Onterie Center is a 60-story lakeside tower that looks a little like John Hancock Center done in concrete and was created by the same design team. It is a distinguished engineering achievement even if it is not the loveliest thing to arise on the downtown skyline lately, and so deserves more than casual attention.
The ”Onterie” name seems unnecessarily gimmicky until you stop to think about the problem of giving marketing identity to a building swimming around in that burgeoning but still amorphous area east of Michigan Avenue and north of the Chicago River. Onterie is just west of Lake Shore Shore Drive between Ontario and Erie Streets, and takes its name from the latter two
thoroughfares.
Yet the new residential and office tower announces its presence in a still more assertive way by means of the X-shaped braces that march up its east and west sides and the zig-zag shapes on the north and south. That is where the Hancock analogy begins.
Onterie was designed by architect Bruce Graham and the late Fazlur Khan, who long worked as a team in the Chicago office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Khan was generally considered to be the nation`s most brilliant structural engineer at the time of his death in 1982.
When the two men collaborated on the Hancock design in the late 1960s, Khan gave that building a strong and rigid tubular steel frame in which the external X-shaped trusses were left exposed in a typical Chicago-style proclamation of a skyscraper`s strength.
Khan had to wait for years to do much the same thing with concrete, because he needed an appropriate site and building type. When the Onterie job came along, he got his chance–and it turned out to be his final skyscraper.
Concrete ordinarily tends to become too expensive for tall buildings such as Onterie because of the cost of making it strong enough to withstand high winds. Khan`s bracing system provided the strength at relatively modest expense, however. The strong exterior frame also permitted the use of fewer interior columns, thus increasing floor layout flexibility.
One big difference between Onterie and the Hancock is that in the latter, the X-shaped steel trusses cut across many windows in ways that are not always pleasing to tenants and that present problems in hanging drapes and blinds.
Khan solved that at Onterie by using solid concrete panels set into the exterior walls in pleasing patterns that tie together the building`s columns and beams. The panels eliminate a few small areas on each floor where windows would otherwise be, but the loss is minimal and the Hancock effect is avoided. In its organization of space, Onterie also follows the Hancock: indoor parking, shops and office space on lower floors and apartments on top (from floors 14 through 59). There is also an 11th floor ”sky lobby” with a swimming pool, health club and other amenities that are de rigueur in a rental apartment building these days. But that is where the Hancock resemblances end. All buildings present changing appearances from remote and close vantage points, but at Onterie the differences are extreme.
From a distance, Onterie`s X`s are bold and clear, and cab drivers seem able to distinguish the building from neighboring highrises even if they have just arrived from Sri Lanka. Still, distant views of the building also give its bottom a clumsy, splayfooted look caused by lower stories sloping sharply outward on both the Ontario and Erie sides.
As you approach the building on foot, these factors reverse themselves. The wall patterns appear to fade away and the sloped bottoms suddenly seem to be making friendly gestures appropriate to the life of the street.
It`s too bad Graham couldn`t figure out an esthetic solution that worked from both perspectives, but this is not the only time he has failed at the critical point where a building meets the ground. Hancock Center has always appeared to be levitating slightly because of an inappropriate band of white travertine interceding betweeen sidewalk level and the 100 stories of black aluminum cladding above. The base of Sears Tower (another Graham-and-Kahn building) was a visual mess until a more intelligently scaled entry structure was tacked onto its west side last year.
In any event, Onterie improves as you draw nearer and harbors a few surprises–some of them quite pleasing.
Onterie is actually two connected buildings. Next to the main 60-story tower is a 12-story office structure whose front wall facing Ontario cants off to create a space topped by a canopy. The spacious atrium formed at this juncture of the two buildings leads to a pedestrian arcade that runs the full width of the block between Ontario and Erie. Flanking the atrium are separate entrances to the two buildings, and a fourth portal on the Erie side is reserved for apartment residents.
By far the handsomest interior feature of Onterie is its marvelous glazed ceramic tile floor done in several shades of blue and gray in diamond and other diagonal shapes that echo the patterns on the building`s facades.
French-born artist Juan Gardy Artigas created the underfoot mosaics, which run throughout Onterie`s interior ground level areas in counterpoint to oak paneling applied to walls and other surfaces. Credit Graham for deciding that the floors should not be boring, and Artigas for a first-rate
performance. Their effort is part of a national architectural trend–although like most good things in architecture, the notion of decorative floors is a couple of thousand years old.
Onterie`s office spaces form a solid rank across the slanted lower floors of the tower as well as the smaller companion building. A pair of atriums cut into the north and south sides of the tower admit extra daylight into office interiors.
The building`s 594 apartments are mostly convertibles and one-bedrooms ranging in size from 471 to 933 square feet. They are conventional, unflawed by any quirks of layout that I could detect and more or less what the sophisticated rental shopper expects to find in a building of this kind. One amenity worth noting for its unusual character is a laundry room on the uppermost floor of the building where–while your sheets are drying–you can stroll around a broad terrace and get a smashing 360-degree view of the city. A few finishing touches remain to be made at Onterie. By far the most important is a tile wall mural (also by Artigas) dedicating the building to the memory of Fazlur Khan, whose work on the project posthumously captured the highest award offered by the Structural Engineers Association of Illinois. The memorial in the main entrance atrium should be in place within a few weeks.
”Faz” Khan, as his close friends called him, was an extraordinarily warm, gentle and humane man. Onterie tells us something of his creativity and his sense of order and logic in the making of a tall building. At a time when too many American architects are little more than cosmeticians, the memorialization of Khan is all the more welcome.
