Project Description
FROM AIA CHICAGO:
Located adjacent to an athletic complex, the Hotel Kapok is a 19-story boutique hotel offering 242 rooms and a variety of amenity programs. The form is simple, while the exterior expression is unique and bold. Clad entirely in high-performance glazing with integrated operable windows for each room; the façade is overlaid with a perforated metal scrim providing valuable exterior shading and visually referencing the diamond-shaped structure of the Sports Arena. A series of heavily landscaped surfaces on the rooftop create a destination dining experience for guests and visitors celebrating unobstructed views to the bay and beyond. A traditional west facing arrival court is sunken to help seclude activity from the neighboring Arena; while the hotel planning strives to provide a unique spatial quality that eliminates the cloistered nature of typical hotel corridors. The resulting pinwheel plan allows for corridors that end in vision glass with a punctuation of light and views. Four multi-story atriums reveal themselves on the facade as large voids in the exterior scrim, and rhythmically ascend up and around the hotel core to drive light deeper into the floor plans. Each atrium showcases interior vegetation while strategically locating varied amenity areas, sensitive of orientation, throughout the hotel.