Height: 292 ft
Floor count: 26
Location: 1454 South Michigan
Construction end: 2008
Architect: Mark McKinney
Developer: Sedgwick Properties Development Corp.

Website (http://www.marqueechicago.com/)

http://img405.imageshack.us/img405/5551/marqueemt0.jpg (http://imageshack.us)

25-Story Building planned for South Michigan Avenue

Sorry about the small size of the rendering, but this is all that they have on their website at this time. I will try to scan in the rendering that was in the Tribune at school.

The name of the building is Marquee Michigan Avenue

The building will be built at 1454 South Michigan Avenue. There will be 1, 2 and 3 bedroom units.

It's being developed by Sedgwick Properties.

Certainly nothing innovative, but not bad looking. If those are bay windows on the corners, I'm pleased.

Ugh.

I hate it.

But atleast it's more positive development for the S Loop.

Butler... I'm guessing the name is Marquee... not Marguee :)

At any rate, like Lover said... it's nothing earth-shattering, but, a decent piece of infill nonetheless. I think it will be a nice contrast to the mostly modern and post stuff that's gone up in the S. Loop as of late.

ATTENTION ALL CHICAGO SKYSCRAPER FANS, IF YOU SUPPORT THESE PROJECTS YOU MUST ATTEND THE NEXT CHICAGO PLAN COMMISSION MEETING ON THURSDAY MAY 19, 2005 AT 1PM IN THE COUNCIL CHAMBERS OF CITY HALL


1. A resolution in support of a proposed site plan submitted by 110 W. Superior, LLC for the property commonly known as 110 West Superior Street and located within Planned Development No. 946. The applicant has proposed the construction of a 26-story building containing 77 residential units and 85 parking spaces. (42nd Ward) (Nori Greenstein)


2. A proposed Residential Business Planned Development application and Lake Michigan and Chicago Lakefront Protection application submitted by Monroe/Wabash Development, LLC for the property commonly known as 21-39 South Wabash Avenue and 52-64 East Monroe Street. The applicant has proposed the construction of a 71-story mixed use development including 353 dwelling units, 428 parking spaces, and retail and institutional uses. (42nd Ward) (Madeleine Doering)


3. A proposed Downtown Mixed-Use Planned Development submitted by 150 East Ontario, LLC for the property commonly known as 148-158 East Ontario Street. The applicant has proposed the construction of a 51-story residential tower with retail and commercial space at the first and second floors, 165 dwelling units and 189 parking spaces. (42nd Ward) (Kathy Caisley)


4. A proposed Residential Business Planned Development submitted by 13th & State LLC for the property commonly known as 1255 South State Street. The applicant has proposed the construction of a 19-story mixed use building containing 14,000 square feet of commercial/retail space at grade, 253 dwelling units above grade and 326 on-site parking spaces. (2nd Ward) (Madeleine Doering)


5. A proposed Residential Planned Development submitted by 1454 S. Michigan, LLC for the property commonly known as 1454-68 S. Michigan Avenue. The applicant has proposed the construction of 215 dwelling units, 240 parking spaces and retail and commercial space at the first and second floors. (2nd Ward) (Madeleine Doering)


You have a civic duty and pride of a Chicago Skyscraper geek to attend this meeting and show your full support and speak in favor of these projects and challenge the fallicous arguments of the NIMBY's and preservationists.

The Chicago Plan Commission will meet Thursday at 1 pm in the council chambers of City Hall.

Show up at least 20 minutes before 1pm so that you can sign up to speak before the commission and voice your support for these projects*********

Civic duty...I don't like the sound of that.

If I was not 700 miles away, I would do it!!

Civic duty...I don't like the sound of that.

When I said civic duty, I was just talking, but it would be nice to have the support to combat the nimby's.

May 19th, isn't that when Star Wars III comes out? That's a good day for a double whammy--support some highrise construction and catch the ultimate flick

CITY REPORT
Development includes saving Buick Building

By Jeanette Almada
Special to the Tribune
Published June 26, 2005

The Buick Building, a relic of the auto industry's early days, will be preserved in conjunction with a 215-unit, 25-story residential development near the Motor Row Historic District.

Chicago-based Sedgwick Properties Development Corp. will build the 25-story building just south of the Buick Building, and as part of its project will restore the show room.

Sedgwick last week closed on its purchase of the 30,000-square-foot site at 1454-68 S. Michigan Ave. from a private owner, according to Marty Paris, president of Sedgwick Properties.

"Built in 1906, the Buick Building, was the first Buick dealership in Chicago and Buick operated from there for years before opening up car lots, during a time when they only had one model in maybe two or three colors [stored on the second floor of the building]," Paris said in an interview last week. "Someone would come in and order a car in a certain color and they would use an elevator to move the car down to sell it."

The building still has the original Buick marquee. "We will restore the facade of the building to its original state, or as close as we can get, working from pictures from 1910," Paris said of the two-story timber loft building.

Of three buildings standing on the development site, the Buick Building is the only one to be salvaged. Sedgwick will demolish two vacant commercial buildings on the south end of the site to make way for the residential tower and a 240-car parking garage at the rear of the tower. The garage will be accessed via an alley between between Michigan and Wabash Avenues.

The tower will have 8,000 square feet of ground-floor retail space beneath 215 condos that will range from 630 to 2,200 square feet. Base prices are $179,000 to $790,000, Paris said.

Thirty percent of the condos will be 1-bedrooms with one or 1 1/2 baths, Half of the condos will have two bedrooms with one or two baths, and 20 percent of the units will have three bedrooms and two baths. "We started selling the units from a sales center on the second floor of the Buick Building in May. So far the best seller has been the 3-bedroom units. We have sold 90 units so far," Paris said.

"The market in the South Loop is appreciating so fast. People looked skeptically at product coming into the area in 2002 and 2003, but in 2004 the South Loop came from the fringe area to being a hot neighborhood, an area that has come into its own," Paris said.

"We don't know how we will use the Buick Building after we have completed construction of the residential tower, but suspect that it would be ideal retail space, the way it was originally used," Paris said.

Chicago-based architect Mark McKinney is designing the project.

Sedgwick Properties negotiated with city officials to receive a density bonus for its development project. In exchange for the bonus, the developer will donate $208,044 to the Chicago Department of Housing's Affordable Housing Opportunity Fund. Construction is slated for early winter and completion, for fall 2007, Paris said.

A few shots from Sat.
http://i97.photobucket.com/albums/l221/Mansmith_2006/DSC_0358.jpg

http://i97.photobucket.com/albums/l221/Mansmith_2006/DSC_0359.jpg

The skylines seems to be fairly small around that area or is it just the shot.

Your right this has one and two story building around it for now. But like everything in the South Loop that won't last.

Nice shots, but I can't say this is a nice building. It will only get worse with things like Terrazio or eco18.

are you telling me you've seen Terrazio?

Tall & thin is in, short & stout is out. This baby is short & stout. And tarting it up with ochre paint ain't gonna help, either.

Edit: On the bright side, though, maybe Marquee Michigan is the end of the last wave of the painted poured-concrete Second Empire crud that sprang up in River North during the last boom?

are you telling me you've seen Terrazio?

Terrazio is also by Sedgwick. Depressing, I know.

I'm at a loss to know what could have or should have been done to avoid this ugliness. Surely we don't want design review in Chicago, and this was the developer's in-house architect doing exactly what the developer wanted. Before someone brings it up, there were no protests from any neighborhood groups of any kind, though South Loop Neighbors did ask why the mansard, and ask for a nicer treatment for the alley garage side, which will be visible for a generation behind Soka Gakkai USA. Late in the process, the three community groups did call the DPD staffer to ask if anything could be done to make the building less godawful ugly, and next thing I knew the PD was approved and the mansard was missing.

Would it have been better with the mansard? I'm starting to think so. At least there was a thought there.

I agree, the mansard sucks. Marquee sans the mansard would look similar to the Lexington Hotel, Manhattan Building, or other midrises in the South Loop with bay windows and prominent cornices. With the mansard, it looks similar to the worst kind of cheap 1980's faux-luxury suburban development.

The bright yellow paint is annoying but tolerable. My last suggestion for this tower would have been window sills. It doesn't look historical at all to have such large windows flush with the facade.

Oh, and lastly... are we sure this tower will be the yellow color shown in the renderings? The renderings show the rehabbed Buick Building in that same shade of yellow, yet in the most recent photos, you can see that the Buick Building is nothing like that color. If the developers are trying to match the Buick Building, then we will probably get a color similar to its taupe limestone.

If they terminated with the bays, fine. But they insisted on having two penthouse levels above that, so the current composition looks pasted together by committee rather than designed by a single mind. My objection to the mansard was that it couldn't logically terminate the corner bays; the two things are just never seen on the same building. The same kind of composition I see in new high-end subdivisions, where every house looks like a train wreck with debris from three or four different architectural periods.

As to color, I think the intent is to match the Buick building. I remember that as closer to a yellowish Joliet limestone than a gray Indiana limestone. But not the deep ocher the rendering seems to show (against an impossibly blue sky).

I am thankfully seeing traditional styles done right, even here in the suburbs. The Brownstones of Arl Hts actually DOES look as if it could have been built in 1915. I don't know how they got the windows to look historic; they're clearly new (they had Pella stickers, lol). Anyway, not all historic design has to be tasteless. It's when you try to make it affordable that it gets that way.

I have nothing but scorn for the developer who chooses to ignore the blatant mansard design flaw when designing a high-end building. He could just as easily have switched materials at the line between regular units/penthouses, and then given the penthouses some roof greenhouses/terraces like you see in vintage NY penthouses.