“Lakeshore East is a neighborhood and should look like one,” says Carlins. “You go into any Chicago neighborhood and you see a plurality of styles—traditional, modern and historic—standing side by side. That’s what we wanted.”

It wasn’t always so. Since its inception in 1996, Magellan has completed 20 projects containing 6,600 residences and 517,000 sq ft of commercial space, not all of it universally acclaimed for its architecture.

“The important thing to remember about Magellan is that it is both a developer and an architect, an arrangement that gives the firm more control over design and that theoretically should result in better architecture,” says Blair Kamin, the Chicago Tribune’s Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic. “But it hasn’t. Prior to Lakeshore East, their work was almost universally panned, particularly its podium towers, which were plopped on parking garages with very little effort to integrate slab and tower.”

According to Kamin, even Chicago Mayor Richard Daley called for an end to ugly buildings.

Lakeshore East, Kamin acknowledges, is different, though he says a merely serviceable master plan by Chicago-based architect/engineer Skidmore Owings & Merrill would have been improved by better integration of the park and an adjoining network of three-tier streets. Carlins says sinking the park to natural grade slashed $87 million off projected infrastructure costs and made Lakeshore East economically feasible.

Aqua Tower, says Kamin, marks a happier convergence of art and commerce. While some of Lakeshore East’s earlier high-rises “managed to make the leap from awful to average, there is no arguing the Aqua is among the finest of the residential towers to emerge from that particular boom,” he says.

Best known for her work on community centers, Gang wasn’t an obvious choice to design it. “She’d never built a high-rise,” says Loewenberg. “I thought, I know how to build a high-rise. I need someone who can turn their creative juices on the exterior, someone who can look at it with fresh eyes, and Jeanne was the one.”
 

“We developed several initial concepts, all containing more information about construction than Jim was accustomed to seeing,” recalls Gang. “The cantilevering concrete terraces were unlike anything Magellan had ever done, but Jim is accustomed to making things happen. That’s how Magellan is. As long as you’ve done your homework and present something that’s implementable, they see the potential.”

Of Aqua’s facade, she says, “I was thinking about strata, how strata erode with water and time. So the name Aqua, which came later from Magellan’s marketing department, was perfect.”

Gang’s curvilinear terraces not only enhance views, but regulate sunshine and shade. Each balcony is slightly longer or shorter than the one immediately above and below it, with some extending as deep as 18 ft past the curtainwall. Upon seeing plans for the facade, “We asked ourselves, ‘How in the hell are we going to build this?’” says Bullard, McHugh’s project manager for Aqua.
 

“Our biggest selling job was to McHugh,” Loewenberg recalls. “I just had to sit down and convince everyone, myself included, that we could do this and do it economically. I told them, ‘This will be the easiest building you ever built.’” McHugh, in turn, needed to convince its subcontractors. “We wound up loading electronic CAD files onto a GPS-like instrument, then located the instrument on each deck to determine where each endpoint would lie,” Bullard says.

The Aqua may mark a turning point for Magellan, which thus far has completed seven of 15 planned high-rises at Lakeshore. “I think it made them realize the value of architecture to the city and their image,” says Kamin. “Let’s hope that with the next wave, they show what they’ve learned from their own good works.”

“We’ve upped the ante,” says Loewenberg. “How do you top it? That’s the question always lurking in the back of our minds.”