Completed in 1988 on Chicago’s Magnificent Mile, 900 North Michigan Avenue stacks retail, hotel, office, and residential across 66 stories—an early KPF work that anticipated, at full scale, the civic ambition now central to mixed-use design.
The portal of the building’s Michigan Avenue façade opens into a six-story retail atrium that culminates in the grand lobby of Chicago’s Four Seasons Hotel. The program continues to climb, with office floors, hotel rooms, and residences and amenities crowning the top 19 floors, stacking distinct uses with enough discipline that each finds its own identity within the whole. The retail component has evolved considerably since opening. The Shops at 900 now house more than 70 luxury and lifestyle retailers anchored by Bloomingdale’s, while Aster Hall—a chef-driven food hall occupying levels five and six of the atrium, added in 2016—reflects the building’s ongoing capacity to absorb new programming without losing its character. The building’s original entrance sequence, carefully planned to reinforce a sense of public life, anticipated the kind of ground-level activation that has since become an expectation for mixed-use design.
Clad in cream-colored limestone and green-tinted glass, the 66-story tower organizes its façade into three parts: the base, which lends definition at street level; the middle, which features vertical striation and leads the eye upward; and the top, which features four corner pavilions lit at night as lanterns against the sky. The eight-level base, composed of granite, marble, and limestone, is scaled to engage the streetscape for pedestrians and establishes an axial relationship with Holabird and Roche’s 333 North Michigan Avenue across the river. The design draws on two enduring themes in Chicago architecture—the Chicago frame and the Chicago window—combining a dense corner structure with a tripartite window system of wide center bays flanked by narrow side bays.
