New Homes Magazine: Modern Love (excerpt)

New Homes Magazine
Winter 2002/2003

Chicago is a bustling urban center, a great American city that was an important incubator for, if not the birthplace of, modern architecture. So it only makes sense that the housing its developers build as we enter a new millennium should be designed for 19th century London.

That, at least, seems to be the logic of countless builders, who replicate the same old styles in project after project. Some argue that buyers simply don’t want anything too modern or too original when it comes to their homes. Some say they’ve found a pseudo-Victorian formula that works, so why take a chance on something different?

The real estate boom of the ‘90s has to a small degree countered the arguments of builders and brokers against originality.

At least some brokers, bankers and builders are beginning to see an advantage to developments that can be separated from the crowd in a market that has seen an abundance of product and slower sales.

Most new residential projects remain fairly boring from an architectural standpoint, with one hard to differentiate from the next. But as the following photo illustrate, there is a small, perhaps even growing, movement here to build something new under the sun.

At the Sterling, 345 N. LaSalle, horizontal bands of concrete define a vertical span of glass at regular intervals until the pattern is playfully broken near the top with an all-glass section. Some corners are rounded and others squared off, a shape that begins with a dramatic 30-foot glass curtain wall lobby. But the design moved from the inside out, according to architect John Lahey, president of Solomon Cordwell Buenz & Associates. “The building got its shape from the units inside and trying to make the most of them,” Lahey says. “We worked on it to maximize the number of units with corner exposures, eight per floor. After we did that, we looked at possibilities for articulation of the form.” Lahey also wanted the highrise to act as a “gateway to the Loop” and sees this as a design that welcomes passersby from its riverfront perch.