Archinect - News

One of Helmut Jahn's final designs distinguishes itself on the Chicago skyline

2024-11-05T12:05:00-05:00

Critics are coming out in favor of a distinctive new residential apartment tower from Jahn after the building opened at the south end of Michigan Avenue in Chicago in June. The 1000M project is a new high-rise accommodation meant to anchor the historic thoroughfare with 73 total stories and 738 units.

Image credit: Tom Rossiter

Helmut Jahn is credited with leading its revised design from 2015 until his death in 2021, joined by a team that included Philip Castillo, Lynda Dossey, Peter Hayes, and Lucie Rigaldies.

Image credit: Tom Rossiter

Residents enjoy access to its ground-floor lobbies from both the street level and a stately porte-cochere located on the western axis. The manipulation of air rights for this project allowed the design's floor plates to gradually expand at the northeast or southeast corners from a rectangular base into a more softened parallelogram form.

Image credit: Tom Rossiter

A seven-level parking structure with 325 spaces services the building, which is draped...

Blair Kamin: ‘Writer underwriting writer’

2024-10-24T17:59:00-04:00

The [Chicago] Tribune, which had been reducing staff and budgets for years before Alden Global Capital accelerated the process with its May 2021 purchase of Tribune Publishing, did not replace Kamin, just as it did not replace several other culture writers who left the paper. So the retired critic took matters into his own hands.

We covered the debut of the Windy City’s newest critic Edward Keegan back in August along with the restart of work on 400 Lake Shore Drive. His position is being funded by Blair Kamin after Kamin stepped aside in January 2021. He explains the situation to Northwestern's vaunted J-school's Local News Initiative blog.

"I decided that if initially they weren’t going to make a grant, that I would make a grant myself to do this," he tells of his personal philanthropy. "But it’s complicated, because when you have a so-called donor-advised fund, you can’t give money legally to a for-profit enterprise. So you need to find a nonprofit to give the money to, and they, in turn, will give the money to the for-profit. So it took forever going through a variety of possibilities."

Whither 400 Lake Shore Drive? Chicago critic Edward Keegan asks for a firm answer

2024-08-15T13:05:00-04:00

Chicago’s most infamous vacant site of the 21st century is finally getting a tower. But will we be getting the architect’s best vision — or just half of a good design? A look at some recent history of large projects in the city offers some guidance, and reason for concern. I have no reason to doubt Related’s stated intention to build both towers, but if history is a guide, it’s more likely than not that the single tower will never see its sibling.

The Windy City's newest architecture critic, Edward Keegan, explains 400 Lake Shore Drive (designed by SOM's Chicago office with David Childs) against five other similar projects that never saw the original vision of their architects fully realized. He says a potential void might become a permanent edifice where once Santiago Calatrava endeavored to build his 2,000-foot Spire tower if Related Midwest is not kept to task by city officials and an active group of "concerned citizens."

"We need a planning mechanism that pays more attention to the interim state of larger projects without becoming too enamored with the complete design," he writes further for the Tribune's newly established architecture column. "Because city building is always a work in progress, as a number of orphan towers can attest."

The first half of the project broke ground in June and expects to be ready for its initial tenants to move in by the fall of 2027.