Legacy Bequeaths Height To Chicago Loop

Chicago is set to get yet another enormous residential tower, the 250.5 metre tall Legacy Tower, designed by Solomon, Cordwell, Buenz and Associates for the Mesa Development Company.Rising 72 floors above ground level, the skyscraper will contain 360 luxury apartment units, 460 parking spaces on basement floors, and 4,000 square metres of space for the School of Art Institute of Chicago.As with Park Michigan, Legacy Tower shows Chicagoans love of the history of their city, it retains the old facades of the building it replaces, Jewelers Row on Wabash Avenue and is set back from the wide podium to preserve the existing streetscape. The podium will have roof gardens on either side flanking the base of the tower, there will also be a sky garden 180 metres up, shown in marketing images with a single very lonely tree.The building is deliberately designed to edge on to Grant Park rather than face it directly to reduce the bulk of the tower from what will be the most commonly viewed angle. The planners in Chicago, who approved Legacy Tower without a single vote against, love slender tall towers rather than simple bulky blocks and try to influence the designs as much as possible to get "soar" with sleek glass and steel. The crown of the tower has a façade overrun with vertical indentations on the surface allowing it to cheat at height and direct the viewers vision even further skywards.In approaching the building as a package the developer took the same approach as Renaissant with Park Michigan by wanting to maximise their views of Grant Park by making the building as tall as they could to make the apartments to appeal as much as possible to purchasers. The current tallest residential building in the famous Chicago Loop is a mere 192 metres but with this, the 251 metre Aqua Tower, Park Michigan at 264 metres the rush for apartment blocks playing on the variation of the theme Legacy is singing shows there must be something going on. Throw into the mix the 319 metre tall Waterview Drive currently under construction and anyone can see huge apartment blocks are finally coming to this part of downtown in a big way. They also help to mark what is a new building boom in the original skyscraper city that will change the skyline profoundly with a near doubling of the number of buildings over 250 metres that can give Hong Kong a run for its money.