If you drive the Edens Expressway with any regularity, the Optima project at Old Orchard Road is an ever larger presence in your consciousness, and it’s looking pretty great overall.
Optima’s design sensibilities aren’t for everybody. Although some stodgy locals have publicly denounced its downtown Evanston high-rises with distinctively colored balconies, they’ve sold briskly. In truth, of course, this probably has very little to do with the jazzy design and much more with the downtown Evanston market for condos, which has been pretty ravenous.
Recently, the spec high-rise market has undergone a sort of amazing transformation architecturally. After decades of some of the most extreme specimens of spectacularly boring design — Dearborn Street north of the river is the best place to see this particular variety of urban blight — developers are using base building architecture as a sales tool, with a vengeance. This trend has been covered admirably both here and elsewhere, so we needn’t elaborate.
Before there was a bandwagon to hop on, if you found interesting design in a spec condo project, invariably it was because the developer was also an architect. Which is, of course, the story behind Optima.
David Hovey, who essentially is Optima, is probably the richest architect in Chicago because he is also the developer. Unlike certain of his publicity-happy colleagues, he keeps an extremely low profile because, well, he can. He doesn’t have to attract the attention of potential clients. All he needs is buyers, and they seem to have flocked to his projects, both here and in the Phoenix area.
In the meantime, he’s turned out some of the sharpest design of the last decade; the Old Orchard project looks like it will be another winner. The big issue: can the architecture and the skyline view outweigh the din of cars and trucks whizzing by below? Stay tuned.