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HYATT CENTER, CHICAGO
ARCHITECT'S STATEMENT
Genesis of Design
Hyatt Center's prospective tenants requested floor plates in excess of 33,000 square feet, with column-free office space spanning forty-five feet from central core to exterior wall. The building's site, though large and well located, is relatively narrow and hemmed in on both of its long sides by neighboring office towers. Giving consideration to these key aspects of program and place, we proposed a lozenge-shaped floor plan stretching the full length of the site from Wacker Drive to Franklin Street, so as to maximize the office floor area while optimizing views from the interior. Studies comparing this unusual shape with more conventional rectangular floor plans confirmed its superior merit and led to its acceptance as the conceptual basis for the building's design.
Skyscraper as Citizen
Hyatt Center manifests a distinctive civic presence not only in the form of its tower - with curved surfaces of stainless steel and glass terminating in the dramatic verticality of bifurcated end walls - but also in the block-long garden shaped by the tower so as to offer an oasis of green to the thousands of commuters who walk by twice daily along Monroe Street on their way between the railroad station and the Loop. To complement and celebrate this public garden, the tower's curved face is raised on a monumental colonnade, behind which the recessed glass wall of the ground-floor lobby offers a view of the interior that adds a further element of visual interest to the public realm at street level.
Experience of Entry
An important feature of Hyatt Center's design is the sequence of spaces leading from the two entrances, located at opposite ends of the tower, to the elevator lobbies at its center. Enhanced security measures instituted after the attack on the World Trade Center in New York have had a devastating impact on the experience of entry into many urban buildings. At Hyatt Center - Chicago's first post-9/11 office tower - these required security measures are accommodated through design in such a way as to enrich rather than impoverish that experience.
At each end of the building, a broad, sheltering canopy invites entry through a glazed vestibule into a fifty-foot-high sky-lit reception hall, whose visual focus is an exuberantly colorful large-scale painting created expressly for the space by the British artist Keith Tyson. The two reception halls are thus in themselves memorable destinations, open and inviting to everyone, including casual passersby who may have no need or wish to go further into the building's interior.
From these antipodal reception halls, Hyatt Center's occupants and their visitors proceed through broad, low-ceilinged foyers, where security monitoring takes place, into the forty-foot-high main lobby of the office tower. This gently curved space, with a grove of bamboo trees screening its glazed perimeter, gives access to elevator lobbies carved into the tower's central core - thus concluding an entry sequence wherein necessary provisions for security are unobtrusively absorbed within an engagingly eventful experience of passage from street to workplace.
Henry N. Cobb
Pei Cobb Freed & Partners
May 2005
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