Space adrift

The Old Chicago Stock Exchange, an 1893 architectural masterpiece of Sullivan and Adler, was recently demolished because it rose only thirteen stories in a zone where forty-five were permitted. The marketplace dictated replacement of the landmark with a modern office tower that would occupy the full forty-five stories. Concerning attempts to save the Exchange, Mayor Daley remarked, "We had a lot of ink, and words on televison....but no one would come up with the money." More than one-third of the 16,000 buildings listed in the Historic American Buildings Survey are gone for the same reason. Many remaining landmark buildings can be saved if a new plane fashioned by Costonis is implemented in time - a plan Ada Louise Huxtable has called "a brilliant, practical, progressive extension of existing zoning tools." The "Chicago Plan", detailed in this volume, promises to relieve the severe market pressures to which urban landmarks like the Exchange so often fall victim. It involves government purchase of a landmark's unused development potential (or full space allotment) and subsequent sale (in the form of "development rights") to a developer who can then make his new building larger and more profitable than zoning regulations normally permit. The transfer of development rights in this manner, carried out according to strict urban design controls, would shift preservation costs from the city and the landmark owner to the downtown development process itself. In March, 1973, Secretary Rogers C.B. Morton of the U.S. Department of the Interior proposed that twelve of Chicago's major landmark buildings be included in a National Cultural Park, the economic keystone of which would be Costonis's Chicago Plan. Morton wrote, "The concept of development rights transfer offers one of the few encouraging approaches to the challenge of redirecting urban economic forces so that they foster rather than obstruct the preservation of the landmark buildings of our cities. Professor Costonis's work is truly seminal and merits serious study by all who retain the best of the past as living parts of the manmade environment." The adoption of Costonis's plan, coupled with Morton's proposal for a National Cultural Park, would, in the words of Wolf von Eckardt of the Washington Post, "...mean true progress toward a new cultural renaissance in America as we move on and look forward to the nation's bicentennial celebration in 1976."