Architecture, like food, is something that you make part of your everyday life whether you are cognizant of it or not. While food in Chicago has enjoyed a virtual renaissance in its quality and an explosion of boosters over the past 25 years, Chicago architecture has been the butt of jokes by the Prince of Wales (his reference to a Mies van der Rohe design for The City being "a glass stump more suited to Chicago") and the target of popular criticism from all quarters. There are many local personalities extolling the pleasures of food and cuisine. For instance, Rick Bayless has a fantastic Mexican cooking show on PBS. If you ask someone on the street in Chicago to name a few local chefs, they could probably roll off a few names. Ask the same person to name a living Chicago architect and they'll be hard pressed to answer you.

So this column attempts to rectify this...

Whereas Chicago is known throughout the world for its innovative architecture, much of it was built 35 or more years ago. The situation today is far more uncertain. Our mission at makeARCHITECTURE is to make you aware of and appreciate architecture in the same way that food critics and chefs make you aware of and demand fresh quality food and cuisine. We realize that this is only a small step and it will take years of work to create the critical mass to really make a large difference and create demand for better designed buildings. But if the restaurant people were able to make us want world class cuisine, why can't we architects raise the level of expectations on building?

Let's start with the new Sofitel at Wabash and Walton. Designed by the the French architect Jean-Paul Viguier (a Parisian Architect), the building is arguably the most interesting new high-rise in Chicago since the extension on the Northwestern Hospital Power Plant and the curved green-glass 333 West Wacker Drive. Unlike these two, it's a destination for fun and pleasure rather than a workplace or a service building.

Why is it such a remarkable building?

Three reasons:

1. The massing and siting: The hotel's rectangular site lies across the street from a wedge-shaped park. Formerly a parking lot, the site was previously occupied by 6 dilapidated two and three story Victorian buildings on standard 25' by 125' city lots. The lower stories of the hotel almost fill the rectangular lot. That's where convention is left behind. Taking a queue from the wedge-shaped park across the street, the floorplate is triangle with the hypotenuse facing southwest and the principal leg with rooms bordering Wabash Street. The elevators and services line the shortest leg on the north facing a brick wall. But it is the missing shape that makes the building so interesting. As Jean-Paul Viguier explained when he was in Chicago recently for the Humanities Festival, he likes to make a small model of a building when he first starts desiging. He enjoys creating shapes and then subtracting from them. He extruded a triangle and then created an elliptical cone whose peak lies at the top of the building. The cone extends vertically down towards the ground. This cone is subtracted from the wedge to give the tower interest and create a piazza in front of the building. If you think of French architecture -- the Architecture of the Beaux Arts as creating spaces with poché, then Viguier is working within that tradition. In a Beaux Arts plan, the negative space formed by the poché becomes the room. In Viguier's composition the cone is like the poché, it creates the space but is no longer there.

2. The public space: The piazza combined with the public park across the street creates the most interesting and welcoming public space for a high-rise in Chicago in 30 years. Whereas most new highrises give the public garage doors and brick walls at street level, Viguier embraces the street. The Wabash elevation at street-level is a ribbon of sawtoothed glass that allows for views into and out of a street-level bar and restaurant. That's a welcome change from the new buildings in Chicago that ignore the street. It makes for safer, cleaner, pedestrian neighborhoods and the kind of city we can take pride in. The Walton street entrance features a canopy that keeps guest dry. Once past the imaginatively detailed canopy, you walk over lights in the floor that change color with time. Much of the exterior and part of the lobby features frameless glazing siliconed in place. It comes in two varieties: milky white and clear. In the lobby there is a shaft of milky white glass that has a light show projected from within. It makes the interior dynamic. This dynamic quality is one of the welcome new ideas in architecture, an idea present in the wings of Calatrava's Milwaukee's museum.

3. The handling of the facade: Most high-rise facades are a variation on what Louis Sullivan or Mies van der Rohe did: one floor is simply repeated and placed on top of the other. Here Viguier treats the enclosure as a modular system. Each room is six modules wide framed by one module of milky white glass. Viguier mixes up the six modules into 2 vision, 1 translucent, 3 vision; 1 vision, l translucent, 4 vision, etc.. The facade is alive and the glass reflects its rich surroundings. (See the subtle reflection in the lower part of the west facade, photo above left.) Chicago a architects have been stuck in repeating the same glazing system. Viguier breaks free of the monotony and the new Sofitel soars.

What do you think?