It’s Chicago’s only high-rise east of Lake Shore Drive — dark, suavely curving, subtly reflective, a world unto itself whose impact extends far out into the world.
As Lake Point Tower, once the world’s tallest all-residential high-rise, celebrates its 50th anniversary this weekend, it’s an apt time to reflect on its legacy. The 70-story condominium tower, which sits just west of Navy Pier at 505 N. Lake Shore Drive, is both hero and villain, though it is more the former than the latter.
It is, by all accounts a spectacular and rare object — a poetic expression of curves in a city that worships the right angle. It’s a vertical marker for the horizontal sweep of Navy Pier. There is no other skyscraper quite like it, though there are imitators, which is the sincerest form of real estate flattery.
Its three-winged floor plan helped inspire the design of the tallest building on Earth, Dubai’s Burj Khalifa. Along with Marina City, it helped pioneer a new kind of downtown living at a time when Chicagoans were fleeing to the suburbs. Today’s generation of apartment high-rises outfitted with rooftop terraces, complete with swimming pools and greenery, follows its sybaritic lead.
Yet five years after its 1968 opening, Chicago passed the Lakefront Protection Ordinance, which forbade commercial construction from marring the city’s shoreline. And now, the urban renaissance it helped to begin, and new attitudes about the making of cities, have made its self-contained character seem fortresslike, standoffish.
If this iconic condominium tower were not so beautifully designed, it might be widely reviled for hogging a piece of the lakefront and turning blank walls to the street.
But look at it from afar and it melts your heart, standing, as it does, in splendid isolation from the forest of skyscrapers across Lake Shore Drive. There’s the city and there’s the lake, as different as earth and water, and then there’s this lovely vertical thing that draws them together — its undulating curves seemingly as fluid as the water.
In 1967, as contractors put the finishing touches on Lake Point Tower’s walls of glass and aluminum, the land to its west was filled with gritty factories, warehouses, silos and docks. Along with surface parking lots, they were what was left of an industrial park that began in 1857 when William Ogden, who had been Chicago’s first mayor, established the Chicago Dock and Canal Co. with help from his lawyer, Abraham Lincoln.
By the early 1960s, Ogden’s successors could see that the future of this land lay in real estate development — specifically, a high-rise district of offices and apartments. In those days, city officials encouraged high-rise residential development in this stretch of the shoreline, creating the opening that led to Lake Point Tower.
To jump-start growth, Chicago Dock leased a choice piece of lakefront property to two young developers, William Hartnett and Charles Shaw. Their architects, George Schipporeit and John Heinrich, both in their 30s at the time of Lake Tower Point’s 1965 groundbreaking, had studied at the llinois Institute of Technology, where they were imbued with the “less is more” philosophy of the school’s leader, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.
It’s often said — wrongly, it turns out — that Schipporeit and Heinrich based their Lake Point Tower design on Mies’ visionary but unbuilt 1921 plan for a glass-sheathed skyscraper on a triangular site in Berlin. In fact, the architects initially conceived the skyscraper as a cross-shaped design with four wings, not three.
To make the project fit the budget, the developers lopped off one of the proposed wings. That led the architects to work out a three-winged, purely curvilinear design that was further distinguished by its sleek, continuous surfaces — a “skin” architecture as opposed to the X-braced “bones” of the John Hancock Center, which would make its debut in 1969.
Lake Point Tower’s exterior had no corners and none of the balconies that clutter the facades of so many of today’s high-rise apartment buildings. In the final design, the architects turned one wing of the Y-shaped tower to the north to create a more dynamic, sculptural appearance. The difference between the final design and the original was the difference between poetry and prose.
In an interview, Edward Windhorst, co-author with Kevin Harrington of the book “Lake Point Tower: A Design History,” said: “George (Schipporeit) told me several times that every night when he said his prayers, he thanked the Lord that the first one didn’t get built.”
As built, Lake Point Tower resembles a large-scale version of the Brancusi sculptures Schipporeit admired: A sensuous object atop a base — in this case, the tower sitting atop a multistory parking garage, or podium, whose roof was lined with a park designed by the noted landscape architect Alfred Caldwell.
The park, a green roof before anyone used that term, was a private version of Caldwell’s renowned Lily Pool in Lincoln Park, with layered limestone outcroppings lining its lagoon, plus an artificial waterfall and, in a concession to modern tastes, a kidney-shaped swimming pool. Residents can look out from this artificial but still compelling wonderland at cars stalled on Lake Shore Drive.
Schipporeit had worked for Mies, designing exterior “curtain walls” of glass and aluminum for the master, so he knew how to put God in the details.
The tower’s elegant exterior walls of bronze-tinted glass and bronze-anodized aluminum drew from the vocabulary Mies had developed to perfection at New York’s bronze-clad Seagram Building, a lordly, premium-priced office headquarters that opened on Manhattan’s Park Avenue in 1958.
Once the world’s tallest reinforced concrete building, Lake Point Tower also has an innovative structural design by engineer William Schmidt. High-strength concrete combines with a triangular elevator core to stabilize the tower against the wind.
Aesthetically and structurally, the tower is all the more remarkable because it was designed in the pre-digital age, before powerful computers freed architects from the constraints of the right angle as never before.
Marina City, which was largely funded with union money, was initially marketed to union workers and others in the middle class. In contrast, by virtue of its design, prices and secluded location, Lake Point Tower has always attracted a more affluent crowd. Celebrities like Ryne Sandberg and Sammy Sosa have lived there. The tower, which now houses about 1,600 people in its 857 condominiums, some of which are combined units, went condo in 1988. (Studios start at $350,000 and the multi-unit apartments have sold for $2 million and up, according to property manager Mitchell Rose.)
The building’s appearance and affluence both caused a stir. Some praised the way it took Mies’ less-is-more language in a new direction. Others slammed it as a departure from the modernist credo that architecture should serve the masses, not just the privileged.
Lake Point Tower was talked about in the 1970s, Harrington said in an interview, as “the culmination or ruination of the modernist movement.”
Its visual drama is not reserved for far-away views. After your vehicle pulls into the podium and you head to the ground-floor lobby, you’re greeted with a circular cutout that affords a view, straight up, to the tower’s soaring curves.
The travertine-clad walls of the ground-floor lobby follow the understated Miesian manner. On the second floor are shops and offices, including businesses where you can get a vasectomy or get your nails done.
Outside the third floor is Caldwell’s 2.5-acre Skyline Park. Its aforementioned lagoon was once stocked — only temporarily — with koi. “Little did we know that we had blue heron nesting in the trees — they came down and ate the koi,” said Jo Ann O’Brien, president of the condominium board.
Not surprisingly, the condominums have drop-dead, panoramic views that are prized during the annual Air and Water Show when the Blue Angels zip by.
“They go below you sometimes. You can see their eyeballs, practically,” said Marcia Stanton, who lives on the 51st floor.
The ceilings are only 8 feet high, which is substandard in today’s condo market of 9- and even 10-foot ceilings. In the combined units, Harrington said, “you feel like you’re in a pancake.” But the expansive views compensate for the low ceilings, Stanton said.
On the 69th-floor roof, which spreads out below the small 70th-floor restaurant, railroadlike tracks guide an automatic window-washing machine around the tower. The views from up there are stunning — and they testify to the tower’s disparate influence.
By demonstrating that a residential high-rise far to the east of North Michigan Avenue could be profitable, Lake Point Tower encouraged Chicago Dock and Canal to clear the industrial buildings that remained on its land in the 1960s.
Today, with some notable exceptions, that land is filled with apartment, condominium and offices, though none of them, with the possible exception of the postmodern NBC Tower, come close to matching Lake Point Tower in design quality.
Elsewhere on the lakefront, other developers seized on Lake Point Tower’s example, though the architects they hired could not match its elegance. The most obvious imitator is Harbor Point, the dark, curving 1970s residential high-rise at 155 N. Harbor Drive.
The tower’s impact also is evident in what you don’t see from the rooftop: other high-rises east of Lake Shore Drive.
Even before ground was broken in 1965, the tower’s developers asked Schipporeit and Heinrich to prepare plans for two more three-winged towers on land to the south. When the developers promoted the plans, members of the press raised objections to the prospect of two more giant towers that would crowd the shoreline.
The controversial 1971 construction of the Lakeside Center at McCormick Place ultimately led to the passage of the Lakefront Protection Ordinance, which banned any more commercial construction east of Lake Shore Drive. And when the city of Chicago reconfigured the drive’s notorious S-curve and moved the road eastward in the 1980s, the Outer Drive East apartment building of 1963 at 400 E. Randolph St. and the Harbor Point apartment building were both “relocated” west of the drive.
But the most notable evidence of Lake Point Tower’s influence is halfway around the world — in Dubai.
When Chicago architect Adrian Smith, then at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, sought inspiration for what became the Burj Khalifa, he looked out from the window of the Skidmore offices at 224 S. Michigan Ave., glimpsed Lake Point Tower in the distance and said to himself, “There’s the prototype.”
The tower’s thin wings, which bring inhabitants close to the windows, were an apt model for a supertall tower containing a hotel and apartments. Views, after all, are what sells the units.
The under-construction Jeddah Tower in Saudi Arabia, by Smith and Gordon Gill, which will be about 3,280 feet high and will supplant the 2,717-foot Burj as the world’s tallest building at its expected completion in 2020, also uses the three-winged model.
That Lake Point Tower has had such an influence speaks to the way Chicago’s architectural expertise is being exported worldwide.
The tower is a singular achievement. And for the sake of the lakefront, let’s hope it forever stays that way.
Blair Kamin is a Tribune critic.
bkamin@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @BlairKamin