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Originally Posted by ardecila
LVDW - still not sure what you're getting at. River Point and 150 N Riverside are about as apples-to-apples as two large developments can get. Both have dramatic modern designs built over railroad tracks with public plazas and riverwalks. Similar amounts of leasable SF with similar parking and retail//restaurant components.
The biggest difference is that Hines demanded $30M of TIF money for their plaza while O'Donnell found a way to build it himself. He should be commended for that, but I'm not seeing how that makes his project more "radical".
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I'm talking about the design, O'Donnell was ever so slightly more aggressive with the architecture and that's part of why he is wailing on them. River Point is not particularly exciting, nice design, but certainly not adventurous. Riverside has not only the ridiculous cantilever base, but all manner of setbacks and balconies. Most institutional developers would look at outdoor space, particularly on higher floors of an office building, as wasted floor space that could be leased, but O'Donnell get's it. The outdoor space makes those upper floors irresistible for the loaded, image conscious, wealth management type or privately held firms that's he has already stated to land.
My point is that if all you do is look at proformas all day, you are just going to build glass boxes with no real character or do "improvements" for the sake of doing improvements (as is likely the case at the Hancock). Why? Because these people only understand numbers, they don't understand design or how human psychology has set patterns of reaction and interaction to the spaces in which we live and work. That's exactly what is behind the Hancock nonsense which is what I was originally responding to. These changes are proposed because the owners only look at spreadsheets and go "we are spending $X on "improvements" so we will see $Y appreciation in value".
Some of it is site constraints over at River Point and Riverside, but it's no accident that O'Donnell has found a way to shoehorn a better building into a more difficult site. He is independent, it's only mostly about the spreadsheet for him, not all about it. It's also why he is disrupting the John Buck / Hines office building circlejerk here in Chicago. The fact that they are apples and apples is exactly my point. Two seemingly identical formulas, one slightly more thought out design, wildly different leasing results DESPITE the incumbent advantage of a massive corporation like Hines who has done this hundreds of times.