Blair Kamin writes:
The wall of buildings that lines Michigan Avenue across from Grant Park is architecture's version of prime time -- no place for the meek or mediocre.
From the stark Romanesque grandeur of Adler & Sullivan's Auditorium Building to the sumptuous Second Empire splendor of the Blackstone Hotel, this man-made cliff is at once a showcase for individual talent and a sublime ensemble, a sharp urban edge that looks as if it were cleaved by a butcher's knife. The deft insertion of the new, diamond-like Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies into this mesa of masonry only underscores its visual power and symbolic role as the face of Chicago.
So it is hard not to be disappointed by the latest and most prominent addition to the wall, the Columbian, a 48-story condominium tower that holds down the high-profile corner of Michigan and Roosevelt Road, just north of the forest of construction cranes that is turning the Near South Side into a crazy quilt of high-rises.
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