Hyatt Center
Chicago
Pei Cobb Freed & Partners Architects

Pei Cobb Freed makes sensuality out of A hard-nosed brief; Skidmore, Owings & Merrill carves out an elegant atrium inside

© Steven Hall / Hedrich Blessing

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By Blair Kamin

Chicago often seems positively Calvinistic in its devotion to the box, but things are loosening up. From various perspectives, the sleek stainless-steel-and-glass walls of the Hyatt Center suggest a very tall ship cruising gracefully through space. Call it the S.S. Pritzker, since it was codeveloped by the billionaire Chicago family that each year awards the Pritzker Prize and owns the worldwide Hyatt Hotel empire that is headquartered inside. In this, Chicago’s first post-9/11 skyscraper, architect Henry Cobb, FAIA, of Pei Cobb Freed, has deftly integrated the new need for heightened security with his long-standing notion of “skyscraper as citizen.”

The Pritzkers originally hired Foster and Partners to design a corporate headquarters with a lavish budget. But the day after the 9/11 attacks, Penny Pritzker, president of the Pritzker Realty Group, told Foster that the prospect of a major downturn in the hotel business made proceeding with his ambitious design impossible.

The Pritzkers and codeveloper Jack Higgins turned to Cobb, requesting a no-frills building that would be shared with other tenants. The brief: column-free, 33,000-square-foot floors, with 45-foot spans from exterior wall to core. Cobb was given four weeks to fashion a schematic design. Recalling the tight schedule, he quotes the British philosopher Isaiah Berlin: “My brain is like a taxi—it responds when hailed.”

The tower’s crisply handled long elevations, with their windows set flush with the luminous, linen-patterned, stainless-steel spandrels, were created from cost necessity as much as aesthetics. “Let’s face it,” says Cobb, “if you’re doing a budget building, keep it smooth.” The striking verticality of the end walls, with their nearly solid splaying surfaces of stainless steel, counters the dominant horizontality of the long elevations. The visible tension in the taut, bulging skin administers the right dose of Chicago toughness.

The most architecturally significant floors within the Hyatt Center house the offices of the Global Hyatt Corporation and Classic Residence by Hyatt, for senior living, on floors 9 through 16. An atrium, evoking its counterparts in Hyatt’s hotels, ties the floors together, with a cascading, translucent-glass staircase to encourage casual meetings among Hyatt employees. The atrium was planned before construction began, according to interior architect Stephen Apking of the New York office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, which proved far less expensive than inserting it after the fact.

Even if the results are not as spectacular as they might have been had Foster designed the Hyatt Center—one imagines an inventively conceived workplace and a showstopping “green” tower—Cobb’s design has a value as a model more than a one-off. It’s an attractive, but not arbitrary, alternative to the box and shows that architects can elegantly respond to the imperative to fortify.

Want the full story? Read the entire article in our March 2006 issue.
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Formal name of Project:
Hyatt Center

Location:
Chicago

Gross square footage:
1,755,255 sq. ft.

Owner:
Higgins Development Partners, LLC
higginsdevelopment.com

Architect:
Pei Cobb Freed & Partners Architects LLP
88 Pine Street
New York, NY 10005
212-872-4078
212-872-5443
www.pcf-p.com