Quote:
Originally Posted by the urban politician
That's an absolute crime!
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Quote:
Originally Posted by PKDickman
No, that is what they wanted.
It is a 4200 sqft bldg on a 6600 sq ft parcel. They have another 1000 buildable feet.
The set back is the same as neighbors, although it may be one - two feet taller than it should be.
They would need a zoning change to subdivide, because they could only cut out a 1250 sqft lot and still be conforming.
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No, that building maxes out the zoning. Where are you getting 4200 SF from? It's a much larger building than that. They even cut out floor sections as was mentioned above so they could add a small penthouse for the rooftop deck without increasing the total SF.
That said the owner is a young investment banker type and absolutely had to have the smarthome look. He chose to destroy a historic building and repurpose it as his own mini mansion. He also paid dearly for doing that as old buildings don't like being ripped apart completely and mutilated. They essentially had to rebuild it completely structurally. Virtually nothing but certain sections of the Chicago common brick remains. They basically built a new construction mcmansion inside of an old building's brick walls without actually demolishing it completely. Total waste of time and money in my opinion. When you really look at what the project yielded they probably spent twice as much money just so they could keep certain sections of old Chicago common brick walls which they could have just built new from salvage brick for a fraction of the cost.
Even in light of the zoning/FAR issue, you don't have to keep all four walls standing to retain FAR. You just have to keep one above grade wall of only one floor high. If you look at the rear and side of the building you will notice they even cut out huge sections of brick to put in massive bands of glass requiring the existing structure be shored up while a new steel header is placed under it. They didn't even leave the header exposed which would have been a good design choice.
This entire project puzzles me but I guess you can never really account for other people's "taste".