Lake Point Tower

Lake Point Tower is a high-rise residential building located on a promontory of the Lake Michigan lakefront in downtown Chicago, just north of the Chicago River at 505 North Lake Shore Drive. It is located in the Streeterville neighborhood of the Near North Side community area. It rises somewhat apart from the urban cluster of downtown Chicago. The building is also the only skyscraper in downtown Chicago east of Lake Shore Drive.DevelopmentThe architects for Lake Point Tower were John Heinrich and George Schipporeit, working under the firm name of Schipporeit and Heinrich; the two were students of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, one of the best known architects of the Bauhaus movement and International Style school, who taught at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. Lake Point Tower was completed in 1968, is approximately 645ft tall, and was the tallest apartment building in the world at that time. The project developer was William F. Hartnett, Jr., chairman and founder of Hartnett-Shaw Development Company, which was responsible for more than 260 residential and commercial real estate developments in the United States from 1961–1983.ArchitectureLake Point Tower was inspired by Mies van der Rohe’s 1922 design for a glass-curtained skyscraper in Berlin. Schipporeit and Heinrich took van der Rohe's unbuilt office building concept and converted it to a residential building. Despite differences — Lake Point Tower is much taller than van der Rohe’s original project, more regular in form, and its exterior glass curtain wall is tinted — many consider it a Mies van der Rohe building executed by two of his protégés.