[ardecila]

Why even have apartments at all? Seems like a natural site for a large hotel instead of a small one, and with a mixed-use program they need two different cores and access. A large hotel could even market to small conventions and work out an arrangement with Amtrak so the spaces off the Great Hall could be used as meeting spaces.

This design doesn’t kill me, I love how solid it looks from an oblique angle. Seems appropriate to go on top of a clunky limestone pile like Union Station. With Goettsch, I was afraid we would get some blue glass thing that was truly a UFO. This is one place where beige is a good idea, IMO, especially if it’s a good quality precast or terra cotta. The larger rendering appears to show a Morris Adjmi-esque “flange” on each of the beige panels, so up close it will probably resemble a beige version of Landmark West Loop, using beige powder coated sheet metal (not a bad thing necessarily). The floor-to-floor heights are really squat, though... seems like they could make the proportions a little better by raising the ceiling heights.