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Lake Shore Drive Apartaments

Promontory

1948 - 1951
MIES VAN DER ROHE, Ludwig

SEXTON, Krueck Restauración 2007 - 2009

La restauración incluyó un nuevo recubrimiento en la estructura de acero y la limpieza de las ventanas de aluminio originales. la plaza fue reconstruida, recreando el sistema de iluminación original de plaza.
Chicago (Illinois)
Estados Unidos

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Recognized as one of the most iconic residential projects of the 20th century, it became the prototype for steel and glass skyscrapers around the world. Its verticality, structural meshes and curtain walls made it an example of minimalist composition. This imagery evoked the efficiency, neatness, organization and standardization of the new models established by architectural rationalism.

The arrival of Mies van der Rohe to Chicago at the end of the 1930s, and the realization of this commission, developed a dream in the European avant-garde of the 1920s (proposal for skyscrapers for Friedrichstrasse. Berlin 1921-22), making one of his ideal projects, would become a constructive reality in one way or another.

These twin towers, sitting on a triangular site overlooking Lake Michigan, are 26 stories high, connected at the bottom by a covered walkway, using floating steel canopies, and the transparent lobbies with beautiful views of the lake are finished in polished steel and marble. However, they were placed in adjacent locations so that the rectangular shapes faced each other in different ways and were perceived in constant tension. The elevators went up the center of each block and gave access to the apartments.

Lake Shore Drive will reveal the way in which Mies had begun to solve the technical and aesthetic problems that came with the construction of a steel-framed skyscraper. As building regulations required covering the steel structure with a 5 cm layer of fire-proof concrete, Mies wrapped this in turn in a metal, thereby providing the building with a façade that reflected the internal structure.

The building appears to us as a poetic formulation of American vernacular construction. If there is something to highlight in the exterior expressiveness of the building, it is the rhythm of its facades. Mies designed a structural framework of bays, so that each of the towers has a plot of three (narrow side façades) by five bays (wide front façade). This structural framework and its glass envelope merge architecturally, each losing a part of its particular identity when establishing the new architectural reality. The slender double-T profiles, attached at regular intervals, introduced additional visual subtleties. The dimensions of columns and mullions determine the width of the windows. The amount has acted as a kind of catalyst for this change. The two central windows (in each structural panel) are, therefore, wider than those adjacent to the columns. These variations of expansion and contraction (column-narrow window-wide window; and then vice versa: wide window - narrow window- column, and so on) give an extraordinarily subtle richness. And to this is added the alternation between the opacity of the steel and the reflective capacity of the glass, caused by the intermittent quality of the uprights as a whole.

About the compositional rhythm on the façade and the materials… Integrating the structure with the window as a woven mesh.

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