2400 Lakeview Apartments

 by: chicago designslinger

[2400 Lakeview Apartments (1963) Mies van der Rohe, architect /Image & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

Herbert Greenwald was a young, up-and-coming developer in 1946 when he met recent German emigree and former Bauhaus director Mies van der Rohe, the head of the architecture program at the Illinois Institute of Technology. It was a pairing that would help reshape the residential landscape of Chicago architecture.

  [2400 Lakeview Apartments, 2400 N. Lakeview Avenue, Chicago /Images & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

After several apartment building projects and a productive partnership lasting 17 years, the 2400 Lakeview Apartments would be the pair's final adventure together. Forty-three-year -old Herbert Greenwald was killed in a plane crash in 1959 just as work was getting underway on the project, and although Mies would continue to work with Greenwald's successor firm Metropolitan Structures, the architect would never build another apartment building in Chicago.

  [2400 Lakeview Apartments, Lake View, Chicago /Image & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

The structure was the result of a design program the architect had devised for his buildings which he fundamentally believed was an expression of the very essence of modern 20th century construction and design. While considered by some as one of the greatest architects in the history, not everyone was enamored with his clean-lined, meticulously delineated habitats. Mazzola Woods was not an admirer of Miesian minimalism, which Mr. Woods made abundantly clear in a 1964 Chicago Tribune profile. Woods hired the House of Raymond Jacques to frame the floor to ceiling windows with pilasters topped by lattice cornices and filled with white felt Roman shades. The flat, slab doors were wallpapered over to tie into the walls, and a large brass and crystal chandelier was hung in the dining area all in an effort to add some drama to an interior "devoid of architectural interest."