We drove by the Margo and Harold Schiff Residencies yesterday and were wowed by the sleek new building in the rapidly changing Cabrini Green neighborhood. The complex (also known as the Near North Apartments), was developed by non-profit group Mercy Housing Lakefront and designed by Helmut Jahn. The building provides both affordable housing and environmental benefits to neighborhood residents. And at an average of 300 square feet, the apartments are small space living with a lot of style.
Half of the units are reserved for low-income tenants, while the other half go to disabled and homeless residents. Green features include rooftop wind turbines, solar panels, and a gray water system that recycles water from showers and sinks back into the toilet system.
Buildings like the Near North Apartments have been a long time coming for some public housing residents, who have been displaced by the Chicago Housing Authority's controversial Plan for Transformation. Not only is the building green and beautiful, it's also earned some accolades including Met Home's 2007 Design 100 List and a citation for merit from the AIA.
On November 10th, the building will be open for tours as part of Chicago's Green Building Expo.
Photos by Doug Snower for Mercy Housing Lakefront.
© 2009 Apartment Therapy
From the outside, it's a cool building, the idea is great and the rendering, at least, shows it to be very spacious in feeling, partly because of the generously-sized windows.
One thing it doesn't show is any sort of window coverings, and I hope this was just an omission on the part of the renderer, and not in the actual building specs. I used to have a panoramic view over the park & lake and it was awesome, but even on winter days, my uncovered windows--this was during my early (and shortlived) flirtation with minimalism--turned the place into a bake oven, and without some sort of way to regulate the light blasting through the big windows of this splace--and considering the unlikelihood of formerly homelsseess residents being able to afford custom blinds for those handsome curved-top windows--I see the whole facade quickly turning into a display of patterned bedsheets.
view magnaverde's profile
i used to like this building until i went in and they don't even have automatic controls. clean with aerosol sprays and a bunch of little things. oh, yeah, and the 197 million dollar construction cost tag. ouch. most expensive public housing, umm, ever. how many more people could it have housed with that budget and still have a decent beautiful living space?
this doesn't prove much for the necessity of a well designed building since it's just a show piece, or at least professionals in the design industry understand this, but what about others?
view mig's profile
Is that barbed wire at the top? Looks like a Danish prison to me. 197 million? Ridiculous.
view Kurt's profile
I hope I am not speaking out of turn. My understanding of the construction cost for this project was it cost about $14 million. The visible structure on the top of the building is aeroturbines, part of the green concept. While this building was built on part of the previous Cabrini-Green public housing geography, it is not public housing. I think it is an interesting structure and concept (both structurally and the projects stated goals) and it will be interesting to see how it all measures up over the long term. I mean no offense to previous comments.
view peardown's profile
the number i got included a couple of million for the entire property, which includes the urban vegetable garden and all the way to the fire station. three more buildings are scheduled to fill this space. this number i got from a building tour earlier this year.
view mig's profile
and it is public housing
http://www.lakefront.org/nearnorth.html
view mig's profile