I'd be interested in seeing one of the twins flipped on the N-S axis to reveal more of the bundled tubes to the north and provide more depth on the Roosevelt street wall, as well as more variation in the base.

Given the address on Park Avenue and the prices units get in NYC, there's no way anything that looks like that will be built in Chicago. The PPSQ must be through the roof.

Very cool design here, looks like 60-80s style boxes that have been modernized

I don't know what's going to happen with Phase 2, but let's also keep in mind that Crescent Heights isn't a small, inexperienced developer.

Not going to be a problem with Vinoly: Exhibits A and B :cool:

And yes we definitely dodged a bullet with that gimmicky P/H design.

Those office towers look kinda hack to me. A bunch of design gizmos thrown onto otherwise ordinary boxes with Lego block proportions. Not a lot of harmony there. The facade treatment of the tower in the foreground is nice enough. Wish it wasn't broken up so coarsely with those reveals. Makes me wary of the treatment of the terraces and parking garage for the Grant Park towers.

The U of C business school is great, though. And it's a nice nod to Robie House, intentionally or not.

But good riddance to that P/H pile of nonsense.

I don't think shadows over the park will be an issue. The sun would be north of it for most of the year.

God. No fucking shit. :cool: :cheers:

http://i.imgur.com/APnrJKjl.jpg

Oh, I just noticed: more bars in more places?
http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/f...7/morebars.jpg

lol

The design is certianly interesting. However, I have mixed feeling with Chicago adding all of those tall buildings along the lakefront. I especially think the view to the north coming from the south has been messed up with the addition of the BlueCross Blue Shield and the apartment buildings built in the early 2000's.

:shrug: Views aren't guaranteed, how many times must it be said?? I swear sometimes I think people just want the city to be frozen in time at the absolute moment they bought their condo.

I suppose any tower on Grant Park is prominent, but it feels to me like a twin tower would work better asthetically alongside the Park rather than at a corner - somewhat like The Eldorado on Central Park West feels 'centered.' It might be better if the second tower was build first to ensure that the corner of the park is 'anchored' with an important building.

you are thinking regressively.

towers by lake too tall? BUILD BIGGER ONES BEHIND THEM!

also, keep those feelings out of any neighborhood meetings.

There's only one place in this town where views are guaranteed, and I hear they're going to build an 862' apartment tower on top of it.

Proportionality concerns can be valid, but I think Grant Park really wants to be enveloped. Holes in the park wall make me sad.

Maybe people don't want to hear about NY, but I hear their park is completely enveloped, and will soon get a few supertalls at or near its wall...

Just sayin' - advantage Chicago, when it comes to having a lake on one side, and that building the Grant Wall of CHIna isn't such a bad thing. :)

I love the subtle design nod to the old IC Station that once stood there.

Which was probably accidental.

Any chance you could clue me in on that?

Not getting the connection. The old Central Station was a grand old building and one I see little to no connection with this new tower.

Looks to be taller than 900' if you ask me!

Perception and perspective can play hella tricks on the eye.

One Museum Park is about 730' and The Grant (One Museum Park West) is about 590'.

The northeastern most setback of this new proposal seems to align with the crown of OMP. The central setback is about 6 floors higher and the west setback is 4 floors higher than that. The back tube rises about 5 more floors with some type of element.

OMP is 62-65 floors and this proposal is 76.

We'll get the exact height eventually.

You've missed the plot. It's not the tower; it's the protruding section (the tallest "tubes") that evokes the smokestack. It doesn't help that this portion is tucked in the back side of the building, just where a smokestack would be. Then there are the trellis things; they look exactly like chimney caps (just do a quick image search of that term and it's frighteningly uncanny).

Sadly, a particular shape or form need not be exactly replicated in order for imagery to be successfully evoked. (At the Art Institute it's plain that the Impressionists figured that out over a century ago.) So, even if the fallacious assertion that smokestacks cannot be square were true, it would be a non starter.

Not to belabor the point however. I don't consider this the dominant impression made by the tower. Just that it can't be overlooked; some people will be reading it that way, and dollars to donuts that some NY or east coast writer one day will refer to it that way as they take pleasure in reducing our city to blue collar cliches.
But this doesn't have the extreme seventies simplicity of 432 (as to massing). And as someone else pointed out, it doesn't have its budget either. But I know nobody needs to remind Tom about VEing and budgets. We'll have to wait for a facade detail render.

This bears more resemblance to the Inter-State Exposition Building than to Central Station. Which is to say, none at all. Nor is it on Central Station's site; this was the site of the peripatetic Dowie Building.

Only if it were in the Southern Hemisphere. Where we live, the sun is in the southern sky, except at the beginning and end of the day during summer.

For some reason, I feel like playing Tetris. :shrug:

...this sounds overly sensitive to the point of paranoia. And since when are evocations of vernacular architecture or other old, "honest" structures ever ridiculed? Those forms are celebrated in Toward an Architecture. Nouvel's first US project, the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, references neighboring grain elevators, something for which it received universal praise.

Love this. So glad Vinoly came in and we were spared the comical P/H designs. This would be better if the trellisy thing on top were nixed - hopefully it will be - that's highly unnecessary.........and absolutely LOVE the number of units......we need to embrace true densification round these parts....

The one thing I very much don't like about the proposed PD amendment here is what is proposed for the parcel on Indiana due south of The Grant. Townhomes? No thank you. Hopefully they go back for another amendment before that actually gets developed. There's no reason for anything less than a 30-40 story tower there, if not two. Townhomes and a park there is a joke. A park? You want a park, walk north a block, there's a big park. You don't like that one, walk east a block or two and you have the Museum Campus. Also, the fact that you would have an area of low-rise directly behind The Grant gives the South Wall a certain 'flimsiness' in my opinion - the wall should have a 'solidity' in that it be 'backed-up' by reasonably dense and tall buildings behind all of it............as I said, hopefully that piece of this gets amended and densified once again....

Quick photoshop job

http://i.imgur.com/wzX5l9n.jpg

^Plus a 40-something floor Essex Annex.

^^^

Done.

Kudos on the photoshop job, RLW.

And 1326 S. michigan!

Yes, there really should be some 'thickness' to the south of the buildings along the Park. The existing townhomes to the south established a bad precedent.

just because
http://i61.tinypic.com/34yprg8.jpg

Unfortunately that precedent of town homes was started like 150 years ago.

I get that many may like boxy, brawny buildings. They aren't my preferred style. I prefer tall and thin and I tend to like skyscrapers with tapering forms like JHC and pointy decorative tops (I believe skyscrapers area usually better when they make a final forceful statement at their apex hence my fondness for 2 Prudential, Smurfit-Stone Container, and the Chrysler Building). I also tend to gravitate towards buildings with curves like Marina City (an exception to my twin dislike) and Lake Point tower. All of these buildings were truly ground braking when they were built or have at least become icons of their skylines. Overall I like variety however, and I wouldn't want an entire skyline full of buildings like I just described nor of boxy bulks which I feel Chicago is tending towards. People say this is very Chicago, but Chicago skyscrapers haven't always been that way (look at photos from the 1920's) or the examples I mentioned above which are all very Chicago (Chrysler excepted). To me Chicago architecture especially when it is high profile (which this is) should be innovative, unique, high quality and functional.

I am ok with phase 1 but I really hope phase 2 isn't built as currently designed. My negative reaction was largely fueled by many of the early overly effervescent, hyperbolic posts after the reveal saying these would be instant icons and all other architects should put down their pencils and redesign their buildings after this. These designs are not ground breaking and I highly doubt they will be considered icons of Chicago architecture. The trellis structures on the tops look like a cheep lazy after thought. Something that could be purchased at a big box home improvement store in the same section the Elysian's mansard roof was acquired at. The façade could turn out well if good materials are used. This means very transparent glass with little to no reflectivity and the white portions either need to be real limestone or high quality precast that doesn't try to mimic real stone like that on the Museum of Contemporary Art or the Roosevelt University tower. However, the sunset rendering gives the glass a brownish gold reflective hue that I hope is just an inaccuracy in the rendering. It reminds me too much of an unfortunate direction late 70's and early 80's modernism took or some twisted combination of Trump World Tower in NY and Trump's hideous gold monstrosity in Vegas.

http://pbs.twimg.com/media/BjnjC4HCIAA4wRl.jpg

I would love to see something like this built at the corner on Michigan and Roosevelt, with the pointy side right at the Michigan and Roosevelt corner and the sloped side facing south east toward the Lake similar to Smurfit-Stone.

I personally think it can make sense to construct some filler-type townhomes or detached homes in certain locations to the south of there, partly to honor the history of the area (e.g,. the Prairie District). It is the large-scale, walled-off townhome developments immediately to the south that I find problematic.

MCA is mostly cast aluminum panels with AFAIK a limestone base.

Roosevelt?, Meaning the VOA blue glass tower? The relatively small precast volume to the north comprised of large black precast panels... don't think it's attempting to mimic anything other than large black precast panels...

If that all happens, covering the tracks can't be more than a generation away.

^How would a developer make money from covering the tracks north of Roosevelt?

By building towers atop them as they've planned... From Roosevelt to 15th the decking was to be a park and from there south to McCormick Place was to be towers.


Vinyl's design is shreaded in this Crain's article.

If you Google the name of the article, you can usually get around the paywall.


http://www.chicagobusiness.com/artic...not-in-chicago

September 25, 2015
REVIEW
Architect Rafael Vinoly has done good work—just not in Chicago
By: EDWARD KEEGAN

I wasn't thinking about a developer, but that could be part of the mix. I was thinking about people like those in SOAR and the city and maybe one of those so-called public private partnerships.

I doubt it happens for at least 100 years. Too many existing buildings now have 99-year easements granting them air rights above the tracks. You could build townhomes or low-rises in the space below the air rights, but how could you make that economically feasible?

The developers own the air rights. None of those townhouses have the right to anything over there.

Dude. The idea is not to build towers! Ugh. It's to make a park.

I don't know if you were talking to me, but dude...

The park only would stretch as far south as like 16th Street. From 16th south to McCormick Place is supposedly one day supposed to be towers.

http://pdnachicago.com/media%20artic...mnents/AC3.pdf

http://gapersblock.com/ac/gateway2ue5.jpg

No, that was a general existential "dude" of despair. I was referring to the tracks north of R. I'd love to see towers south of there.

I am always suspicious of such very early and seemingly decisive criticism...

I think what Vinoly was suggesting when he said he did not intend for this building(s) to be iconic, is that he wants it to be beautiful in a way that is derived from its function and detail and not from overt gymnastics...

regardless, it is IMO way too early to be making such decisive judgements about this design...

I can't help but look at this thing and think that it looks like a much larger version of the Columbus Plaza at 233 E Wacker. Love the height but even a little effort to be creative or innovative with the design wouldn't have hurt.

That PDF says 12 towers from Roosevelt to 18th, not Roosevelt to McCormick Place. Then you say it will be park from Roosevelt to 16th.

That leaves 16th to 18th open for development. Really? Not gonna happen any time soon, that's for sure. Not with the Air Line there.

Well, ok, if the city pays for a connection between 18th and LSD and 15th and Prairie/Indiana, then someone might be able to make an economic case for some development along that road.

Definitely agree with you here. For example, in my case, although I was very pro-X/O when it was proposed, I'm not necessarily offended by the idea of townhomes (now being built by Golub and a JV partner) on that site. I'm absolutely offended, however, by the idea of only townhomes on this significant parcel at Indiana/13th. That is way too far under highest and best use, and as mentioned makes part of the South Grant Park Wall merely a veneer - when it should be backed along its length fairly thick with towers.....

love the proposal! much better than what was planned there before and very Chicago Style. Lets hope they build both towers :cheers: