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Fifty Bellevue Place Apartment Building, Chicago, Illinois, Isometric

A work made of graphite on illustration board.

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  • A work made of graphite on illustration board.

Date:

1976

Artist:

Christopher John Chamales
American, 1907-1993

About this artwork

By the early 1950s, architects and developers began planning high-rise apartment buildings to replace older housing in Chicago’s North Side. As Le Corbusier had done in his 1920s Ville Contemporaine, which called for the historical fabric of Paris to be razed and replaced with cruciform towers surrounded by green space, modernist American architects looked to experimental forms of residential development to remake the city. Although the most visible form of urban planning was undertaken through urban renewal projects that replaced slums with high-rise housing, architect Christopher Chamales’s plan for a luxury apartment building shows a similar planning ethos on a smaller scale—a tall tower of unusual geometries intended to maximize light and air, set on a high base to accommodate parking—exploding the scale of the neighboring 19th-century mansions.

Status

Currently Off View

Department

Architecture and Design

Artist

Christopher John Chamales (Architect)

Title

Fifty Bellevue Place Apartment Building, Chicago, Illinois, Isometric

Place

Chicago (Building address)

Date  Dates are not always precisely known, but the Art Institute strives to present this information as consistently and legibly as possible. Dates may be represented as a range that spans decades, centuries, dynasties, or periods and may include qualifiers such as c. (circa) or BCE.

1976

Medium

Graphite on illustration board

Dimensions

54.3 × 75.2 cm (21 3/8 × 29 5/8 in.)

Credit Line

Gift of Margaret Goehst Chamales

Reference Number

1994.190.1

Extended information about this artwork

Object information is a work in progress and may be updated as new research findings emerge. To help improve this record, please email . Information about image downloads and licensing is available here.

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