#driehaus foundation

The Richard H. Driehaus Foundation has awarded funding to Chicago Neighborhood Initiatives, Inc. (CNI), to oversee an open design competition to engage the best and brightest Chicago architects for the planning and design of a creative space in Chicago’s Pullman community for artists to live, work, gather and share ideas. Pullman Artspace is being developed in partnership with PullmanArts, a group of neighborhood artists committed to the revitalization of Pullman; and Artspace Inc., the Nation’s leading non-profit developer of mixed-use artist housing.

Taken from the Chicago Neighborhood Development Awards website:

For creating a welcoming new presence in the neighborhood that supports growth in the rapidly changing community and preserves a legendary Chicago landmark, Landon Bone Baker is the 2014 winner of the First Place Richard H. Driehaus Award for Architectural Excellence in Community Design, for Harvest Commons.

Opened in 1930 as the Union Park Hotel, this six-story, terracotta-and-brick building on Chicago’s Near West Side is a Chicago landmark and classic example of Art Deco architecture. Still, in recent years the building fell on hard times. The structure wore signs of its several transformations: first, an “apartment hotel” and later as the Viceroy Hotel, one of the city’s many SROs, which advertised a cheap place to sleep.

The Viceroy Hotel has been born again as Harvest Commons Apartments, an affordable housing development and supportive services project designed by Landon Bone Baker Architects that seeks to contribute to the on-going rejuvenation of the Near West Side.

Working with Heartland Housing to save the neighborhood icon, Landon Bone Baker took pains to preserve the historic structure. The team undertook a major restoration of the lobby, uncovering long-buried motifs of flowers and ears of corn. The architects looked to decades-old documents, plans and photographs to maintain the building’s historic integrity as they renovated the front stairway, barrel vaults and exterior façade. The preserved plasterwork in the ground-floor communal space and the restored luster of the earth-toned terrazzo floors in the lobby speak to the building’s history.

In coordination with Heartland’s vision, Landon Bone Baker reconfigured residential floors to reduce the number of units from 150 to 89 studio apartments. Harvest Commons is a safe, supportive and healthy living environment for near-homeless individuals and women recently released from prison.

The hotel has been restored to be much more than an apartment building. The long-vacant ground floor is now a social enterprise café and teaching kitchen in which residents take classes about nutrition and food preparation. Outside, a garden provides therapeutic opportunities for residents, as well as a way of engaging closely in sustainable urban agriculture.

Taken from the Chicago Neighborhood Development Awards website:

For its creative reuse of an abandoned structure and its creation of a new focal point for community health issues, JGMA is the 2014 winner of the Second Place Richard H. Driehaus Foundation Award for Excellence in Community Design, for its Instituto Health Sciences Career Academy.

On South Western Avenue in Pilsen, a deteriorating and abandoned industrial building has been transformed into the Instituto Health Sciences Career Academy (IHSCA), a charter high school with a health sciences and college preparatory focus that aims to train the next generation of nurses, doctors and scientists. Recruited for the job by Instituto del Progreso Latino (IDPL), the architects at JGMA repurposed the three-story, 77,000-square-foot building into a state-of-the-art facility and community anchor.

Reconceptualized as a school during a community charrette in 2007, the 1920s-era, heavy timber and brick building was expanded and renovated. A gleaming new color-morphing facade echoes the creativity within the building. This high performance skin, or “rain screen” technology, dramatically improves the thermal performance of the building envelope. The building’s bright, contemporary interior design enhances the school’s cutting-edge educational strategies and technological teaching tools. In addition to classrooms and computer labs, IHSCA is home to health career and family resource centers; a community clinic and library; a dining/multi-purpose room with a dramatic skyline view; a fitness center with a climbing wall; and administrative and conference spaces.

Categorized by “Community,” “College,” “Hospital,” and “Biotech,” each floor of the school is easily identifiable by a uniquely bright color scheme, graphics and furniture—all meant to instill a positive and energetic attitude in the school’s 600 students. The school’s curriculum integrates hands-on health sciences training with a focus on college attendance and future employment in the health care sector. In addition to a diploma, students are given the option of graduating with certification in nursing, health administration or health technology.