[Chicago Skyscrapers, 1934-1986, published by University of Illinois Press, is out now–available on Bookshop.org and Amazon.com, among other outlets.

Gateway Center I-III (SOM, 1963-72)

Weeks after the Hartford’s opening in April 1961, Bruce Graham’s concerns about predatory New York developers and architects proved relevant.  Erwin Wolfson, chairman of Morse Diesel and the leading figure behind Manhattan’s Grand Central City, disclosed plans to invest $200,000,000 in air rights developments over Union Station’s riverfront railroad tracks, stretching four blocks between Madison and Van Buren.  Mayor Daley had arranged the deal, bypassing the city’s Planning Commission and surprising the Commission’s chair, Ira Bach, who nevertheless expressed support, pointing out that it would represent a “major step” in realizing the Central Area Plan.[i]  Air rights projects like the Prudential, the Merchandise Mart, and the Daily News Building had made Chicago a pioneer in developing infrastructural space.  Grand Central City (later Pan Am) followed Chicago’s lead by developing the space over that station’s tracks in New York and was being built to designs by Emery Roth, Walter Gropius, and Pietro Belluschi even as Wolfson worked out the deal in Chicago.  At fifty-nine floors and nearly 3 million square feet of space, that project’s bulk and its “clumsy” connections to the surrounding streets were drawing withering criticism, though.[ii]  Concerned about initial reactions to the Grand Central project, Daley pressured Wolfson to employ Chicago architects and demanded that the development include “abundant” urban amenities along the River.[iii]

Wolfson hired Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill’s Chicago office, and they presented a scheme for the northernmost parcel in November 1961—an 18-story rectangular block running parallel to the river, occupying just half of the site, and set atop an elevated pedestrian plaza.  In deference to Bach’s association with the Central Area Plan, Wolfson suggested that, if the city moved ahead with the Transportation Center, the building could be built on the block to the south.  Wolfson was confident enough in the market and the site’s proximity to the Station that he announced the project would start without a confirmed major tenant.[iv]  “My reputation is at stake,” Wolfson told the Tribune in January 1962, committing to the project and predicting demand in the neighborhood for at least a million square feet.[v]

Wolfson died of cancer in June 1962, however, throwing the project into doubt.  His air rights options ran out, though the railroads and the city expressed interest in renewing them.[vi]  New York-based Tishman Realty and Construction took over his leases, keeping SOM on board and hiring Arthur Rubloff as their local agent.  Tishman was more ambitious than Wolfson had been. SOM released a revised design for them in January 1963, showing a 20-story steel frame clad in glass and black metal set on a riverfront promenade with plazas at the Madison and Monroe ends of the block.  An inset glazed lobby and projecting I-beam mullions made this design SOM’s strictest Mies’ interpretation yet, though with blue-green heat-absorbing glass that contrasted with the otherwise dark palette.  Office floors within extended north and south from a central core and the structure was tuned to the position of tracks below, with three track-spanning 45’ bays in the east-west direction and fifteen smaller, 18’ bays running north-south to reduce spans and, thus, vibration from trains underneath.[vii]  All told, Gateway I would contain 750,000 square feet and cost $20 million.[viii]

Reassured by Daley’s personal role and the promise of new investments in the West Loop, First National and Continental Illinois led Gateway’s financing.  This first tower broke ground in September 1963, as Tishman reported that 14 stories had been leased and that a second building, south of Monroe, would follow suit.  Originally planned as a four-story transportation center to meet the Central Area Plan’s goals, Tishman was so convinced of the market that it re-conceived this second phase as a twin to the first.[ix]  This first building opened in February 1965 and the second, a strict copy, broke ground that December.[x]  Steelwork for Gateway II began rising in the spring, of 1966, and Gateway I filled that August, with IBM, Weyerhaeuser, and Monsanto taking space in its upper floors.[xi]  Tishman began looking for the next logical expansion, taking an unfortunate cue from New York’s Penn Station, where they had been consultants for Madison Square Garden and Penn Plaza, projects that involved the demolition of the McKim, Mead, and White Penn Station.  In March 1967, Tishman vice president Perry Herst announced that the third phase of Gateway would rise above Union Station’s boarding platforms, replacing the stone, steel and glass head house from Graham, Anderson, Probst, and White’s 1922 structure.  This, Herst explained, would keep the development contiguous, rejecting a proposal from the city to build farther west in the West Madison urban renewal district.[xii]  Objections from Chicago’s burgeoning preservation movement failed to convince the City to stop the demolition.

Tishman presented SOM’s preliminary plans for the third Gateway Tower in February 1969—initially a steel frame with aluminum and glass curtain walls, much like the first two buildings, but with different proportions—a square plan of 35,000 square foot floor plates extended to 35 stories.  Much of SOM’s work went into weaving Union Station’s pedestrian access and baggage services through the structure, but as the design progressed, Graham brought Fazlur Khan in to consult on the structure as well.  Khan had, by this point, engineered so-called tube structures for the Hancock and Chestnut-DeWitt apartments (see Chapters 6 and 8), and he proposed the ‘composite tube’ to address the unique problems of Tishman’s site.  Perimeter walls of steel columns encased in structural concrete would form a stiff exterior shell. In contrast, a lightweight, more flexible structure of steel alone would support its interior—a more literal interpretation of the Monadnock’s hybrid.  The exterior shell alone would provide lateral resistance, eliminating heavy shear walls that would have interfered with the tracks below. Light steelwork supporting the center of the building could be supported on smaller, shallower foundations, limiting the amount of deep caisson work required between tracks.[xiii]  Tishman’s executives approved the idea, and Khan’s revised design began to take shape in early 1970.[xiv]

Tishman’s optimism was borne out as the third Gateway building topped out in 1971 when insurance brokerage Marsh & McLennan leased the top eight floors for 20 years—at $36 million, the largest commercial office lease in the city’s history.[xv]  That paralleled the Chicago Mercantile Exchange’s announcement that they would occupy a dedicated trading floor in an extension to the new tower, a cross-braced, cantilevered structure on Jackson Street.[xvi]  A new concourse for Union Station, meanwhile, swapped the spatial drama of the old, glass-roofed head house for 30,000 square feet of underground concessions and corridors on two 12’-0” stories between track and street level. 

As the complex opened in January 1972, Tishman announced the fourth and fifth Gateway buildings for the riverside site south of Gateway III, including a long-anticipated heliport and the half block just west of the second building.  But these were delayed by economic uncertainty and the politics of the 1970s—Tishman would not complete the final two Gateway blocks, designed by a new generation of SOM architects, until the 1980s.  The three original buildings continued to attract tenants, but they also came to stand for SOM’s formulaic approach.  The three buildings’ relentless grids and the simple replication of the second structure left critics unimpressed. Paul Gapp, while acknowledging the “cool and proper” Miesian design of the first two, thought the “uncomely” third phase was unforgivable given the demolition of Union Station’s concourse and its replacement with “ugly…lower-level spaces.”[xvii]  The three buildings served as effective backdrops, however, to the riverfront promenade, christened “Riverfront Plaza” as the first two buildings opened.

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[i] Thomas Buck, “Skyscrapers Planned on Air Rights Site.”  Chicago Tribune, July 20, 1961.  3.

[ii] Edgar Kaufmann, Jr., “The Biggest Office Building Yet…Worse Luck.”  Harper’s Magazine, May 1, 1960. 220.

[iii] Thomas Buck, “Skyscrapers Planned on Air Rights Site.”  Chicago Tribune, July 20, 1961.  3.

[iv] “Wolfson Group Plans Transit Hub.”  The Wall Street Journal, Nov. 17, 1961.  24 and James M. Gavin, “$20,000,000 Skyscraper First Air Rights Project.”  Chicago Daily Tribune, Nov. 17, 1961.  C7.

[v] James M. Gavin, “City Skyscraper Plan Definite—Wolfson.”  Chicago Daily Tribune, Jan. 14, 1962.  A9.

[vi] “Attempt in Chicago to Build on Air Rights is Being Re-Evaluated.”  Wall Street Journal, July 2, 1962.  24.

[vii] “Train Yard Towers.”  The Architectural Forum, Vol. 128, no. 2.  March, 1968.  73.

[viii] “Start Construction of First Gateway Center Building.”  Chicago Tribune, Sept. 18, 1963.  C5.

[ix] “Start Construction of First Gateway Center Building.”  Chicago Tribune, Sept. 18, 1963.  C5.

[x] Alvin Nagelberg, “2d Gateway Building to Rise.”  Chicago Tribune, July 30, 1965. C7 and “Begin No. 2 building in Gateway Center.”  Chicago Tribune, Dec. 2, 1965.  G7.

[xi] “Start Plaza Twin’s Steel Construction.”  Chicago Tribune, May 29, 1966.  E5 and “Occupancy is Completed in 1^st Gateway Building.” Chicago Tribune, Aug. 28, 1966.  E1.

[xii] Alvin Nagelberg, “Tishman May Build Over Union Station.”  Chicago Tribune, Mar. 1, 1967.  E6.

[xiii] “Massive Core [sic] Supports Thin Steel Frame.”  Chicago Tribune, Nov. 22, 1970.  E1 and “Innovation at Gateway Center.”  Chicago Tribune, May 23, 1971.  D1.

[xiv] Richard Ellis and David Billington, “Construction History of the Composite Framed Tube Structural System.”  Proceedings of the First International Congress on Construction History. (Madrid, January, 2003).  799-810.

[xv] Alvin Nagelberg, “Gateway Lease a Record.”  Chicago Tribune, Mar. 25, 1970.  D9.

[xvi]“Future Mercantile Home.”  Chicago Tribune, May 19, 1970.  C7.

[xvii] Paul Gapp, “River’s Newest: One Works, One Doesn’t.”  Chicago Tribune, Apr. 15, 1984.  K28.

[Chicago Skyscrapers, 1934-1986, published by University of Illinois Press, is out now–available on Bookshop.org and Amazon.com, among other outlets.

Lake Point Tower (Schipporeit and Heinrich with Graham, Anderson, Probst and White, 1965-1969)

Chicago’s most visible residential tower, rising 645 feet from the base of Navy Pier, sprung from a cladding detail and a helicopter flight, matching a dramatic, undulating curtain wall and technical developments in air conditioning to a singular lakefront location.  Owned by Chicago Dock & Canal, the site was occupied by declining warehouses and factories adjacent to the obsolete Navy Pier.  Chicago’s port facilities’ move to Calumet drew industry with them, though, and the area’s loft structures gave way to parking lots.  By the early 1960s, Chicago Dock & Canal was more real estate company than active port, selling its land to developers who hoped to transform the grimy, polluted acres of fill and asphalt into a desirable residential neighborhood.

Lake Point Tower’s developers and architects were part of a growing network of skyscraper experts centered on Chicago.[i]  William Hartnett, a New York lawyer assisting Herbert Greenwald on Metropolitan Structures’ Mies-designed Newark apartment project, worked with Charles Shaw, an Alcoa employee who was develop prototype aluminum housing and high-rise components in St. Louis.  Alcoa was considering a demonstration project on the Dock & Canal property and Hartnett and Shaw invited architect George Schipporeit to join them on a helicopter tour of the site in 1962.  Schipporeit, a Nebraska native, came to Chicago in 1955 studying at IIT before going to work for Alfred Caldwell and then Mies.  He had worked on curtain walls with integral fan coil units for Mies’ Newark and Detroit projects before moving to St. Louis in 1960 to work with Shaw at Alcoa’s Cupples subsidiary.[ii]  After joining Shaw for the aerial tour, Schipporeit recalled thinking that the property was “the best site in the country.”[iii]  Alcoa passed on the opportunity but Hartnett and Shaw formed their own development company for the site and, after finding initial schemes by Perkins & Will unimpressive, Hartnett turned to Schipporeit, who in turn brought his IIT classmate John Heinrich on board.  Heinrich (1928-1993) had been a field architect for Mies on Lafayette Park; he took Schipporeit up on his offer of “the biggest gamble in the world.” Hartnett and Shaw brought Los Angeles-based Fluor into the project as financiers, while Schipporeit and Heinrich associated with Graham, Anderson, Probst, and White for technical assistance and with William Schmidt for structural engineering.[iv]

The site, east of Lake Shore Drive between Illinois and Grand, was massive but “marooned,” in Schipporeit’s words, a half-mile from Michigan Avenue.  Zoning would allow over 1230 apartments, they estimated.  Wanting to leave as much open space as possible, Schipporeit and Heinrich accommodated these within a point tower rather than a slab.  Given the site’s extraordinary views they developed a cruciform plan with rounded corners to provide lake and skyline panoramas.  Set diagonally at the far eastern end of the site, atop a podium containing parking and a landscaped deck, the four wings of the tower were to radiate from a central core.  As the design progressed, Fluor grew concerned about renting so many units at such a remote site.  Marina City, they pointed out, had only 900 units and Outer Drive East just 945.  One of Fluor’s executives suggested slicing one arm of the cruciform off, leaving a three-lobed form that reduced the number of apartments, offered more open views and greater privacy, and—with some fine-tuning—eliminated inefficient fire stairs at the corridor ends of the four-armed scheme.[v]  Schipporeit and Heinrich took to this idea, first laying out a three-lobed plan around the site’s east-west axis, accessed by long automobile ramps from the west end of the site.  They found the resulting form “too static.”  By rotating the tower 120°, however, so that one arm pointed due north, the tower fit more comfortably on its base, allowing more generous space for automobile access from Grand Avenue, an enclosed drop-off they developed with an open skylight in the roof, offering a dramatic, upward view of the tower. 

The scheme’s three arms implied a triangular core— structurally efficient but difficult to arrange.  Schipporeit and Heinrich turned its elevators toward a central lobby on each floor that led through the core’s corners to radial hallways, with fire stairs and service shafts wedged into the triangle’s vertices.  The apartments were laid out to maintain an even depth tangential to the corridors and core walls.  The resulting soft transitions from the tower’s curved corners to its long re-entrant curves created a sleek form that, wrapped in a black aluminum and dark glass curtain wall, was arresting and allusive.  Critics would compare this curving glass wall to Mies’ 1922 Glass Skyscraper’s curving concrete floors and transparent glass walls. Schipporeit and Heinrich were happy to claim this lineage, but this was a superficial comparison.  Mies’ early schemes would have stood just 30 floors tall, less than half Lake Point’s height, and he never developed mechanical services or lateral bracing for them.  Their floor-to-ceiling glass curtain walls without intermediate mullions remained infeasible even in 1965. 

Schipporeit and Heinrich’s curtain wall experience with Mies gave them a good understanding of their infiltration, condensation, and thermal problems.  Schipporeit recalled constant visits to the Esplanade Apartments to survey and propose fixes for leaks.  Improved extrusions and sealants addressed these problems but combining code-required natural ventilation with mechanical heating and cooling loaded curtain walls with functions that competed for space.  Schipporeit had developed integral, knee-height cabinets for the Detroit and Newark projects that could accommodate either fan coil units or operable, grilled apertures supplying fresh air.  He and Heinrich adopted this detail for Lake Point Tower, with cabinets that alternate between housing electric fan coil units and screened openings, both integrated with the curtain wall sill panels.[vi]  Each window panel runs from one cabinet’s top to the next floor, framed by two horizontal mullions for each story, all set behind a screen of vertical aluminum I-beams.  The result is a delicate, woven texture like the Esplanade and Commonwealth curtain walls—but wrapping an evocative form.  The same cladding panel repeats more than 11,000 times and the building’s lack of sharp corners means no special detailing was needed, as in Mies’ towers, to end one plane and begin another.[vii] 

The undulating tower was topped by a rooftop mechanical unit and, above that, a circular pavilion containing a private lounge for residents.  At the base, the podium was designed to accommodate 700 cars and retail facilities within a minimalist brick box—often criticized for its forbidding, 30-foot-high walls, which were more appropriate in the building’s original context of grim industrial buildings and abandoned docks.  The base does contain one piece of immense structural drama—the 108’ clear span that forms the automotive drop off and leads on to the ‘rotunda’ on the Grand Avenue side, while the podium’s roof houses a garden designed by Caldwell.

At 70 stories, Lake Point was one of several Chicago structures to claim the title of world’s tallest reinforced concrete structure.[viii]  William Schmidt, Chicago’s most prolific flat-plate concrete engineer, designed the tower’s core walls to taper from 30” at the base to 12” at the 56^th floor, above which they are replaced by simple columns.  Eight-inch lightweight concrete slabs connect to the core and columns with reinforced joints to form a monolithic, wind-resistant structure.  Schmidt specified high-strength concrete throughout the columns and core walls, minimizing their bulk and weight, and these savings allow the entire building to sit on a layer of good hardpan 90’ below the surface, tied to the core walls with a 24’ deep grade beam.  Schmidt deployed a network of strain gauges throughout the foundations and superstructure to test his calculations after the building was occupied, making the building a laboratory for wind engineering for years after its completion.[ix]

Crane Construction began work in November 1965 as the project faced protests upset at its intrusion on the lakefront.  Lake Point was the third project to be built east of Lake Shore Drive, after Outer Drive East and Solomon, Cordwell, and Buenz’ Harbor Point Tower, both at the end of the extended Randolph Street.  For decades, Chicago builders had a gentleman’s agreement that no construction would take place between the Drive and the actual Lake—not that there were that many potential sites wedged between the two—and Lake Point drew pointed arguments about the tradition of a public shoreline.[x]  These were matched, however, by genuine fascination as the tower grew out of its foundations at the rate of a floor every three days, reaching the 16^th story by October, 1966 and the 29^th by January, 1967.[xi]  Construction was slowed by a building trades’ mechanics strike in January, 1967 and the operating engineer’s strike that spring.  But by the end of 1967 the structure was topped out, with Daley praising the project’s “young entrepreneurs for another fine edifice for the future of urban living.” By then it was occupied by over 100 tenants, who moved into the lower floors as construction continued above them.[xii]  More than half of the building’s units were leased by the time upper floors were completed in April 1968.  Its rooftop lounge— “a masculine flavor carried out in a French Norman interior”—and a street-level steak restaurant sealed the building’s appeal when they opened in 1970.[xiii]

Lake Point Tower won the local AIA chapter’s top architectural award and was one of fourteen projects recognized with national AIA awards in 1970.  Hartnett and Shaw planned expansions of the original in 1965, when Schipporeit and Heinrich proposed two duplicates of the three-armed tower to the south and west of the original and in 1971, when they modeled three boomerang-shaped slabs flanking the entry to Ogden Slip.[xiv]  None of these proceeded beyond massing studies, but Schipporeit and Heinrich did collaborate with Hartnett and Shaw on one other large project, the 22-story State National Bank at Orrington and Davis in downtown Evanston (1968-69), a more doctrinaire Miesian prism, after which Heinrich left to pursue teaching full time.[xv]  Schipporeit continued designing commercial and residential towers, including the 13-story Eisenhower Tower in Maywood (1973), the mid-rise Atrium Village on Division Street and 18-story One Rotary Center in Evanston (1977), the 33-story Asbury Plaza in River North (1981), and the 38-story Lake Shore Tower on east Ohio Street (1986).  His design for the Cor-ten clad parking garage north of Mies’ IBM Building (1974) wrapped vertical cladding elements around the elevated sweep of Wabash Ave. in a subtle nod to IBM’s vertical mullions, repeating in principle the visual effect of Lake Point Tower’s articulate aluminum piping.

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[i] See the outstanding Edward Windhorst and Kevin Harrington, Lake Point Tower: A Design History.  (Chicago: Chicago Architecture Foundation, 2009) for an authoritative, detailed history of the project.

[ii] “Build a Room with Aluminum Panels?: Versatility Noted.” The Christian Science Monitor, July 06, 1962. 12.

[iii] Interview with George Schipporeit, Illinois Institute of Technology Architectures Studios.  10 October 2012, 1600-1800.

[iv] “Lake Point Tower: The First Skyscraper With an Undulating Glass Wall.”  Architectural Record, Vol. 146, no. 4.  Oct., 1969.  130.

[v] “How High to Build?  Need Tells.”  Chicago Tribune, Feb. 8, 1970.  E1 and Edward Windhorst and Kevin Harrington, Lake Point Tower: A Design History.  (Chicago: Chicago Architecture Foundation, 2009).  6.

[vi] Display ad, “All Electric Design [Lake Point Tower].”  Architectural Record, Vol. 146, no. 4.  Oct., 1969.  278-279.

[vii] “Lake Point Tower: The First Skyscraper With an Undulating Glass Wall.”  Architectural Record, Vol. 146, no. 4.  Oct., 1969.  130 and “Tallest Apartment Tower Will have Aluminum Skin.” New York Times, June 4, 1967. 1.

[viii] “Chicago Keeps Building Them High with Concrete.”  Chicago Tribune, May 15, 1966.  F1.

[ix] “New Tower to be a Giant Test Station.” Chicago Tribune, Jan. 9, 1966. 1-e1 and Barbara Schmidt Hornkohl, “The Structural Engineer: A Retrospective of the Engineering of William Schmidt” in Nancy Gavlin, ed., Engineering in the City of the Century. (West Lafayette: Purdue University, 1998).

[x] “On The Streets.” Chicago Tribune, Oct. 28, 1965. 1-e9.

[xi] Alvin Nagelberg, “Reveal Floor Plans, Rent Schedules for Lake Tower.”  Chicago Tribune, Oct. 7, 1966.  D11 and “Construction Lags: 70,000 Men Off Job.”  Chicago Tribune, Jan. 28, 1967.  B7.

[xii] Alvin Nagelberg, “Lake Point Twinkles on Skyline.”  Chicago Tribune, Dec. 9, 1967.  D7; Alvin Nagelberg, “Lake Point Topped Out.”  Chicago Tribune, Dec. 29, 1967.  C9; and Glenn Fowler, “Eager Tenants Lived in Tower as it Went Up: Tenants at Topping-Out.” New York Times, Feb. 11, 1968. 2.

[xiii] Kay Loring, “Lake Point Tower Opens Continental Restaurant.”  Chicago Tribune, Aug. 2, 1970.  F5.

[xiv] Alvin Nagelberg, “Plan Lake Shore Dr. Apartments.”  Chicago Tribune, June 23, 1971.  C9.

[xv] “Developer Tells Need for Evanston Tower.” Chicago Tribune, June 18, 1967. 1-d1.

[Chicago Skyscrapers, 1934-1986, published by University of Illinois Press, is out now–available on Bookshop.org and Amazon.com, among other outlets.

Executive House. (Milton M. Schwartz ,1959). 

Hotels were one of the last sectors to resume construction in the Loop after the twenty year building hiatus; by the end of the 1950s, no new dedicated hotel building had been built in downtown Chicago since Holabird and Root’s 23-story Chicagoan was built as an extension to the Morrison Hotel, on West Madison, in 1932.  Seeing an overdue opportunity developer George S. Lurie, along with his partner, Jerrold Wexler and two local lawyers, spent much of the decade assembling parcels on Wacker Drive at the northward bend in the River.[i]  In 1956, working with Draper and Kramer, they arranged a $3,500,000 loan from Aetna Life Insurance to cover 50% of their costs.  In June of that year, they announced plans by Milton M. Schwartz, then enjoying the acclaim from the attention given to his 320 Oakdale and Constellation apartment towers, for a 37-story skyscraper containing a unique mix of units that blurred the distinction between apartment and hotel.[ii]  Apartment hotels had a long and mixed history in Chicago—they formed a critical supply of short- and medium-term housing for middle class workers who were able to afford daily or monthly leases but preferred not to commit to longer contracts.  Most were built to provide studio—or, in the term of the day, ‘efficiency’—units, with small kitchenettes that were typically supplemented by cafes or restaurants.  Their appeal to young singles was apparent in constant controversy over their construction.  Often opposed by neighborhood organizations who feared the moral implications of night clubs and large groups of unmarried residents, they saw a gradual change from single-sex to co-ed in the 1950s along with more of an appeal to the lifestyle benefits of the arrangement.  Lurie and Wexler, though, claimed a different motive. In talking to investors, they found reluctance to fund pure residential development in the Loop itself.  More certain of the market for business travelers, and recognizing the aging stock of hotel rooms downtown, Aetna had been willing to fund a ‘hotel’ but not an ‘apartment’ project, and the investors carefully announced the project as a ‘luxury hotel’ while instructing Schwartz to design the building with kitchenettes in every room.  The investors signed a management contract with Condado, a Chicago hotel company, and gradually recognized that the central area was “vastly underbuilt in the apartment hotel field,” where efficiencies and kitchenettes were associated with flop houses on skid row more than with luxury living.[iii]

The hotel’s program reflected Lurie and Aetna’s hedged bets on the future of downtown living; more than 85% of the building’s 448 units were studios—essentially hotel rooms with kitchenettes—providing for both hotel guests and for longer term renters.  A restaurant and café on the ground floor replicated the usual apartment hotel amenity, while a cocktail lounge on the roof offered views of the city and, because of the project’s siting, of the River’s main branch.  All interiors were provided with air conditioning, and a 200-car garage in the basement could be rented daily or long term—as at the Constellation, Schwartz specified an automobile elevator to save space.  Wexler and Lurie proposed rents that reflected the additional services that the hotel arrangement provided—at $150 per month for a studio, rents were about a fifth higher than rates for high-end rentals within walking distance of the Loop and daily rates of $16 were similarly aggressive for local hotels.[iv]  But tenants and guests would receive more than access to parking, bars, and a restaurant; finished in ‘gleaming metal and glass’ and with balconies providing fresh air and views, the freshly-named Executive House would also, its backers argued, appeal to the growing taste for urban living among young residents.  Initial inquiries were promising; Loop corporations were particularly avid, signing long-term deals for units on what Wexler called the “New York basis,” where company personnel and guests could be put up in their dedicated units while visiting on business.[v]  But responses from prospective hotel guests were also strong, and Condado recognized another potential market in tourist and executive families, who would find the suites and kitchenettes particularly attractive.[vi]  Ultimately, just eight of the building’s 37 floors were reserved for permanent residents.

Schwartz initially proposed a cylindrical design for the site but, as at 320 Oakdale, he faced stiff resistance from financial backers for such a radical scheme and instead focused, again with structural engineer Henry Miller, on maximizing views and efficiency.  The site was a particularly narrow one, restricted at the rear by Holabird & Root’s 1932 Automobile Club building.  Schwartz and Miller’s plan responded with a tightly integrated reinforced concrete structure that relied on shear walls placed ever 40 feet to stiffen a 20 x 20 column grid.[vii]  Four centrally located elevators were tied directly to the concrete structure (a mistake that would plague the development with excessive mechanical noise until renovations in the 1980s), across a double-loaded corridor from two interwoven staircases that occupied a single fire shaft.  At the ends, one-bedroom suites took up the leftover site dimensions with subtle angles that wedged as much lettable area into the parallelogram of a site; the result was a supremely efficient floor plan of fourteen units per floor—six studios and two one-bedrooms, ten of which had balconies, six of which overlooked the River.[viii]  Miller’s design was, briefly, the tallest reinforced concrete structure in the United States, and, at 37 stories, the slab was, also briefly, Chicago’s tallest residential tower.[ix]  Interiors of the furnished units, along with the hotel lobby and restaurant, were designed by Morris Lapidus, then riding the popular success of the Miami Beach Fontainebleu, specified gold-upholstered settees to complement blue-green and gold finishes throughout the ground-level restaurant and bar.[x]  The “Executive Dining Room and Lounge” was pitched not only to guests and residents, but to the downtown business community as “an atmosphere of muted magnificence” in the “ultra-modern new 40-story skyscraper hotel.”[xi]

Lapidus’ trademark excess occurred within a project that featured notable technical advances in its foundations and cladding, as well as its record-breaking structural design.  The building broke ground, with Mayor Daley in attendance, at the end of January, 1957, and right away the job site attracted attention for its caisson drilling technique.  Schwartz, shocked by the poor safety record of foundation excavation in the city, demanded that the contractor, C.A. Tharnstrom & Co., use a French Benoto drilling machine that relied on its own dead weight to screw 3-1/2 foot diameter steel tubes into the ground, after which soil could be safely extracted by bucket from within.  The method eliminated the need to send workers into the fragile excavations—though Schwartz insisted on being lowered, himself, to take samples once the machine hit bedrock, but it also handled ground water more readily than traditional methods and it lessened noise and vibration, both critical on the tightly confined site.[xii]  The Benoto machine was a success, drilling on average one caisson a day over a two month period over 110 feet deep.

Surrounding Miller’s reinforced concrete structure, Schwartz designed a glistening stainless steel skin that functioned as both enclosure and, on the building’s balconies, as a parapet.  Grand Rapids-based Haskelite manufactured the metal panels, laminating 26-gage stainless sheets to 4’ x 8’ foam cores 1” thick.[xiii]  These were held in place by aluminum z-bars and steel angles connected to embedded plates in the adjacent concrete slabs, all of which provided a precise, even surface that had none of the oil-can effect that marked Inland Steel’s cladding, a few blocks away.[xiv]  The resulting elevation was, like Schwartz’ 320 Oakdale, expressive of its slab construction, presenting a powerful horizontal grain to the river that was capped by the asymmetrical cocktail lounge with bright neon signage—a sleek, stylish contrast to the art-deco rocket of Lincoln Tower next door.  Fully enclosed units in the center of each floor formed a light vertical counterpoint, but Executive House’s overwhelming sense was that of cool, trim horizontality, emphasizing its views out and over the River and City instead of the grasping skyward reach of the earlier generation. Executive House proved enormously popular; Schwartz’ careful planning and Lapidus’ interiors did, in fact, appeal to the broad range of business travelers, families, downtown professional singles, and corporate guests that Wexler and Lurie had imagined, and the building filled with eager residents and guests even as construction finished in February, 1959.[xv]  While the building itself enjoyed continued success due to its location and its amenities, its namesake parent company—renamed to reflect Executive House as its flagship property—floundered in the late 1960s after disastrous expansions including an airport hotel in San Francisco and resorts in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean.  The company filed for bankruptcy in 1971, but Wexler and his company maintained an interest in the building.  Under management by Ramada in 1986 the building underwent a renovation that enclosed the original balconies and replaced Schwartz’ original clear glass with deeply-tinted, blue-green panes that have obscured the original, more elegant proportions.[xvi]  The project’s success was proof that there was a strong market for both hotel and residential construction downtown; it also extended the height to which reinforced concrete seemed viable in skyscraper construction. 

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[i] Ernest Fuller, “Work Begins on Downtown Apartments.”  Chicago Daily Tribune, Jan. 31, 1957.  D7.

[ii] Ernest Fuller, “Plan Skyscraper on Wacker Dr.: Tallest Apartment House in City.”  Chicago Daily Tribune, June 21, 1956.  3.

[iii] Ernest Fuller, “Many Inquire of Leases in Wacker Bldg.”  Chicago Daily Tribune, Mar. 25, 1957.  C5.

[iv] Ernest Fuller, “Many Inquire of Leases in Wacker Bldg.”  Chicago Daily Tribune, Mar. 25, 1957.  C5.

[v] Ernest Fuller, “Many Inquire of Leases in Wacker Bldg.”  Chicago Daily Tribune, Mar. 25, 1957.  C5.

[vi] “Loop to Have 1st New Hotel in 2 1/2 Decades.” Chicago Daily Tribune, Sep 27, 1957. 1-c9.

[vii] “New Hotel in Midwest Offers Unusual Facilities: Executive House, Chicago, IL.”  Architectural Record, Vol. 125, no. 5.  May, 1959.  215-218.

[viii] “New Hotel for Chicago’s Loop [Executive House].”  Architectural Forum, Vol. 3, no. 2.  August, 1959.  124.

[ix] “New Hotel in Midwest Offers Unusual Facilities: Executive House, Chicago, IL.”  Architectural Record, Vol. 125, no. 5.  May, 1959.  215-218.

[x] Richard J.H. Johnston, “Chicago’s New Hotel Ready to Open.”  The New York Times, Jan 25, 1959.  X31.

[xi] “New Hotel for Chicago’s Loop [Executive House].”  Architectural Forum, Vol. 3, no. 2.  August, 1959.  124; and “Executive House Announces the Opening…” Display ad, Chicago Daily Tribune, Feb. 28, 1959.  18.

[xii] Ernest Fuller, “Many Inquire of Leases in Wacker Bldg.”  Chicago Daily Tribune, Mar. 25, 1957.  C5; see, too, Schwartz Oral History, ARTIC [????]

[xiii] “Executive House Steel Face Shines in Dark.”  The Chicago Defender, Jan. 31, 1959.  4.

[xiv] “New Hotel in Midwest Offers Unusual Facilities: Executive House, Chicago, IL.”  Architectural Record, Vol. 125, no. 5.  May, 1959.  215-218.

[xv] “Guests Filling New Hotel as Work Goes On.”  Chicago Daily Tribune, Jan. 10, 1959.  B5.

[xvi] Karl Plath, “Executive House Puttin’ on the Glitz to Edge Rivals.”  Chicago Tribune, Sept. 13, 1987.  [????]