Near South’s new giant gets it right
NEMA Chicago’s architect keeps rental high-rise in line with city’s architecture
It’s no coincidence that the nearly complete NEMA Chicago skyscraper, which at 896 feet is Chicago’s tallest rental high-rise, bears a strong resemblance to Willis Tower. The architect, New York’s Rafael Viñoly, is a fan of our muscular skyline giant.
The comparison is impossible to miss. Even the most casual observer can glimpse it in NEMA’s resolutely rightangled geometry and the way its cluster of nine vertical sections gradually peels away, leaving one to soar to the summit.
Fortunately, the outcome is a vigorous reinterpretation of Willis, not a slavish copy. And that should come as a relief for anyone who cares about Chicago’s skyline.
Apartment buildings are notorious for low budgets and lower aesthetic aspirations. A visual flop at NEMA’s prominent site — on the south edge of Grant Park and near the busy corner of Roosevelt Road and Michigan Avenue — would have left a lasting, unavoidable eyesore.
Viñoly, whose previous works include a business school and hospital at the University of Chicago, avoided that trap by doing things the old-fashioned Chicago way: with a directness that verges on bluntness.
“That’s what Chicago is all about — a no-nonsense approach to almost everything,” said Viñoly, who worked on NEMA with Chanli Lin, a partner at his firm.
NEMA sports no torturous, digitally enabled curves or cutesy, hat-shaped tops. Instead, we’re treated to a straightforward expression of the building’s structure and functions, with just enough artistic license and attention to the urban context to create a skyline silhouette that is compelling from all angles.
Though the tower can be faulted for its chilly street-level presence, it is still one of the finest efforts of the current building boom.
Developed by Miami-based Crescent Heights, NEMA belongs to a wave of super-thin, supertall residential towers that are remaking American skylines and becoming lightning rods for critics of income inequality.
Viñoly’s 432 Park Avenue in midtown Manhattan, a 1,397-foot condo tower that is both freakishly thin but appealingly simple, may be the most visible of these skyline disrupters.
Like NEMA, it’s an exercise in stark straightforwardness: A grid of large windows set in an exposed concrete frame. But unlike 432 Park, NEMA is not a slim white monolith.
Instead, it consists of three stacked parts: a sitefilling base; a square midsection with a southern extension that looks like a giant flight of stairs; and a top portion with multiple setbacks. Together, these parts form a sculptural whole that evokes Willis even though the two buildings’ structural systems are quite different.
At Willis, nine rigid interlocked steel tubes, each 75 feet square, create an immensely strong, relatively lightweight, highly economical framing system. Engineers call this system, which is visible to passersby, a “bundled tube.”
NEMA repeats this nine-square geometry, but the squares are half the size of those at Willis, owing to the need to keep floor sizes small and apartment dwellers close to coveted panoramic views.
The structure is a core and outrigger setup that resembles a skier braced by poles. From a massive central core, thick concrete walls extend to perimeter columns that help brace the tower against the wind.
Viewed at city scale, NEMA is an instant landmark that serves as a skyline bookend for the 1,136foot Aon Center on Grant Park’s north end.
Taking its cues from the cliff-like row of historic skyscrapers that frames Grant Park’s western side, NEMA turns toward Grant Park in a manner that is appropriately wall-like. To the south, where such restraint is not necessary, the skyscraper becomes dramatically sculptural, spiraling upward as a result of its multiple setbacks.
Apartments that line the north and east fronts of the base conceal an internal, multistory parking garage from view. The southern extension nicely cascades downward to nearby midrises and townhouses.
Architecturally, NEMA is at once calm and lively; proudly exultant but not, for the most part, standoffish.
The tower’s perimeter columns simultaneously express the core and outrigger structure and accentuate the tower’s verticality. Wider-than-normal spans between columns open the apartments to panoramic views. Stacks of recessed balconies add depth and visual rhythms to the facade.
The exposed concrete exterior isn’t elegant, but neither is it crude.
Still, architects always have found it difficult to transition from the massive scale of huge, structurally expressive towers to the fine-grained pedestrian scale of the sidewalk. And so it is at NEMA: The main facade, a blunt grid along Roosevelt, does little to engage passersby. Worse, the west-facing end of the parking garage is exposed to the street.
To be sure, things will improve if a planned stainless steel mesh screen covers the exposed portion of the parking garage and Crescent Heights rents out ground-floor retail space.
But for now, there’s a sad irony: At the very time other developers are making Willis Tower more city-friendly by expanding its base and filling the expansion with shops and public spaces, NEMA is giving us a dose of the anti-urban stance of Sears Tower, as the building was known when it was finished in 1974.
Most passersby will never set foot inside NEMA, where apartments range from 420-squarefoot studios that start at about $1,800 a month to a penthouse priced at (gasp) $25,000 a month. But the interior is nonetheless noteworthy because it represents the latest volley in the amenity arms race that has made new apartment buildings the equal of luxury condominiums.
Among other bells and whistles, NEMA’s 70,000 square feet of amenities offers tenants an airy coworking space, a sports bar, a 25-yard indoor swimming pool, a chef ’s kitchen that can cook up room service meals, a gym with its own boxing ring and a huge outdoor deck. Residents who live on the upper floors (49 through 76) have their own intimate groundfloor lobby as well as a 48th-floor amenity zone. A larger lobby serves residents of the less expensive apartments on floors 2 to 47.
All this might come across as over the top, but New York interior designer David Rockwell has given NEMA’s interior a sense of clean-lined, understated modern luxury.
Drawing inspiration from the grid pattern of Chicago’s streets and NEMA’s exterior, Rockwell threads the four-square motif throughout the interior and uses wood floors and soft lighting to make the big apartment building feel more like a home than a hotel. The careful styling extends to the smallest detail within the units, like bathtub walls outfitted in a handsome tile grid.
As I toured NEMA, I wondered if it’s destined to become a self-contained, economically stratified refuge for those who can afford it. Why bother to venture outside if everything you need can be gotten inside?
But the same criticism might be lobbed at the vertical village of the former John Hancock Center, now 875 N. Michigan Ave., where you also can live, work and play.
NEMA’s residents will venture out, I suspect, just as those at the old Hancock do. The density and dollars they bring eventually will filter into the city. And there will be more vitality if Crescent Heights ever proceeds with its plans to build another Viñoly tower at the corner on the adjoining empty lot at Michigan and Roosevelt.
For now, we can be glad that NEMA has returned Chicago to its pragmatic architectural roots and endowed the skyline with a fresh shot of visual poetry. That’s better than an ugly concrete stalk along Grant Park.