CHICAGO DEVELOPMENT SEEKS TO AMEND PRIOR ZONING APPROVAL

Located at 800 West Lake Street, a previously approved development concept for a 21-story hotel with 476 rooms is seeking approval to amend the prior zoning approval to allow for a taller 36-story concept featuring 406 rental apartments, 102 parking spaces, and ground-floor retail space along the street frontages of Halsted and Lake Streets.

CTBUH Organizational member G|R|E|C Architects, who led the design of the previous hotel concept, is presently in charge of the revised proposal for the site to be developed by a joint venture of Ascend Real Estate Group and North Park Ventures, LLC. The revised design was first submitted to Chicago’s Department of Planning in 2022 and with some design modifications was presented to the Neighbors of West Loop Community Organization on the evening of September 6, 2023. As proposed, the rental apartment building would feature a two-story lobby entrance along Lake Street beside a porte cochere, bringing traffic circulation off of the local streets and into the property for loading, deliveries, and parking garage access.

The project stands out with an exterior design that emphasizes verticality by extending the façade expression through the podium floors and down toward the street level, as opposed to many other recently constructed buildings in the vicinity which often feature a contextualized base, usually masonry, to echo the character of the formerly industrial Fulton Market District.