Some of the buildings championed by self-described "real critics" make me want to throw up... The Sofitel is decent, except for that nasty blank wall on the north side. But that's a small detail.
The Elysian is very much a real building, built in a real style... it is a real marker of taste in Chicago, and it is annoying to read again and again the
condescending remarks made by many people here about this particular taste.
For some reason, many people in Chicago have a fondness for Second Empire Parisian architecture. Perhaps it's an expression of a mental "phantom limb" syndrome, after so much of Chicago's 19th century architecture and urbanity was brutally destroyed by modernism. Perhaps it's also a response of revulsion against the boring modernist architecture around it. "Less is a bore," it replies to modernism. The kinds of po-mo regression that it expresses (and that the Four Seasons across the street expresses less successfully) is for me a symptom of the failure of modernism with its audience, which is ultimately
not, and never has been, the audience of self-conscious theoreticians from academic architecture programs.
In other words, Park Tower and the Elysian say something about Chicago, and I think they say something complex, important, and rooted in the history of the experience of Chicago architecture.
Moreover, the history of architecture is full of regressions, even in Chicago; I enjoyed the neo-Gothic UC campus... The modern Europe so idolized by some is full of "regressive" architecture. Isn't even the Capitol in D.C. neo-something?