[Chicago Skyscrapers, 1934-1986, published by University of Illinois Press, is out now–available on Bookshop.org and Amazon.com, among other outlets.
1000 N. Lake Shore Dr. (1953), Sidney Morris
Mies’ apartments took center stage in coverage of Chicago’s apartment building, but other developments were influential locally, in architectural and financial terms. The 23-story slab that replaced the 1900 Edith Rockefeller McCormick mansion was the earliest among these. Harold Perlman, a lawyer and philanthropist who had established a reputation for fighting insidious banking practices, purchased the mansion and the entire block on which it sat in 1953. The site was among the most prestigious in the city, at the corner of Michigan Avenue, Oak Street, and Lake Shore Drive, with views over Oak Street Beach and along the ‘millionaire’s row” of East Lake Shore Drive that wrapped around the northern edge of Streeterville. Perlman had invested in a shopping center at Lincoln and McCormick designed by architect Sidney Morris, who had a small but growing practice that had focused entirely on single-family homes and low-rise retail development, in particular for some of the CHA’s outlying projects, and he hired Morris to design a scheme for the site. After an initial effort of 200 units in a 24-story block, published in the Tribune in December 1952, Perlman retreated slightly, announcing plans for a building one story shorter and with seventeen fewer units, developed by Morris with in collaboration with Shaw, Metz, and Dolio in May 1953.[i] Morris described the project’s massing as a response to the site’s unparalleled views, its open southern exposure and the desire to take advantage of lake breezes in summer, and the relative privacy of Bellevue Place. This residential street intersected the Drive at the north edge of the site. The result was a tall slab oriented perpendicular to the Lake—seemingly contradicting the desire for views—but arranged around two elevator cores so that most units either had corner exposure or, in the center of the block, were open to both the north and south facades. This took advantage of the relatively low construction around the block—which would change quickly in the ensuing boom years—while orienting most units away from the traffic noise on the busy Drive to the east. Morris’ facades borrowed from contemporary curtain wall practice, with aluminum, porcelain enameled steel [???] and glass curtain walls on the north and south facades, the latter expanded with long, horizontal sunshades that offered protection from the summer sun while allowing low winter sun to penetrate the living, dining, and sleeping rooms organized along this edge.[ii] The 187 apartments ranged from one to three bedrooms, arranged around wet cores that clustered around the two pairs of elevator shafts and fire stairs at roughly quarter points of the plan and pushed to the outer, east and west walls of the slab in the western corner units, where views were least impressive. Units on the east lake end tucked their kitchens and baths inward so that dining and living rooms could take advantage of the lake views—the end wall here was rendered in long strip windows that “framed a shore view that rivals the Riviera or Rio’s Copacabana Beach,” an optimistic pitch, but one that reflected the appeal of the site. However, the building’s signature features were two dozen randomly placed balconies on the north façade that cantilevered out from various bedrooms and living rooms. Capped with sheltering roofs, these replicated on a smaller scale the elaborate roof terraces of neighboring 1920s co-op towers on the Drive. They marked the first true balconies in Chicago apartment construction. While climatically questionable, the provision of a small outdoor space to sit or to grill would become a standard feature of the city’s private high rises, offering architectural variety and richness that would form a counterpoint to the flat curtain wall—but at the same time presenting environmental issues that required careful detailing and insulation to prevent excessive heat loss in winter.
Frank Kornacker engineered the building’s structure, which featured a composite column design for the lower half of the structure and simply reinforced concrete for the remainder. The floor slabs included copper coils for radiant heating, controlled by individual units’ thermostats, which were a new enough feature that Honeywell used the building for its local advertising.[iii] Cooling presented Morris and Perlman with a conundrum. While the technology to cool apartments with centrally-chilled water was becoming more affordable, it was not yet a full-on expectation of even luxury apartment tenants—only 40 tenants in Mies’ 860-880 building had opted for installing either room or unit machines.[iv] Individual units protruding from building elevations were unsightly (Mies had these specially designed to be fully inside the units, taking up valuable space but saving the buildings’ crisp facades from random intrusions of the inevitable metal boxes), but options for central chilling proved untenable; Morris considered using the copper heating coils embedded in each slab for chilling as well but recognized that there would be inevitable problems with condensation on the resulting cold slabs. Providing ducted chilled air, as in a typical air-conditioned office building, proved similarly uneconomical, as it would have required significant sectional space over corridors and interior rooms that would have pushed floor-to-floor heights up; the combined cost of extra exterior walls, fire stairs, and shafts would not, Perlman felt, be reflected in higher rents. Ultimately the building was provided with no central air conditioning; additional high-voltage outlets were provided near windows to allow individual tenants to install their own self-contained units, but Morris bemoaned the effect they would have on the building’s elevations, trying unsuccessfully to design specialized interior units similar to those developed for 860-880.[v] 1000 N. Lake Shore would, however, be one of the last tall developer buildings in Chicago to forego air conditioning. There were projects under construction even as it opened that found ways to handle the budgetary and architectural issues that frustrated Morris here.
Construction began in May 1953 and was complete by August 1954.[vi] Its rapid construction was matched by enthusiastic rentals; aimed squarely at the expanding luxury market, tenants were required to advance six months’ rent and to sign five-year leases. But even with these high financial bars and commitments, two-thirds of the project’s units were rented in March 1954, nearly five months before tenants could move in. The building’s demographics reflected Perlman’s predictions, with professional singles and couples forming the majority and only six children among the 183 apartments.[vii] Those tenants found a wealth of high-end finishes and amenities in the finished building, which was marketed as a cosmopolitan counterpoint to the stodgier 1920s co-ops that it joined on the Drive. A marketing brochure managed to mention “the beauty of Parisian boulevards” and the “sophistication of New York’s E. 50s” alongside references to the French Riviera and the building’s Niemeyer-esque “Brazilian Brises-Soleil” on its south façade. Alongside this were mentions of the design’s combination of traditional materials, such as sidewalks of Vermont slate and column covers of Norwegian granite, with technically-advanced elements, such as heat-absorbing glass and “fine handsome aluminum” that formed the curtain wall and its operable windows.[viii] At its base, a stepped entrance along Lake Shore Drive was highlighted by a cast bronze relief. At the same time, an asymmetrical entry on Bellevue Place provided access, through a wood-paneled lobby, to the two elevator cores.
Architectural Forum’s apartment panel found faults with Morris’ design, from its massing that addressed Bellevue Place instead of the lakefront to its “dinky balconies” that made for “timid decoration.” Its end walls, despite the broad strip windows along the eastern, lake-facing facade, were for Yamasaki symptomatic of an ‘indecision as to whether to go to a masonry or glass building,’ a quandary that would continue to define architects’ approaches to apartment blocks—should they emulate the “glass houses” that had proven popular but that illustrated the inherent privacy and environmental problems in pure curtain walls? Or should they adopt the other Chicago paradigm, the Promontory block with its more limited windows and the frank acceptance of blank walls covering service areas? Morris, to his credit, distinguished between the panoramic east end and the western arrangement of bedrooms and bathrooms; Yamasaki’s critique was only applicable, really, to the decision not to carry the curtain wall all the way around the building’s eastern end. Yet the random balconies and the asymmetries of the ground floor, while “laudable” in their “attempt to provide some fun in the design,” were, for the panel, “not very well carried through.”[ix] Whatever its architectural faults, Perlman found the combination of the Lake Shore Drive site and of Morris’ planning successful enough that he would develop the 55-story 1000 Lake Shore Plaza on the same block in 1964, selling both of them in 1969 as he abandoned his development career to focus on his law practice.
[i] Al Chase, “Plan Flats on Famed Gold Coast Block.” Chicago Daily Tribune, Dec 3, 1952. 1.
[ii] Sidney H. Morris & Associates. 1000 Lake Shore Drive [Building Brochure]. McNally and Quinn Records, Series I, Box.FF 2.35, Ryerson and Burnham Libraries, The Art Institute of Chicago. 1953?
[iii] Al Chase, “Successor to Lake Front Mansion.” Chicago Daily Tribune, May 12, 1953. B7; see, too, “Honeywell Thermostats [Display Ad].” Chicago Daily Tribune, Oct 20, 1953. 1-a7.
[iv] “Mies van der Rohe’s New Buildings.” Architectural Forum, Vol. 97, no. 5. November, 1952. 101.
[v] Joseph Egelhof, “Scan Central vs. Unit Air Conditioning.” Chicago Daily Tribune, Sept. 18, 1953. C9.
[vi] Al Chase, “Successor to Lake Front Mansion.” Chicago Daily Tribune, May 12, 1953. B7 and Al Chase, “ ‘1000 Building’ Rising, Filling at Rapid Pace.” Chicago Daily Tribune, Mar. 27, 1954. A5.
[vii] Al Chase, “ ‘1000 Building’ Rising, Filling at Rapid Pace.” Chicago Daily Tribune, Mar. 27, 1954. A5.
[viii] Sidney H. Morris & Associates. 1000 Lake Shore Drive [Building Brochure]. McNally and Quinn Records, Series I, Box.FF 2.35, Ryerson and Burnham Libraries, The Art Institute of Chicago. 1953?
[ix] “Eight Chicago Apartments.” Op. cit., 142, 147.
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