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Parisian Architect Jean-Paul Viguier Credited for
Sofitel Chicago Water Tower's Audacious, Almost-faultless Design
By Blair Kamin, Chicago Tribune
Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News 

May 29, 2002 --Ooh la la! 

After years of flops by celebrated out-of-town designers and some good, but not quite great, efforts by the home team, Chicago finally has a work of architecture that makes you want to run into the streets and dance the can-can. 

The new Sofitel Chicago Water Tower, a 415-room, 33-story hotel that sits two blocks west of the John Hancock Center and opens Tuesday, is a stunning geometric exercise, a perfect marriage of Chicago boldness and French elan. 

Not only does the building's knifelike southern end slice through space like the prow of a ship. It also tilts outward -- and narrows -- as it rises, so its acutely angled top extends an eye-grabbing 33 feet over the sidewalk. 

Call it "the Leaning Tower from Paris," and credit Parisian architect Jean-Paul Viguier for one of the finest commercial buildings done here since the curving green office building at 333 W. Wacker Drive rewrote the rules of skyscraper design nearly 20 years ago. 

With his full head of tousled gray hair and a red scarf draped over his broad shoulders, the 55-year-old Viguier looks like Central Casting's idea of a French architect. But he's the real deal, having won this prized commission in a 1998 design contest that pitted him against Chicago stars Lucien Lagrange and Helmut Jahn. 

The key to his audacious, almost-faultless design is that it's no one-liner, like the Smurfit-Stone Building at 150 N. Michigan Ave., where an attention-getting, sliced-off top is done in by bad proportions and inelegant detailing. In contrast, the Sofitel is both powerfully conceived and carefully crafted, a sculptural object that also is a civilized urban presence. 

One of several hotels being opened around the world this year by the French-owned Accor group, Sofitel's parent company, the Sofitel Chicago Water Tower rises from the northwest corner of Chestnut Street and Wabash Avenue. Just across Wabash is an intimate city park, a triangle formed by the diagonal slant of nearby Rush Street. The park turns out to be an essential part of Viguier's design. 

Take away the park and the Sofitel is a hemmed-in sculpture. With the park, it has room to preen and be seen. And what you see is a building that compensates with shape for what it lacks in height. 

The hotel's tower, a triangular wedge clad mostly in an opaque white glass, rises from a five-story base that houses public spaces including the lobby and ballroom. An exuberant, dark glass wall sweeps around the low rise portion of the hotel, then shoots up the tower as a skinny, warping triangle. 

This triangle suggests a man leaning forward (or, perhaps, a drunk about to keel over -- a fitting, if unintended, nod to the bars of Rush Street). But Teng & Associates, the Chicago architects and structural engineers who worked with Viguier, assure that the Sofitel is in no danger of toppling. 

Structurally, the only unusual thing about the Sofitel is a tilting concrete column at the building's apex. The prow extends outward from this column by just one additional foot per floor. Concrete floor slabs tie the column back to the building's concrete core. The core, in turn, stiffens the Sofitel against the overturning force of the wind. 

This structural drama is best appreciated from Chestnut Street, where the Sofitel's prow seems ready to give the Hancock's truncated obelisk an architectural kiss. They're actually a terrific odd couple. 

The Hancock tapers inward, the hotel outward. The Hancock is glowering and black, the hotel playful and white. The Hancock reveals its bones. The hotel conceals them. The Hancock is the brute force, blue-collar Chicago of yesterday. The hotel is today's Chicago, as much awhich is the city that plays as a much as the city that works. 

Even without this vivid design dialogue, the Sofitel would be drawings "oohs" and "aahs" as well as "ooh la la's." 

The building benefits enormously from the fact that it is simply a hotel and not part of a gargantuan, multi-purpose building such as like 900 N. Michigan or Water Tower Place. 

That gave Viguier the chance to shape a relatively small, jewel-like building rather than a bland, blockbusting giant which offers no clue that a hotel is embedded somewhere within it. 

He took full advantage of this opportunity, with the triangular tower leaving room for the hotel's glassy base. There, activity inside can easily flow outside. Along Chestnut, for example, the Sofitel's Café des Architects (besides paying proper due to draftsmen and women) will have tables and chairs that spill onto its outdoor plaza. 

Before Sept. 11, such gestures might have been taken for granted. Now, with concrete Jersey barriers and other fortifications deadening streets in Chicago and nationwide, they remind us that lively streets are the very lifeblood of cities. 

But the Sofitel impresses primarily because of its architecture -- in particular, its tilting, curving façade, which is meant to suggest a conelike empty space directly in front of the tower. Even if that move is hard to grasp, Viguier has made several others that raise the building's level from solid citizen to star performer. 

Take the hotel's main color -- white. It's just right for Chicago, not only because it recalls such gems as the Wrigley Building (another sharply prowed structure), but also because this is a cool-colored city where brightly hued designs such as like Lagrange's yellowish Park Tower seem jarringly out of place. 

Viguier is equally good in the way he articulates the Sofitel's wedge, creating strong contrasts between horizontal elements that suggest the hotel's public functions and vertical ones that represent the stacking of its guestrooms. 

At an even finer level of detail, he forgoes a conventional, structurally expressive façade grid for a seemingly irregular window pattern that creates a delightful graphic look, like a computer punch card. 

Finally, the building's white glass panels have a milky, reflective quality that elegantly sets them apart from the city's new forest of concrete condos and their deadly gray skins. 

The lone faults are a concrete back wall, an eyesore for those looking at the Sofitel from the north, and clunky exterior signs that consist of beige letters mounted on bulky steel frames. The signs, which depart from Viguier's vision for crisp dark letters, are the equivalent of buying ugly cuff links to go with a $5,000 designer suit. 

Still, these wounds are not mortal, and the Sofitel remains a softly shimmering, sculptural presence. Moreover, the building's formal attributes do not detract from function. The interior clearly benefits from Viguier's unusual geometry, with the building's triangular shape creating short corridors and added this phrase about guest rooms -- ensuring that guest rooms get lots of natural light. 

French designer Pierre Yves Rochonok, who handled the interiors, works in a manner that is clearly sympathetic to Viguier, respecting his crisp modernism but humanizing it with a warm palette of taupes and plums. 

Rochon has lent the interior some appropriately avant-garde touches, such as like square lights in the lobby's black granite floors that shift in color from blue to green to purple. Other interior highlights include the lobby's splaying, naturally-lit grand staircase (perfect for wedding pictures) and the third-floor ballroom, which flaunts a curving ceiling and an elliptical window that affords a stunning view of the Sofitel tower "kissing" the Hancock. 

Perhaps the best thing about this bracing new building is what Viguier doesn't do: He doesn't fall into the nostalgic trap that has ensnared all those architects who have paid homage to Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright and other late, legendary Chicago designers. Instead, he respects Chicago's great tradition while extending it forward. 

That balancing act, in the end, is what makes this tilting tower so superb. 

-----To see more of the Chicago Tribune, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.chicago.tribune.com/ 

(c) 2002, Chicago Tribune. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News. AC, 


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