State Street Apartment

Awards
AIA Illinois Design Award 2023
Excellence in Interiors for Projects under 5,000 SF

This renovation explores spatial organization and material articulation in a small apartment with striking elevational views of the Chicago Loop. Domestic spaces intersect functions that support working and making, blending the creative environment of the workshop with the traditional living space of the apartment. An underused balcony is reimagined as a courtyard to provide a common and centralizing element for each room. A simple material palette is expressed as smooth or textured, thick or thin, rustic or refined. These variations articulate changes in space and program, creating moments that are distinct yet unified.

Millwork is deployed to both harmonize and differentiate the apartment’s various programs. Facing the entry, a steel and perforated wood door conceals a mechanical closet for a new high-efficiency electric heat pump. Fluorescent colored pucks attach magnetically to recessed steel circles, creating a large-scale, analog version of a “Lite Brite” children’s toy that captures the apartment’s ethos of both concentration and play. This perforation motif is repeated in the hallway and workshop, where walls are clad in a custom CNC pegboard made from recycled paper products.

Elements that frame or support– whether a bed frame, the frame of a niche, or a cantilevered shelf – are articulated as thick, solid and structural. In contrast, elements that clad or cover are expressed as thin and veneered surfaces. A pattern of solid wood slats reconciles these two conditions by providing depth and thickness to a surface treatment. In the bathroom and entry, handmade tile and natural stone convey variation and texture in contrast to the uniform surfaces of lacquered millwork.

Two landscape elements further enhance and unify the interior. A 10’ long planter box and linear light is suspended below the interior face of a window to allow for the year-long cultivation of herbs and plants. An adjacent outdoor balcony is repurposed as an artificial rock garden that visually connects the bedroom, office, kitchen and living room. These landscape elements mediate the urban and architectural elevations of Hammond, Beeby & Babka’s Harold Washington Library and William Le Baron Jenney’s Second Leister Building.