At YoChicago, redundancy isn’t our raison d’etre. But sometimes we just can’t help it, as with the disturbing proliferation of condo projects with stupid names. Today’s example: The Parvenu, at Sheridan and Leland — a section of Uptown that’s still pretty gritty despite the presence of the new Border’s complex a few blocks to the west.
You can only imagine that the developers thought giving the building a French name was intended to add that touch of class, but didn’t they bother to look it up in a French-English dictionary? If they had, they’d have realized that “parvenu” is a pejorative description of a newly arrived, social climbing pretender, which certainly isn’t the way anyone would want to pigeonhole him- or herself.
But here’s the twist — despite the dumb name, it’s actually sort of an interesting building, with jazzy geometry, a flashy curtain wall and a cool sunshade at the top. Unfortunately, the architects, like many designing tall buildings today, haven’t figured out how to make the base of the building — containing the parking levels and the entrance areas — anywhere near as appealing as the tower.
At street level, the Parvenu looks more like a prison or a bomb shelter than an apartment building, which may help explain why, a year after completion, the owners have been unable to rent any of the retail spaces on Sheridan.