Seen from a distance, Vista’s stepping silhouette recalls the pronounced setbacks of the Willis and Trump towers. It all adds up to a tower that does exactly what a skyscraper is supposed to do: appeal to the viewer at many different scales. The stacked frustums form the stems, which grow in height from east to west, making an effective transition between the wide-open horizontality of the lakefront and the soaring verticality of downtown’s skyscrapers.įollowing the angled path of East Wacker, the stems are offset, giving the tower eight corners instead of four - a plus for the developers, who rely on panoramic views to sell condos. She follows a similar path at Vista, where her building block is truncated pyramids, called “frustums,” that have the functional advantage of creating different floor sizes. The tower also enlivens the continuous row of buildings, or “streetwall,” of East Wacker, with a glass-walled projection, which the architects call the “cube.” Among other uses, it will contain the hotel’s restaurant and glow like a beacon, beckoning pedestrians from Michigan Avenue.Īt Aqua, Gang’s design method was to begin with small units - the curving balconies, which captured views - and organize them into mesmerizing stacks.

OLIN landscape architects of Philadelphia are handling that part of the project. In another urban design plus, Vista is turning what used to be the dull dead end of East Wacker into a small park, open to the public, that will overlook the river and Navy Pier. 9, 2020.Ĭity officials would be smart to extend the passageway to the Riverwalk by installing brightly colored crosswalks and better lighting on the lowest level of Wacker Drive. The ground-level passage under Vista Tower between Lakeshore East and the Chicago Riverwalk nears completion on Nov. A boldly curving, scooplike wall forms an inviting gateway to the passageway from the park. That opens the way for Vista’s chief ground-level amenity: a well-lit passageway that leads from the handsome park at the center of Lakeshore East to the downtown Riverwalk, just to the north. Their underlying structure - concrete cores in the outer stems, linked by a spinelike wall in the middle stem - frees the central stem to bridge over the ground. The stems reflect Gang’s desire to make the tower a good neighbor as well as a landmark. Unlike the single-columned Brancusi sculpture, Vista consists of three connected high-rises, or stems, the highest of which reaches 1,191 feet - a level topped in Chicago only by the 1,451-foot Willis Tower and the 1,389-foot Trump International Hotel & Tower. Yet the Chicago tower, which Gang designed with Julianne Wolf, a principal at her Chicago-based firm of Studio Gang, is no copycat. Sharp-eyed observers have noted a similarity between Vista’s suggestion of endless verticality and sculptor Constantin Brancusi’s Endless Column, a Romanian war memorial whose stack of truncated pyramids symbolizes infinity and infinite sacrifice.

An announcement about a new hotel operator is expected soon.Ĭhicago’s bKL Architecture served as architect of record. In July, Dalian Wanda’s hotel unit, which had been expected to operate Vista’s hotel, agreed to sell its 90% equity stake in the tower to Magellan. The developers were China’s Dalian Wanda Group and Chicago’s Magellan Development Group.

Chicago skyscraper concrete