By Joe Frey

How is success weighed? In some respects, it is, like ethics, subject to situational relativism; an endeavor deemed successful in one context may be viewed less favorably in another. But some accomplishments are beyond the reproach of subjective judgment, achieving success as definitive as a platonic ideal, as axiomatic as arithmetic. Aesthetics seem to be especially subject to this disquieting paradox, and an interesting object lesson of it now stands in plain view just east of North Michigan Avenue.

Designed by the Chicago firm of Brininstool+Lynch, 550 North St. Clair is an admirable addition to the thickening forest of monolithic mediocrities Streeterville and other close-in neighborhoods are becoming. The now-familiar formula of residential-tower-over-parking-garage has resulted this time in a straightforward minimalist statement that eschews gratuitous geegaws calculated to provide comfort through familiarity. Here, however, it is the form itself that provides the familiar flavor, a spiced-up recipe from the International Style’s cookbook.

Re-enforced concrete columns stand guard before the recessed, transparent ground-floor lobby and retail spaces. The columns disappear above to reappear before the recessed amenities level that delineates the opaque façade of the six-level parking garage from the eighteen floors of residences, the glass curtain walls of which obscure but do not hide the square columns of the structure. The parking garage is further defined by a wraparound horizontal screen of brushed metal over cladding that is Le Corbusierian white, perhaps in reference to the Crate and Barrel store (1990, Solomon, Cordwell Buenz) around the corner.

Taking advantage of the views afforded by the low-rise buildings filling the block to Michigan Avenue, terraces on the west elevation run the breadth of every residence floor. More modestly-scaled balconies on the east elevation seem to make the tacit admission that any Lake Michigan views are obstructed by taller nearby structures. Though there is a certain elegance to the terraces and their cantilevered interior floor-slab extensions, they and the balconies compromise the purity of the form. By extending beyond the roofline, the curtain walls echo the jutting horizontal projections of the terraces yet serve to imply a vertical continuation of the form rather than a break from it.

Placed atop the literal pedestal of the parking garage, as if it’s a piece of heroic sculpture, that form takes on almost reverential importance. The honored is, of course, the Miesian glass box, its mortal manifestation posing mere blocks away at 860 – 880 North Lake Shore Drive (1949, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe). Fittingly, the tribute is sculpted in white as beatifying as carrera marble, rather than the corporeal black of the celebrated subjects. Yet the contrasting façade treatments of 550 North St. Clair’s parking garage and its residence levels—separated by the twin bases of the ground floor and amenities level, both recessed behind pilotis—also creates a false start effect. It’s as if 550 North St. Clair is in fact two buildings stacked one upon the other. Though not a totally unpleasant illusion, it does help account for proportions that, when the building is taken as a whole, are a tad squat and ungainly. Zoning code constraints and/or value engineering more than likely contributed to the proportioning, but this would seem to be more explanation than mitigation. Not that attention wasn’t paid to the devil-god details. Ten-foot ceilings between floors nine and sixteen increase to eleven feet above that, tricking the eye into perceiving the stories as uniform in height by slightly manipulating the perspective in an almost entasis-like effect.

But in the vacuum of an architectural rendering—and even in the broader context of the city’s recent high-rise residential construction—550 North St. Clair is, all in all, a worthy effort. Walk just a block east, though, and that judgment becomes less certain. However, any assessment of 600 North Fairbanks—also the work of a Chicago firm, Murphy/Jahn—is immune to such doubt. It’s that good.

Proximity and their concurrent completion make a comparison between 550 North St. Clair and 600 North Fairbanks tempting; certain distinct similarities make such an exercise irresistible. However, considering the difference in scale—at forty-one stories, 600 North Fairbanks is over half again as tall as 550 North St. Clair and its 227 units are more than twice the latter’s112 units—the comparison might seem unfair. But the relative shortcomings of the smaller building have nothing to do with mere magnitude. (Besides, any similarities the two buildings share are rendered superficial by the execution of their designs.)

Most obviously, both 550 North St. Clair and 600 North Fairbanks are luxury residential towers over parking enclosures. And both of the designs spring from modernist sensibilities, manifested in a simple form comprised of stratified layers of concrete floor slabs and floor-to-ceiling glass. However, in 600 North Fairbanks, the eleven levels of parking over the lobby and below the twenty-eight stories of apartments, penthouses and building amenities are encompassed by the form—rather than separated from it—subtly delineated by perforated screens behind the glass curtain wall. If these were residence floors, you could almost imagine that all the owners had decorated with the same window treatment and kept their curtains drawn closed. Further unifying the form, the curtain wall extends straight to the ground, uninterrupted by a recessed first floor.

One of the most striking features of 600 North Fairbanks is the graceful corner it turns around the south and east elevations. Perhaps a reference to the same firm‘s 55 W. Monroe building (1980), the ninety-degree corner here is made in fewer angles yet still reads as continuous rather than segmented. Another eye-catcher is the four-story slant of the graduated cantilevers between the ninth and twelve stories that project the structure out over the three-story building neighboring to the north. In less skillful hands, this design element could have come off as gimmicky shtick. But the irregularity in 600 North Fairbanks’s shape perversely reinforces the form, making it all the more distinct, wrapped as it is in a transparent glass skin that seems shrink-wrapped to a lithe reinforced concrete skeleton. The treatment of the curtain wall varies on the north elevation near the top and on the slant, accentuating both the irregularities and increased ceiling height of the uppermost floors and also the transition between the two verticals that define the east and west elevations. Here, horizontal sheets of glass overlap like jalousie windows.

The skeleton of columns and floor slabs plays peek-a-boo through the expanses of barely-there glass, but reveals more of itself in the irregular treatment of the curtain wall near the top. A band of glass encircles the terminus of the tower, as if a compression ring wrapped around the top of the columns to keep them aligned. Insert balconies are arranged in multiple columns on the south and north elevations, with a single column of balconies on the west elevation; the east elevation is sheer glass, except in the north corner at the top, where the balconies help to articulate the summit. To serve as railings, sheets of glass, like sliding panels, extend below each floor slab, screening the top of the balcony below. Partially filling the void in the façade created by the balconies further articulates the form. And that is the ultimate, simple triumph of 600 North Fairbanks: the unification of form and structure, the former encompassing the latter, the latter dictating the former.

Imperative to this interplay between form and structure are the concrete floor slabs. Rather than constructed the usual way with steel rods, in 600 North Fairbanks they are reinforced by post-tensioned cables. The results are floor slabs that, at only eight inches thick, seem impossibly thin, the impression most visible at the corners. Laid bare by the sheer curtain wall, they appear to hover suspended in space without support. This lightness of structure informs the entire building, creating a form that resembles nothing so much—especially when viewed from the southeast where both the curved corner and the slant of the progressive cantilevers are visible—as a shimmering high-altitude research balloon. It’s as if 600 North Fairbanks defies gravity. Rather its load bearing down and anchoring to bedrock, the building instead seems merely tethered, lest it float away.

One aspect of 600 North Fairbanks is troubling, though. An article in the March 23 edition of the New York Times describes how recent residential projects designed by the architectural glitterati are having the greatest transforming effect on Manhattan’s identity in forty years. Rather than retreating behind the stolid facades of respectability of Park Avenue apartment houses, today’s titans are broadcasting their affluence by living in the latest design statements as if supermodels strutting down the runway garbed in them. Nicolai Ouroussoff, author of “Nice Tower! Who’s Your Architect?” wonders if this latest trend in urban architecture will be a legacy of the 21st century’s first gilded age, buildings that are nothing but “gorgeous tokens of a rampantly narcissistic age.” Interloper Donald Trump not withstanding, Chicagoans, however, tend to be more humble, reserved, subtle, modest or tasteful—depending on how you want to put it. Still, the cachet Chicago’s elite are starting to assume from living in buildings designed by Helmut Jahn and other international starchitects may hint that our fair city is also susceptible to such superficial ostentation.

That may well be true, but it in no way detracts from what can only be stated as fact: The first Chicago condominium project designed by Jahn’s firm is a building as much for tomorrow as it is for today. Defying ephemeral fashion, it’s a timeless structure that does not need to be graded on a curve to be recognized for the standout that it undeniably is.