Fifty Bellevue Place Apartment Building, Chicago, Illinois, Isometric

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.