Chicago, Illinois
When it was completed in 2009, the Trump International Hotel & Tower was the tallest residential building in Chicago and North America, rising to 423 m. / 1,389 ft. In the wake of 9/11, plans for a taller building were changed, and the mixed-use hotel and condominium, designed by the Chicago office of SOM stopped at 98 stories, two floors short of the mixed-use John Hancock Center of 1969 by SOM, which squeezed its floors into 343 m.
Spectacularly sited on the north bank of the Chicago River, adjacent to the ornate white terra cotta Wrigley Building of 1922, the skyscraper flaunts the sleek steel and glass vocabulary of Chicago modernism. The tower rises in a series of shifting volumes and setbacks that reflect both the changing uses inside and the shapes of its neighbors. A landscaped space on several levels gives the public access to the river’s edge and connects the busy areas of North Michigan Avenue and the Loop.