Description

This project description is an excerpt from the longer article “Tall Towers”. For a comparative analysis and further data on this and all other categories including accompanying graphs, please see the article “A Turning Point”.

Another recent project of note from North America is The Contemporaine by Perkins+Will, located in the River North area of Chicago on a modest 0.08-hectare site. Completed earlier in 2004, the 15-storey-tall building is situated in a neighborhood with an eclectic mix of redundant and converted warehouses, water towers, low-rise commercial and new high-rise dwellings that were developed in response to then Mayor Richard M. Daley’s interest in the rapid development of the city’s downtown core. The Contemporaine is composed of a level of retail on the ground floor along with the entry lobby, three floors of parking stacked above, and 11 floors of apartments and penthouses floating on top of this podium. Constructed with cast-concrete floors supported by slender columns, the building is clad in glass from floor to ceiling, thereby affording a high degree of transparency to the structural and material elements in this contemporary, poetic composition that clearly pays tribute to Le Corbusier and the modernist movement. Variation on the façade was cleverly achieved by reversing the orientation of every other window frame, creating a “Mondrian-esque mullion pattern”.
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The building mass is broken down not only by the lightness of the glazed façades, but also the use of deep slots, the narrow, cantilevered balconies on all four sides of the building, as well as the emphasis on the vertical four-storey-tall columns visible along the podium and a solitary one on the rooftop supporting the exposed-concrete portico-like structure. Inside, the apartments are served by a central core of elevators and stairs alongside a central corridor that opens up to each unit. Within the units, the service functions such as the bathrooms and storage rooms are located closer to the core, thereby freeing up the façade and the views beyond to the habitable rooms. Ensuring a degree of flexibility in openness within the units was also of importance to the architects, and thus they opted for open plan kitchens in the living rooms, which are placed close to other service areas and away from the windows. Designed originally for 52 units, many were later combined by owners who purchased multiples, yielding a final tally of 28 units, ranging from 86 square meters to 341 square meters in size.

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Drueding et al., “Residential Architect Design Awards ’05: Project of the Year – Contemporaine, Chicago,” 42.

Even then, the overall residential density is high at 650 dwelling units per hectare. At night, the building glows from within, endowed with a captivating theatricality that plays on its modernist architectural elements.

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Originally published in: Peter G. Rowe, Har Ye Kan, Urban Intensities: Contemporary Housing Types and Territories, Birkhäuser, 2014.