Park Tower is better then OBP IMO because it tries less to mimick a style and is more in the realm of earlier Pomo where the point wasn't replicate, but to evoke. It matches the fanciful Cheesecake Factory in the base of the Hancock wonderfully. No one is meant to believe Cheesecake Factory is an old Victorian era restaurant, it's just a design theme used in an almost fanciful way. That's what Park Tower is, in what world does a French Second Empire roof belong on top of a soaring art Deco skyscraper?
It also has merit from an engineering perspective both in it's design and how early it was for buildings of a similar style. It was the first use of a tuned mass damper and the form is actually somewhat structurally expressive with much of the deco massing consisting of concrete sheer walls there to stiffen such a tall and narrow building. Speaking of which, it was really one of the first very tall and narrow concrete towers which now dominate the world of super tall design. The mansard roof even serves a purpose concealing the aforementioned damper penthouse.
Also, the materials here are significantly higher quality than other recent Pomo towers. The mansard crown is entirely clad in copper which is finally starting to patina. Once it's really well aged it will really soften even the unfortune precast concrete.
Here's Blair Kaman' s take on it from 2000:
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2000-07-23-0007230144-story.html
Some interesting quotes:
Quote:
It's big, all right, but is it beautiful?
At 844 feet, the new Park Tower is the tenth tallest building in Chicago and one of the 60 tallest buildings in the world. It also is more than five times the height of its newly dwarfed neighbor, the old, 154-foot Chicago Water Tower.
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I particularly like this Oscar Wilde quote, being offended by the "ye olde castle" aesthetic is not something new to our era, but age tends to improve the character of any building...
Quote:
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Located on the northwest corner of Michigan and Chicago Avenues, the Park Tower sits just west of one Chicago's most important public spaces, Water Tower Park, and the park's namesake, a quirky tower of yellow Joliet limestone that Oscar Wilde once called a "monstrosity with salt and pepper boxes stuck all over it."
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Quote:
Initially, the Park Tower was designed by the project team, which includes Lagrange and structural engineers Chris Stefanos Associates of Oak Lawn, to be roughly 650 feet tall.
Yet the tower grew by nearly 200 feet, according to those involved in the project. Why? Because the Pritzker's Hyatt Development Corp., which had overall responsibility for Park Tower, and the developers of the condos, an affiliate of LR Development Co. of Chicago, allowed the ceiling height of the condos to increase by roughly a foot and a half. That change made the expensive units seem more spacious -- and thus more marketable.
But the shift also required a structural rejiggering, largely because wind tunnel tests showed that the newly extended tower would be swaying too perceptibly as gusts blew in from Lake Michigan and bounced off the nearby John Hancock Center and Water Tower Place.
As a result, the engineers bulked up the Park Tower's steel-reinforced concrete frame, particularly the north- and south-facing walls that act, with the building's centrally located elevator core, to brace the building against the wind.
They also introduced a 400-ton pendulum, which is suspended from steel cables tucked beneath the tower's top and is known as a "tuned mass damper" because it reduces -- or damps -- the swaying caused by the wind. (This marks the first time in the United States that a tuned mass damper has been designed into a new building. Others have been installed, as at New York's Citicorp Center, to correct structural problems after the fact.) In simplest terms, when the Park Tower moves in one direction, the damper moves in the other, cutting down on sway. "The chandeliers will still be swinging," said engineer Chris Stefanos, "but at a lower rate."
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