54 with 1:34 left in the 4th. Ignoring the quarter vs half error, at least the artist captured the essence of DePaul basketball.
I really like the seating layout.
Quote from: mikekinsellaMVP on June 17, 2014, 12:47:32 PM
https://cbschicago.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/2014_04_15_basketball_1.jpg (https://cbschicago.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/2014_04_15_basketball_1.jpg)
Zoom in on the scoreboard. DePaul is down 49-54 with 1:34 left in the 4th. Ignoring the quarter vs half error, at least the artist captured the essence of DePaul basketball.
The simulated crowd is also wildly inaccurate. If a DePaul game was going to have that many attendees, at least 3/4 of those shirts would be gold.
Edit: Sorry, missed Connecticut's post.
Quote from: mikekinsellaMVP on June 17, 2014, 12:47:32 PM
https://cbschicago.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/2014_04_15_basketball_1.jpg (https://cbschicago.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/2014_04_15_basketball_1.jpg)
Zoom in on the scoreboard. DePaul is down 49-54 with 1:34 left in the 4th. Ignoring the quarter vs half error, at least the artist captured the essence of DePaul basketball.
Clearly the artist also has his/her thumb squarely on the pulse of conference realignment.
According to the banners, the Big East members also will include Texas, Georgia, ND, and Wisky.
EDIT: Sorry CreightonWarrior -- missed your earlier post about this.
The Cuttlefish.
(http://www.walpapershddownload.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/cuttlefish-wallpapers-5.jpg)
BTW, this arena is good for DePaul. Good for Chicago. Good for the Big East.
The Mound of Rebound