I don't think there's any greater city of great architecture than Chicago.
I don't know if there's another city that's known for its architecture.
We all come from literally all over the world to see our architecture.
Cab drivers that you might ride around with, they know buildings by name.
They know exactly where you want to go because they get so many requests for that.
And they can even talk about some of those architects and why they were important for the city.
It's a city that was built on the ashes of the Great Fire.
And we created modern architecture first with the skyscrapers
and certainly with the post-war boom that went on primarily led by Mies van der Rohe and others, including Bertrand Goldberg.
Goldberg's stuff is original, inventive, pushed the boundaries of engineering,
often in ways that more conventional Chicago modern architecture didn't.
The dominant organizing principle of the modern movement was basically the grid and the steel frame.
Goldberg studied with Mies in Germany in the 1930s and came back to Chicago and completely reinvented what modernism was.
His design philosophy was that there were no right angles in nature.
He wanted to find a more organic way of expressing architecture.
And you do have a sense somehow that this is an almost organic object in a way that you don't with the square buildings.
We associate more completely with Chicago.
When he was conceiving Prenus, it was a building that was really designed from the inside out.
It was new not just for its formal and architectural merits, but it was new in the way that it was thinking about what a hospital could be.
I mean, before that time, the fathers were relegated in the waiting room rather than being a part of the birthing experience,
which is something that went into the idea of what that building could be and really revolutionized the way that a woman gave Bertrand.
We've always intended to demolish the building.
That was our plan that we made public more than a decade ago and when the hospital moved its main operations out in 2007, we reaffirmed that plan.
Love me preface by expressing my admiration for Bertrand Goldberg.
He was my friend. We were very much attuned to each other and I held him in the highest esteem.
But I do not believe this building should be landmark.
If there's a landmark established, that building cannot come down.
It can't be altered without further government approvals and intervention for the developer. It's the ultimate death penalty.
Northwestern University plans to build a new medical research facility at that location.
The building was designed for clinical care as a hospital in what would have been the early 70s.
You just can't do medical research in the 21st century in a building that was designed for a different purpose 40 years ago.
My wife runs a medical research foundation in New York.
It's offensive to be told that if you want to see Prentice saved, then you're putting an obstacle in front of scientific progress.
I mean, that's a false and nonsensical argument.
The reality is the iconic Bertrand Goldberg building is Marina City.
In everyone's opinion, it is masterpiece.
We haven't landmarked that. We're not a museum of architectural relics.
We have to have some balance.
Buildings are being replaced. Modern structures are being put up that meet the needs of the science of today.
Unless we have a really, really good reason, why are we getting in their way?
I think in the case of Prentice in particular, it's not a beautiful building in the traditional sense of beauty.
It's an exciting, inventive, imaginative, creative and important building.
He built Prentice as if it were a tree.
He's actually taken four Roman arches and intersected them and transferred all of that exterior weight,
seven stories of concrete, back down to the central core.
And that's absolute genius as far as I'm concerned.
The reality of what you can build these days is, unfortunately, you can't duplicate some of the things that were done in the past.
Whether it's from a financial standpoint, a time standpoint, the same craftsmen aren't available these days.
Goldberg's work was not easily duplicatable because it wasn't easy to do.
These were one-offs. Each one was a unique, separate environment.
It's the same age than I am, so I look at this building and I think about the way that we treat people.
We learn from the elders that we have, and so if we look at architecture in the same way,
those that are considered elders are, at times, undervalued.
It would be nice to see the building be saved. My kids were born in the building.
We would rather repurpose the building than tear it down.
I think you miss the buildings more once you see some of the crap they get replaced with.
We tore down that beautiful building for this, but those buildings weren't landmarked.
The property owners could do what they wanted with them.
The problem has been that Northwestern adamantly refuses to entertain any other option than a wrecker ball.
There is no compromise. There is no discussion. All they want is to demolish the building,
so it's virtually impossible to be able to engage in a substantive conversation about adaptive reuse.
We've agreed to disagree. We believe very strongly that it's important to build a new building on that side,
and I think the preservation is believed very strongly that an old prentice should be preserved.
It's not that one person is better than the other, one person is smarter than the other.
It's just a difference of opinion.
If we lose prentice, we are losing a revolutionary and truly unique piece of world architecture.
Chicago, after all, is the nation's preeminent city of architecture.
For Chicago to say that preservation of an important work of architecture doesn't matter.
It's an unfortunate thing to have happen anywhere, but it's particularly shocking in Chicago,
which of all places ought to know better.
Thank you.
