Column: An exclusive look at Jeanne Gang’s Vista Tower, now Chicago’s third-tallest building

Chicago’s nearly complete Vista Tower comes wrapped in superlatives — the city’s third-tallest building and the world’s tallest building designed by a woman — as well as seemingly curving, multicolored glass.

But the hype would be meaningless if the $1 billion, 101-story tower did not merit a more important distinction: It’s a stirring work of skyline artistry.

Vista’s architect, Jeanne Gang, already has graced Chicago with the 87-story Aqua Tower, whose undulating concrete balconies were inspired by the layered topography of limestone outcroppings along the Great Lakes.

Vista, in contrast, appears as liquid as it is solid, as if the waters of Lake Michigan had burst upward and transformed themselves into fluid, undulating tiers of glass.

The tower represents a decisive break from the muscular, industrial-age modernism of Willis Tower and 875 North Michigan Avenue (the former John Hancock Center). It doesn’t simply show that women can play the male-dominated skyscraper game. They can play it very well, thank you.

Located on a multilevel riverfront site at 363 E. Wacker Drive that belongs to the same Lakeshore East development as Aqua, Vista will house a 191-room hotel and 393 condominiums once it’s complete in the third quarter of next year.

For now, as COVID-19 rages and office cubicles remain empty, the tower sends the upbeat message that downtown has a future, and it’s not just for the 1%. Vista’s ground-level amenities, will benefit ordinary citizens as well as those who can afford the tower’s condos, which start at around $1 million.

The lone fault comes on the 83rd floor, which has been left empty to let Chicago’s famous winds whip through. This so-called blow-through floor, the first of its kind in the city, will reduce sway that makes chandeliers rattle, but it disrupts the upward sweep of the tower’s undulating exterior.

The developers were China’s Dalian Wanda Group and Chicago’s Magellan Development Group. In July, Dalian Wanda’s hotel unit, which had been expected to operate Vista’s hotel, agreed to sell its 90% equity stake in the tower to Magellan. An announcement about a new hotel operator is expected soon.

Chicago’s bKL Architecture served as architect of record.

Sharp-eyed observers have noted a similarity between Vista’s suggestion of endless verticality and sculptor Constantin Brancusi’s Endless Column, a Romanian war memorial whose stack of truncated pyramids symbolizes infinity and infinite sacrifice.

Yet the Chicago tower, which Gang designed with Julianne Wolf, a principal at her Chicago-based firm of Studio Gang, is no copycat.

Unlike the single-columned Brancusi sculpture, Vista consists of three connected high-rises, or stems, the highest of which reaches 1,191 feet — a level topped in Chicago only by the 1,451-foot Willis Tower and the 1,389-foot Trump International Hotel & Tower.

The stems reflect Gang’s desire to make the tower a good neighbor as well as a landmark. Their underlying structure — concrete cores in the outer stems, linked by a spinelike wall in the middle stem — frees the central stem to bridge over the ground.

That opens the way for Vista’s chief ground-level amenity: a well-lit passageway that leads from the handsome park at the center of Lakeshore East to the downtown Riverwalk, just to the north. A boldly curving, scooplike wall forms an inviting gateway to the passageway from the park.

City officials would be smart to extend the passageway to the Riverwalk by installing brightly colored crosswalks and better lighting on the lowest level of Wacker Drive.

In another urban design plus, Vista is turning what used to be the dull dead end of East Wacker into a small park, open to the public, that will overlook the river and Navy Pier. OLIN landscape architects of Philadelphia are handling that part of the project.

The tower also enlivens the continuous row of buildings, or “streetwall,” of East Wacker, with a glass-walled projection, which the architects call the “cube.” Among other uses, it will contain the hotel’s restaurant and glow like a beacon, beckoning pedestrians from Michigan Avenue.

At Aqua, Gang’s design method was to begin with small units — the undulating balconies, which captured views — and organize them into mesmerizing stacks.

She follows a similar path at Vista, where her building block is truncated pyramids, called “frustums,” that have the functional advantage of creating different floor sizes.

The stacked frustums form the stems, which grow in height from east to west, making an effective transition between the wide-open horizontality of the lakefront and the soaring verticality of downtown’s skyscrapers.

Following the angled path of East Wacker, the stems are offset, giving the tower eight corners instead of four — a plus for the developers, who rely on panoramic views to sell condos.

It all adds up to a tower that does exactly what a skyscraper is supposed to do: appeal to the viewer at many different scales.

Seen from a distance, Vista’s stepping silhouette recalls the pronounced setbacks of the Willis and Trump towers. Because it shifts from a broad base to a narrow top, it is very much a Chicago building — a powerful presence, unlike the freakishly thin, cigarette-shaped towers that rise from the confined sites of Manhattan’s Billionaires’ Row.

Viewed at closer range, Vista goes from the familiar to the spectacular, owing in part to an optical trick. The stems seem to curve in and out even though the structural columns on the tower’s perimeter are, in fact, straight.

Gang creates that illusion with a steplike progression. Each column is placed 5 inches inward or outward from the one below it. It’s a small move, but multiplied hundreds of times, it equals the difference between a bland vertical stalk like the neighboring Aon Center and a dramatic sculptural form.

Two close-up views are worthy of being singled out. From the Lake Shore Drive Bridge over the Chicago River, Vista is a stunning sculptural presence, with deep shadows accentuating the curves of its three stems.

Seen from South Lake Shore Drive around the Field Museum, the tower looks flatter but is still striking, rising directly ahead of the driver as Gang takes full advantage of its location on the same line, or axis, as the drive.

In a significant refinement, the glass exterior is sheathed in six types of blue-green coating — darker for the smaller floors of the truncated pyramids, which need more protection from the sun, and lighter for the larger floors.

According to the architects, the glass, made in Germany, cuts down on heat gain and saves energy. It also has an aesthetic advantage, accentuating the thinness of each stem.

Following the lead of Aqua’s undulating balconies, the multicolored glass will join with the curving exterior and low reflectivity to lessen the likelihood that migrating birds will crash into the tower.

The overall result combines noble simplicity with a dynamism appropriate to the digital age. Vista is not fussy and backward looking, like architect Robert A.M. Stern’s One Bennett Park. It is more emphatically vertical than Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s Trump Tower, whose setbacks resemble the stacks of a wedding cake.

But the blow-through floor, a double-height space on the 83rd floor that is left open to the wind, is not ideal.

The first of its kind in Chicago, it had to be added after wind tunnel tests revealed that high winds could cause the tower to sway, making people inside uncomfortable or even sick.

From ground level, the blow-through floor looks strangely unfinished, a scar that interrupts the upward sweep of Vista’s curves. Gang calls it a “focal point.” I liken it a hole in a forehead. It’s a flaw, but not a fatal one. The tower’s form is strong enough to absorb it.

The interior is very much a work in progress, with construction workers still scurrying around. (The first condominium owners will move in early next month. Half the condominiums are sold, according to Magellan.)

My tour included an 84th-floor penthouse, whose drop-dead views of the lakefront and skyline made it seem like a private observatory, and a 47th-floor outdoor deck for residents, complete with a pool and sauna, that will keep Vista competitive in the amenity arms race fought by luxury towers.

There was not a discernible difference in views from apartments with darker glass and those with lighter glass.

There is one extraordinary interior space: the hotel’s restaurant, which flaunts 38-foot ceilings and massive, dramatically canted concrete columns that are pulled back from the facade to maintain riverfront views. This is a bravura display of old-fashioned Chicago muscle. Metal window frames subdivide the cube’s exterior into truncated pyramids, further breaking down the tower’s scale.

Through such features and its ground-level amenities, Vista stands poised to become an active part of Chicago’s daily life as well as a skyline symbol.

It is one of Chicago’s finest skyline giants — not as strong architecturally as the X-braced former Hancock Center, but a great success nonetheless.

With its sleek, swelling curves and sophisticated environmental approach, it refreshes Chicago’s historic role in tall building design and charts bold new directions in skyscraper style,

Blair Kamin is a Tribune critic.

bkamin@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @BlairKamin

———

©2020 the Chicago Tribune

Visit the Chicago Tribune at www.chicagotribune.com

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.