The Elgin Mental Health Center Medical and Surgical building, a modernist cylindrical tower designed by the late architectural pioneer Bertrand Goldberg, is being eyeballed for demolition.
Built in 1967, the five-story building has been closed since July 2002. An Illinois Department of Human Services spokesperson said the building was shuttered due to the dangers of asbestos and “multiple” structural hazards.
“At this time, the building is on a list for possible demolition,” the spokesperson said. “However, at this time IDHS does not have a timeline for when the potential demolition might occur.”
The building, at 750 S. State St., sits on the center’s 100-acre campus 42 miles west of downtown.
No doubt, finding a new use for the decaying and remotely-located tower is a tall order.
But the idea of chopping down a building designed by Goldberg — a visionary who was among the most significant architects of the 20th century — leaves quite a bitter taste.
A humane building
In addition to designing Marina City, the Chicago-born, Bauhaus-educated Goldberg is responsible for a wealth of other modernist and iconic local buildings, such as River City; Hilliard Homes at Cermak Road and Clark Street; and Astor Tower, 1300 N. Astor St.
His work at Elgin was the first of a series of visually striking yet functional medical buildings designed by Goldberg, including Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston; Stony Brook Hospital in Stony Brook, New York; and the late, great Prentice Women’s Hospital, 333 E. Superior St., a superlative, cloverleaf-like structure that the city and Northwestern University conspired and wrecked in 2013.
With many of his designs, including Elgin, Goldberg saw circular forms — and the radial interior spaces they created — as more efficient ways to move people and services through a building.
At Elgin, Goldberg put interconnecting doors on the outer edges of patients’ rooms, allowing personnel to make their rounds by walking the tower’s interior circumference rather than a central hallway.
It’s a humane-looking building, designed with care at a time when society’s views of those in need of mental health treatment were starting to improve for the better.
Goldberg’s son Geoffrey, who is also an architect, said Elgin is “very unusual in several ways,” noting the building’s almost transparent exterior grillage — which makes the tower look weightless while letting in natural light — its radial floor plan, and the pioneering use of nurses’ stations as clusters.
On the plus side, the building likely can’t be ripped down overnight, said Kaitlyn McAvoy, director of communications for the preservation organization Landmarks Illinois.
“There are processes that the state must undergo before it can demolish a building that we suspect would be eligible for the National Register of Historic Places based on its architectural merit,” she said.
An RFP before R.I.P?
The tower sits close to another modernist Goldberg design on the campus: an accordion-like former laundry building — an absolute stunner — that also calls out for reuse.
Owned by the city of Elgin since 2013, the laundry building has a column-free ,110-foot by 240-foot interior. Elgin, preservation groups and the architecture firm Skidmore Owings & Merrill drafted a reuse study in 2016 to turn the building into a sports and recreational space, but the proposal has gone nowhere.
“The laundry building is quite unique,” said Elgin’s Historic Preservation Planner Christen Sundquist.
With the two one-of-a-kind buildings sitting relatively close to each other, the state should consider issuing a request for proposals to reuse the medical building — just to see who might bite — before calling in the demolition teams.
“Overall, it’s well worth preserving for the legacy,” Geoffrey Goldberg said of the tower. “Whether that convinces anyone from a preservation or utility viewpoint is another matter.”
Lee Bey is architecture critic for the Sun-Times and appears on ABC7 News Chicago. He is also a member of the Editorial Board.
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