The St. Regis Chicago

Now the third tallest building in the Chicago skyline, the design for The St. Regis Chicago asks the question: What if skyscrapers can be porous connectors, rather than barriers, for the public realm? Defining a new edge of the city, the tower tightly knits the downtown Lakeshore East community to its surroundings with unprecedented urban connections and enhanced public access to the Chicago River. Housing condominiums, a 5-star hotel, restaurants, and amenity spaces, the building’s residential and hotel amenities combine at the upper levels to create a vibrant social center. Looking up from the river and park, the tower presents itself as three interconnected volumes of differing heights. Moving rhythmically in and out of plane, the overall flowing appearance of the building is the result of an alternating geometry between these three volumes. An innovative structural system allows the central volume to be lifted from the ground plane, creating a new essential pedestrian connection between the Chicago Riverwalk and the nearby community park’s outdoor recreational facilities. The essential “building block” of the architecture is a 12-story truncated pyramid called a frustum. Stacked and nested, right-side up and upside-down, the frustums to form the tower’s flowing volumes. The unique geometry creates a tall building with eight corners instead of four, providing inhabitants with daylight and fresh air from multiple orientations, while also allocating green space atop the building’s various heights. Reinforcing the tower’s flowing appearance is a gradient of high-performance glass that has been optimized for solar performance. Six different types of glass coatings are used for the hybrid window-wall system. Produced using cutting-edge coating-on-demand technology, each type of glass is optimized to perform environmentally for its floor-to-glazing ratio. These coatings also create distinct shades of blue green that recall the hues of Lake Michigan. Targeting LEED Silver certification, the St. Regis Chicago’s key sustainability measures include a water retention cistern for irrigation of the amenity terraces atop the building’s various heights, proximity to public transit options, bicycle storage and changing rooms, car charging stations, and all-underground parking.