For most of its history, Peoria was spared the kind of interchangeable architecture that fills many American cities. Settlers built in brick and timber. Whiskey money built the Victorian mansions along High Street and Moss.
When Caterpillar was rising, instead of the typical American suburban sprawl, executives hired local architects to build up Downtown — and a hillside of mid-century modern homes. All over Peoria are unique homes, offices, and churches, big and small.
The buildings going up now belong to a style that has spread across mid-sized cities in the country — efficient, functional and from nowhere in particular.
In the local reporting of these projects, the conversation was about budget, square footage, and response times. What they would look like never came up.
One researcher argues that skipping that question carries a cost measurable in a person's body.
"The East Peoria police station makes you sick," Nikos Salingaros said. "Peoria County Health and Human Services building makes you sick."
Salingaros is a professor of mathematics at the University of Texas at San Antonio who has spent three decades studying how the geometry of buildings affects the people who encounter them.
He and colleagues attach portable medical monitors to study participants, tracking heart rate, skin conductance, skin temperature, and brain activity — and walk them past buildings.
"What I'm telling you is supported by medical data," he said. "It's not my opinion."
The buildings in the photographs shown to Salingaros represent the newest construction in the Peoria area — and their style will be familiar to anyone who has driven through any mid-sized American city lately: steel and glass flat-roofed blocks, sometimes wrapped in minimalist metal paneling, roof lines broken into uneven sections at jarring angles.
Schools, fire stations, police headquarters, health departments, apartment complexes — all in the same ultra-optimized format, from Peoria to Arlington, Texas.
The new East Peoria police headquarters on Camp Street is a $21.6 million, 41,000-square-foot example: an array of low horizontal blocks, dark brick on one wing a meeting glass curtain wall on another at an off-center angle.
FGMA Architects, the firm behind it, has built nearly identical structures across Illinois, Virginia, Texas, and Arkansas. The firm describes its approach as one that "integrates resilience, sustainability and wellness practices to minimize environmental impact and maximize functionality and comfort."
On Sheridan Road, Peoria County's new $22.3 million Health and Human Services campus follows the same template — pale brick, metal panel, flat roof, readable from the road.
In East Peoria's Levee District, the $65 million Blutowne development arrived with 219 upscale apartments and a rooftop sky lounge.
Mayor John Kahl told WCBU the developer, Indianapolis-based Flaherty & Collins, was chosen for Blutowne partly because "Flaherty & Collins has done this in multiple states. This is nothing new for them."
The interchangeable nature was the selling point.
Peoria and East Peoria are separate cities in separate counties, facing each other across the Illinois River — different mayors, different councils, different planning boards, neither answering to the other. That two unrelated governments arrived at nearly the same style within a year of each other suggests the decision wasn't really made in either city.
Salingaros said he has watched this happen to councils and approval boards across the country. The design arrives already decided, he said, and the argument for it is that everyone else has one.
"The architects come to them and they say, 'Look, this is what's done all over the country. This is the standard thing for police stations today,' " he said. "We have to do it like this, and if you don't do it like this, then we are going to be accused of being old-fashioned."
Board members who object, he argued, rarely get far.
"If somebody on the board says, I don't like this, it makes me feel uneasy — the architects will say, but this is what's done." The people signing off on these buildings, in his telling, "are bullied into approving them."
Salingaros argued architecture is a public health question. The body, he said, reads geometry the way it reads everything else in its environment — as information about safety or threat. "The geometry of the building is telling the body that this is an alarming thing that may attack you, so the body is constantly under stress," he said.
Near a Victorian storefront or a historic commercial block, the same instruments tell the opposite story. "The body feels welcome. It feels that it wants to approach that building, because the building is friendly — and the friendliness comes from the geometry," said Salingaros.
The explanation, he said, is evolutionary. The brain developed over millennia surrounded by plants — fractals, revealing more detail the closer you look — and animals, whose symmetry it evolved to read in an instant. A building rich in layered detail rewards that instinct: you approach and see something interesting, come closer and see more, reach the door and see more still.
The East Peoria police station, Salingaros said, offers the opposite experience. "You see a few rectangles, you go close, and it's empty because you've come beyond the rectangle. There's nothing there. It's the anti-fractal." The building's designers, he noted, "went to a lot of trouble to avoid putting in the elements that are necessary for human comfort."
For a building people pass every day, he argued, the cost compounds — and most people will never trace the feeling to its source. "The geometry of the building is telling the body that this is an alarming thing that may attack you, so the body is constantly under stress." Salingaros said.
“You get sick, and you live a life of misery, and you don't know why you're miserable."
"It is unconscionable for a board to approve an ugly building for public use," Salingaros said. "It's like putting lead in the gasoline or lead in the paint — it decreases the health of the user."
And in a city Peoria's size, there is less around to absorb the damage. "In a smaller city like Peoria, one bad building in a prominent spot can ruin the environment for one or two miles around it," he said. "It's like an oil stain that spreads."
What makes a building architecture?
"You can just have buildings that house a function, whether it be for people, for storage, for whatever," said Ed Barry, an architect at Farnsworth Group and the immediate past board president of the Peoria Historical Society. "But what makes architecture architecture is that you add a piece of art to it. You create something that is special."
That doesn't require ornament or expense. "Some of the best pieces of architecture are very simple," Barry said.
In Peoria, where historical and unique buildings line the streets, the optimized buildings of the 21st century can seem jarring.
The Flanagan House, finished in 1837, still stands on a bluff above the Illinois River, its brick walls more than eight inches thick, built by settlers overlooking the rolling hills and the Cathedral of St. Mary.
City Hall, finished in 1899 by local architects Reeves and Baillee, is Flemish Renaissance made with Lake Superior sandstone. Its arched windows, wrought iron bannisters, and stained glass are filled with detail that keeps rewarding you as you approach and enter.
In 2017, it beat out 63 competitors in a national bracket to be named the best city hall in the country.
Peoria Modern documents the mid-century case: Richard Doyle's Peoria Heights Village Hall, built partly with 300 tons of stone hauled by community volunteers, and his Kelly Avenue library, now the Betty Jayne, recognized by the American Institute of Architects for features such as floating stairways — described by its current owner, Kim Blickenstaff, as "probably the only such civic edifice of its kind in downstate Illinois."
Even Peoria's own downtown police headquarters makes a point to be part of the environment. It sits on SW Adams, designed — according to Peoria architectural historian Tim Hartneck — to be compatible with the 1930s building across the street.
Two police stations, were built for the same purpose. One was designed for a specific corner. The other could be unloaded anywhere.
All of those older buildings had something in common besides quality: somebody in Peoria wanted them that way — and was willing to pay for the art piece, not just the function.
Whether the buildings going up now will ever earn a kind of loyalty is an open question. Barry, for one, isn't ready to write them off. Every new style looks wrong at first, he said.
When Cletis Foley designed the mid-century Fellowship Hall beside the classical Westminster Presbyterian Church, "I think a lot of the parishioners initially were like, we don't like this at all," Barry said.
Today it's considered a mid-century gem. He offered a line from an Eritrean architect that he used at the Historical Society's annual meeting: "Until a building has a history, it has nothing to say." Maybe the East Peoria station, after it settles in, after its occupants modify it and mark it, will say something.
"We should give it a chance," he said.
Salingaros's answer is that the people walking past these buildings don't have 20 or 30 years. By his instruments, the cost is being paid now, daily, by everyone within sight.
There is, in the end, a worse outcome than a building people dislike. A building that makes you feel something — even anger — is doing more than a building that makes you feel nothing.
"Someone like Frank Lloyd Wright would probably say, 'That's great — I want to poke the bear, make them get mad,'" Barry said. "He was a cantankerous person."
These buildings make us feel something, for some it might be the pride of having something clean, modern and efficient, others anxiety over the geometry.
There is one difference between a building and every other kind of art: you can put down a book, walk out of a gallery, turn off a song. The building on your commute, you can't. It's there every morning, saying whatever it says — or saying nothing — to everyone, forever.
"There has to be stuff that makes Peoria Peoria," Hartneck said, "as opposed to Anytown USA."
This is the first of two stories on architecture and development in the Peoria area. The second asks how the city's built environment came to this point — and how Caterpillar helped shape it.
