The city’s Department of Planning and Development has approved plans for two new high-rises proposed by Kargil Development Partners with a design by Lucien Lagrange that proves the talented architect should stay the hell away from the Gold Coast. Lagrange’s designs for that and other tony Near North neighborhoods have been dull, vintage-looking schmaltz. With edgier projects such as Erie on the Park and Kingsbury on the Park, Lagrange proved he was capable of something original and artistic, and the new towers will hammer that point home.
Plans for the unfortunately named X/0 (is the builder going for the tic tac toe market, trying to foster a warm huggy-kissy feeling?) call for two towers, a 44-story north tower with 289 condos along 17th Street and a 34-story south tower with 216 units that will stand behind a row of 10 townhouses along Prairie Avenue. The floor plates expand and contract as the eye travels up the towers, so that the high-rises slope gently, with curves too subtle and willowy to be called voluptuous.
Lagrange has compared the buildings to figures dancing, and in this case, the metaphor isn’t architectural pretension. The towers work not as a single unit, but as a beautifully matched pair, straining toward each other and away in a compelling frozen dance. Their lower halves pull together sensually (sure that sounds weird, but take a look at the rendering), while on the upper stories the high-rises move out to a more seemly arm’s length. They are complementary and bend in tandem, but like dancers, they are not symmetrical or perfectly matched. The shapes and heights of the buildings vary, as do the skillfully designed balconies, whose patterns echo each other without mirroring.
The $250 million development has the support of the Near South Planning Board and the Greater South Loop Association, according to a news release from Frankel & Giles, the marketing agents, and that makes sense given the bland, unimaginative towers that have dominated the neighborhood. The South Loop was still a largely blank slate in the early ’90s, before the high-rises started to proliferate, and think what a showcase it might have been if we’d insisted on buildings with this sort of ambitious design. The probability that buildings like these and the latest from Museum Park will set a new tone in the South Loop is probably low, but it’s nice to hope.
The development will have three green roofs and a long list of amenities – swimming pool, deck, etc. centered in a 13,000-square-foot “lifestyle center,” where residents can take classes and get massages. A model is scheduled to open in November on site. Condos in the first-phase north tower will range from the $200s to more than $1 million.