The new 89-unit Encuentro Square affordable housing development in Logan Square is a smart addition to Chicago’s architecture with a compelling design that’s simple and straightforward, but layered with just enough detail to keep things interesting.
It’s located just north of The 606’s western end. When the popular elevated trail opened a decade ago, there wasn’t a lot there at its western terminus. The McCormick YMCA opened its doors just north of the trail in 2018, but while its facilities serve its neighbors well, its architectural design is desultory at best.
Encuentro Square changes that calculus.
The two-building complex was designed by locally based Canopy / architecture + design, which has been practicing since 2009 and is best known for its work in the affordable housing market and what Canopy principal and founder Jaime Torres Carmona dubs the “social impact space.”
The project’s name is Spanish for “to gather,” “to connect,” “to engage” — which describes how the project aspires to relate to its Logan Square neighborhood. The $67.5 million development currently consists of two buildings: There’s a four-story L-shaped structure at the corner of West Cortland Street and North Hamlin Avenue and a six-story canted structure at the corner of West Cortland and North Ridgeway Avenue. The two buildings provide 89 affordable apartments that are available to families and individuals with incomes at or below 60% of the area’s median income. And 55 of the units can be rented with Chicago Housing Authority vouchers.
The property had long been home to a single-story manufacturing facility. It was acquired by the Trust for Public Land in 2014 while The 606 was still under construction and sold to the city of Chicago in 2019. The city demolished the old building in 2021 and remediated the land before donating it to the current development.
The complex is set back at Hamlin and Cortland to provide a small public plaza at the four-story building’s entrance. The six-story building is entered off Hamlin where the south end of the building steps away from the sidewalk to help diminish its 200-foot length and better define the complex’s private interior courtyard. Both entrances open to the courtyard, and ground level interior spaces are devoted to various amenities for the residents. A new public park space will eventually be located south of the next phase’s single structure, adjacent to The 606’s terminus.
The buildings display a sophisticated use of very ordinary materials, an attribute it shares with many of Chicago’s best buildings. Much of the complex is clad in a white, horizontally corrugated metal siding. It’s not the most obvious choice for an apartment building. Rather, it’s a straightforward inexpensive “industrial” material that reminds us of the site’s more workaday past. But in Canopy’s capable hands, the expression is clean, sleek and modern.
At four and six stories, the buildings are a bit larger than most of their immediate neighbors, but they don’t feel hulking nor do they overwhelm. In order to create a sense of welcome to the neighborhood, the architects developed the six-story facade facing Cortland as a feature wall. The designers drew inspiration from the monarch butterfly, “a symbol for culture, resiliency and community,” Carmona said. But rather than apply a mural to the building, the architects chose to express the butterfly abstractly as architectural metaphor. This can be seen in the undulating movement of colored metal panels across the facades. They begin just four panels high about halfway down on Ridgeway, rise to two stories tall at the corner before soaring to the upper floors as the building’s mass turns into the new midblock courtyard.
And the monarch butterfly informed the complex’s palette as well: a combination of reds, oranges, browns and charcoal. The western half of the four-story building eschews the white corrugated cladding in favor of flat gray panels with gray corrugate insets. The gray structure has a hint of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, although its celebration of the building’s gridded frame is far more playful than the master could have tolerated.
The design of the windows is notable. Like most apartment buildings, each floor’s apartment layout is identical. But the designers shift the location of windows within the same interior spaces to create a more varied expression on the facades. Most windows are placed within boldly orange-hued aluminum “portals” that give the exteriors a sense of depth and texture. In particular, the windows really pop from the facades at the building’s curved corners. They produce an element of domesticity that’s often lacking in contemporary residential construction. And their placement is neither ordinary nor dull. The east building is more than 200 feet in length, and the designers wanted to suppress the mass a bit.
“As a really long apartment building, we wanted to slow down the length of the building,” Carmona said. “Using those portals allows there to be this sense of rhythm, but the sense of slow.”
One interior note that’s readily seen from the outside are the expressed elevator lobbies in the taller building. They each have floor-to-ceiling glass facing the courtyard with super-graphics calling out each floor that are visible from a block away. These lobbies provide intimately scaled social spaces for the residents while also creating a bold presence on the exterior.
Residents just recently started moving into their new apartments at the complex. And Encuentro Square is not yet done. There are plans for a third building that will stretch between Hamlin and Ridgeway that will more fully enclose the complex’s courtyard. Given the continuing need for affordable housing — and the high level of design they’ve already achieved here — this is new development that should happen as soon as possible.
Encuentro Square is a very sophisticated example of contemporary multifamily housing. That it’s 100% affordable housing is particularly noteworthy; many — even most — new “luxury” apartments throughout the city don’t do design this well. If every new building in Chicago achieved this level of design, we’d be much the better for it.
Edward Keegan writes, broadcasts and teaches on architectural subjects. Keegan’s biweekly architecture column is supported by a grant from former Tribune critic Blair Kamin, as administered by the not-for-profit Journalism Funding Partners. The Tribune maintains editorial control over assignments and content.
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