A cheer (but not three cheers) for the new Embassy Suites Hotel at 511 N. Columbus Drive, just west of Navy Pier, which had the misfortune to open shortly before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the subsequent travel slump that is making usually bustling airports and hotels as quiet as small-town libraries.
Unlike the bland, concrete boxes of the dismal, year-old North Bridge tourist district to the west of Michigan Avenue, this 17-story, 455-suite hotel is at least striving to be architecture with a capital “A.” It doesn’t reach that exalted plateau, but it has its moments, like a soaring, light-filled atrium and a stunningly transparent wall of glass that forms an enormous picture window, nearly 200 feet tall, that offers dramatic views of the lakefront.
Unfortunately, these features turn out to be exceptions in a squat, split-identity structure that fails to synthesize the familiar look of 1920s Art Deco with today’s sleek modernism. Still, they suggest that this ambitious building could mark a key transition, one that leads its architect and client to do truly contemporary work.
Designed by Greg Randall of the Chicago architectural firm DeStefano and Partners, with interior design by the Gettys Group of Chicago, the Embassy Suites holds down the western flank of developer Dan McLean’s $1.5 billion River East Center, which is itself just one part of the 13-acre city within a city called River East that the developer’s MCL Co. is constructing between Michigan Avenue and Navy Pier.
River East Center also consists of a 58-story condominium tower on its eastern end and a four-story structure, due to house shops, a spa and movie theaters, that sits between the hotel and the high-rise. These structures, it should be noted, do not stand apart from one another, but form a single, interconnected building several hundred feet long.
The project’s full urban impact only will become clear when the condo tower and the rest of the project open next year. But one already can observe that this mega-building forms an imposing “Chinese wall” between Grand Avenue and Illinois Street, which flank it on the north and south. A street-level arcade slicing through the building would have made River East Center far more permeable and pedestrian-friendly, like the nearby North Pier, a McLean-owned property that is another part of River East.
Architecturally, River East Center breaks the mold for McLean, who rose to prominence by developing handsome low-rise residential buildings, with arches and other retro details, in Chicago neighborhoods such as Lincoln Park.
It also represents a departure for Embassy Suites, whose previous efforts have been fade-into-the-background, contextual buildings where the atrium is tucked into the core of the building, like a hole in a doughnut. The brick-faced Embassy Suites at 600 N. State St., a decent building that sits across State from the Tree Studios, is a good example.
Emphasizing space
The new hotel, in contrast, not only reveals its 15-story atrium through a wall of astonishingly clear glass, but also forcefully expresses the big space with a vaulted steel and glass roof. Instead of being doughnut-shaped, the plan is a “U” — with rooms stacked around three sides of the atrium, and nothing but open space in the middle of the hotel’s south wall.
Yet, perhaps owing to McLean’s penchant for traditional forms or city planners’ desire that the new hotel relate to nearby postmodern buildings like the NBC Tower, these strongly contemporary gestures are mixed with assorted Art Deco details and compositional devices (spires, zigzagging aluminum panels and receding facade planes) that evoke the still-popular 1920s style.
An integrated design
The idea, as architect Randall demonstrates in a quick sketch, was a single, integrated design, a modern version of Art Deco that consisted of solid, towerlike masses on the flanks with the atrium’s void in between. But it doesn’t fly.
A 100-foot-tall base, which houses the hotel’s ground-floor entrance, as well as meeting rooms and movie theaters that spill over from the adjacent Cineplex, is far too big for a building of this comparatively modest size — just 318 feet. The base throws the hotel’s proportions out of whack, making the structure seem squat and ponderous — the very antithesis of Art Deco’s trim vertical look.
Worse, the base is clad in precast concrete, a concession to budget-cutters that robs the exterior of the warmth and quality that more expensive limestone would have provided. Yet even if limestone had been used, the hotel still would consist of a glassy top sitting awkwardly on a masonry bottom — more like two buildings than the unified statement the architect had intended.
For all those faults, the steel and glass vaults that shelter the atrium and the building’s specially designed, south-facing glass wall are a pleasure to behold. (The rest of the structure’s exterior, incidentally, is done in a conventional, reflective glass curtain wall.)
Using the same highly transparent glass that architect James Stewart Polshek employed with poetic effect at the new Hayden Planetarium in New York City last year, Randall has created on the hotel’s south end what is, in effect, a 190-foot-tall picture window — braced only by a grid of white-painted steel trusses and structural glass supports.
The glass wall reveals elevators as they whiz up and down, animating the otherwise stolid facade. Its sense of transparency is even stronger because sidewalk passersby can look into the hotel and spy the sky, visible through the cathedral-like ceiling vaults.
This feature adds a new twist to the celebrated Chicago tradition of structurally expressive design. An urban design bonus is that the big glass wall beautifully culminates a view of the Embassy Suites from the Sheraton Hotel, just to its south.
The hotel’s interior is better than its stylistically compromised exterior, though it, too, is not without faults.
Pedestrians enter through a high-ceilinged, ground-floor lobby along Columbus while motorists arrive in an arched carport, located on the building’s ground-floor level. Then visitors take elevators to a sky lobby more than 100 feet above the street.
Pluses and minuses
This type of sky lobby arrangement has a downside, removing the hotel from the life of the street and making it seem a protected world unto itself. But in these nervous times, that may not strike many security-conscious people as a bad thing. In any event, the architects have handled the atrium well, designing a crisp, light-filled space that is grand without being grandiose.
“We didn’t want people to feel that they were a dot in a giant atrium,” Randall says. They shouldn’t feel that way because the atrium has handsome, hand-crafted materials, like a Brazilian slate floor. Randall also broke up the vast atrium with 40-foot-tall bamboo trees and a 40-foot-long, 12-foot-high waterfall. The result is not exactly homelike, but it still creates the sense that you are moving through a relatively intimate room within a room.
There are some problems — green walls that are too vibrant and blocky fire stairs that mar two corners of the atrium. Even so, the overall result represents a welcome departure from the darkened Hyatt Hotel atriums that Atlanta architect John Portman made so popular in the 1970s.
Opens up to the city
Here, instead of turning in on itself, the hotel opens to the city and sky, nowhere more so than when the visitor rides one of the glass elevators and looks through the south-facing glass wall to a jaw-dropping view of the skyline and the lakefront. Better yet, the natural light filters through windows along the hallways into guest rooms that ring the atrium. Guests can close shutters if they want to darken the rooms or preserve privacy.
The Embassy Suites is no prize-winner, but it certainly shows promise. Chicago has more than its share of such “not quite there yet” structures, like Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Promontory Apartments in Hyde Park, which led to the triumph of the Mies steel-and-glass high-rises at 860 and 880 North Lake Shore Drive.
That’s a standard McLean and Randall can strive for as they work toward more fully modern expressions than this one.
