While some of Chicago’s late 19th-century tall buildings, such as the Reliance Building at State and Washington streets, were predominantly glass, it wasn’t until the arrival of Mies van der Rohe and the post-World War II building boom that the glass building become a staple of almost every city’s skyline. More recent developments surrounding energy efficiency and climate change have slowed glass’ dominance, but architects’ preference for large glassy volumes have led them to employ new tricks to maintain the desired aesthetic.
That’s the case at Solverre, a new 12-story residential apartment building designed by locally based Valerio Dewalt Train (VDTA) and facing the lakefront in Uptown. Its choice piece of real estate sits immediately south of Weiss Memorial Hospital and on the north side of Wilson Avenue, between Marine Drive and North Clarendon Avenue. The site offers views of Montrose Point, Harbor and Beach, which form one of the larger expanses of lakefront parkland on the North Side.
Solverre’s 303 apartments are a mix of studio, one- and two-bedroom configurations with monthly rents ranging from a low of about $1,800 to north of $3,800 for a larger unit on the top floor. Its 12-story height fits easily within the surrounding context.
A two-story-tall base fills the entire 1-acre site, with the tower configured as a U that presents two narrow elevations to Wilson Avenue, a subtle reference to the twinned apartment complexes that are common north of Belmont Avenue along the lakefront. The entrance is at the southeast corner of the building at Wilson and Marine Drive, with the double-height public lobby running the length of the east side of the building facing the park. The building’s concrete structural frame is exposed in the public lobby and clad in brick or metal panels across the building’s facades.
The overall composition uses the gridded frame as its organizer, echoing the structural grid as Chicago architects have done since shortly after the Great Fire. But each elevation is quite different. On the east facing the park, the grid is fully expressed with cantilevered brick-clad balconies as bookends. On the south facing Wilson, the two ends of the U are predominately brick with vertical ribbons of glass accentuating the structure’s height. On the west facing Clarendon, the grid is least mannered and might even be mistaken for an older, more Miesian, building. On the north, a brick tower toward the east end denotes the elevators.
Contrary to the common organization of a tall building into a base, middle and top, the architects intentionally omit a well-defined top. “We were starting to dematerialize it as you got to the top of the building,” VDTA Principal Joe Valerio says. This strategy allows the structural columns to end just slightly higher than the glazing.
It’s not the most jarring thing you’ll see on a building this week, but it’s not the dematerialization that Valerio describes either.
Interestingly, the architects expose one typically interior feature to public view: the fire stairs. Located on the south ends of the building, their visibility is meant to encourage residents’ use of the stairs while helping to animate the facades. “If a stairway has natural light, it’s 30 times more likely that people will use it to move up and down through a building,” Valerio says. Additionally, each floor’s elevator lobby has a window facing north, providing residents with views and onlookers with activity.
Balconies on contemporary residential buildings can be a blight, often conceived as awkward appendages. But Solverre’s designers have used small balconies on the building’s northeast and southeast corner apartments to sharply frame the overall building. Black brick accents the building at those balconies, clads many of the columns on the building’s lower floors and frames the fire stairs at the south elevation. But the traditional material was constructed in two very different ways. At the base and at the corner balconies where people can walk right up to the wall, they are full bricks hand-laid in the manner used for centuries. At higher elevations, they are thinner units set in precast concrete panels that were craned into place.
While Solverre presents as a predominantly glass tower, it’s not quite what you think it is at first sight. Much of the building’s glazing is backed by insulation that creates a more energy-efficient envelope than a typical Miesian glass building from the 1950s or ’60s. In fact, only 46% of the exterior wall is vision glass or actual windows, more akin to a traditional masonry building one might find in the neighborhood. But depending on the light, the success of this strategy varies considerably. And it isn’t always as convincing as the architects might hope.
On a recent sunny day, it was only too obvious where the actual windows are located; we can only speculate that Mies might not be impressed.
Solverre is a pricey rental building built on some of Chicago’s best real estate facing the lake. Neighborhood affordable housing advocates voiced their disapproval during the project’s planning phase, but then-46th Ward Ald. James Cappleman, who retired last year, backed the proposal as it now stands. The developer satisfied its affordability requirements by paying $3.1 million to a neighborhood nonprofit to support another housing development. Valerio argues that luxury housing such as Solverre actually helps create affordable housing in neighborhoods such as Uptown, citing San Francisco as an example: “They have figured out that the way to create affordable housing is (to) let developers develop more expensive apartments, and you’ll free up more affordable apartments in the city.”
But while Solverre is successful as an aesthetic addition to the city, this glossy glassy building, regardless of architectural quality, doesn’t provide every answer to the range of housing that Chicago’s neighborhoods need. That might be expected in Streeterville or the Gold Coast, but the more diverse neighbors in Uptown had rightfully hoped for more.
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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