For all the attention that glass and steel garners, it’s brick that captures the soul of Chicago’s architecture. Since the conflagration of 1871, brick has been the workaday material of choice throughout the city’s neighborhoods. Worker’s cottages, bungalows, three- and six-flats, and courtyard apartments have been largely constructed of brick. Even Ludwig Mies van der Rohe — our high god of modern glass and steel — clad his first high-rise in 1949, the Promontory Apartments in Hyde Park, in brick. 

Brick is one of the most fundamental materials in architecture. Each piece is a little bit of the earth itself, molded to a shape that fits easily in the hand, baked to achieve permanence and then stacked, one atop another, to form a wall that can enclose, shelter and delight us. Brick’s diminutive size helps ground a building — regardless of scale — in the human hand that was integral to its construction. 

And brick is an essential element in many classic Chicago buildings including The Rookery, the Monadnock and the Marquette Building. Frank Lloyd Wright favored Roman brick — an elongated version that mimics the architect’s horizontal structures in each unit, with Hyde Park’s Robie House as a particularly good example. 

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The Rookery at LaSalle and Adams streets in Chicago in 2020. (Zbigniew Bzdak/Chicago Tribune)

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But brick is no guarantee of design quality. The city is flooded with dull and uninteresting structures clad in the material. But thoughtfully designed and detailed, brick can evoke the full history of architecture and elevate a building’s status. 

The following brick-faced projects of note have been recently approved or financed or are under construction. They’re promising designs that have the potential to become very good neighbors — and might point to a broader interest in creating appealing architecture that fits in. 

A 66-unit brick building at 1201 W. Kinzie St. at the northern edge of the booming Fulton Market District was designed by Dirk Denison Architects. At just five stories tall, it’s a throwback in scale for this rapidly densifying neighborhood. Tucked between Kinzie and the railroad tracks, it’s a very straightforward building whose mass is mitigated by a series of notched setbacks. But the renderings shown to date are rather dull and just a bit off; this could become a forgettable and uninspired apartment block, except Dirk Denison is a very detailed-oriented architect who often works with wealthy clients on commercial and residential projects. The color of the glazed brick and mortar, the quality of the windows, and the promised bronze railings and details will be critical to the building’s architectural success. 

A new four-story-tall, 59-unit apartment block at 1728 N. Clybourn Ave. was proposed late last year for a site half a block north of the North/Clybourn Red Line station on the west side of the street. Featuring large windows that recall the Clybourn Corridor’s industrial past, the Eckenhoff Saunders design displays a modern minimalist sensibility. Balconies are used judiciously to break the overall mass into three separate volumes along the streetscape while differently colored brick gives each piece its own identity. 

This four-story-tall brick building that’s nearing completion at 2237 W. Roscoe St. in Roscoe Village is quite appealing. Designed by En Masse Architecture and Design with a+c architects, the design displays a sense of weight that’s appropriate for brick construction. Subtle stringcourses tie the punched windows together. The initial rendering showed deep horizontal banding around the building’s corner that were unfortunately omitted, but the building holds up under scrutiny. According to the project’s website, the six condominium apartments have already been sold. 

Fully approved and permitted, the new building at 2724 N. Lehmann Court in Lincoln Park promises a spare minimalist essay in brick. It’s designed by Studio Dwell, which has been creating crisp contemporary residential designs for more than two decades. The accomplished small firm was rather inexplicably the sole Chicago firm featured in a new book by former Architectural Record editors that documents design-savvy designers between the coasts.

At 2724 N. Lehmann, we’ve lost a decent, if somewhat unassuming, three-flat. But this is an object lesson in how to densify an already-dense Lincoln Park neighborhood without breaking the prevailing residential scale. The new structure is not much taller (five versus three stories) than its neighbors while creating 19 units in place of just three. The renderings are a bit vague, but Studio Dwell’s track record indicates that this is a building worth watching. 

Just recently proposed, the five-story-tall block at 2758 N. Mozart St. in Logan Square was designed by Chicago Common Studio and Gansari & Associates. It’s solid and almost classical in its somewhat staid overall composition. The building seems even more solid than the other projects here due to its massive masonry pier that holds the corner of Mozart and Diversey Avenue. That’s in part due to the building’s unusual interior configuration, with four, two-story-tall townhouses along Mozart. Three of these units are within the overall five-story-tall volume, with another occupying a lower “bustle” at the south end of the building. There’s some retail space along Diversey, with 36 apartments filling the rest of the structure. 

The Department of Planning and Development just recently selected a very promising two-building transit-oriented development at 1515 and 1607 W. 63rd St. in West Englewood designed by architects Beehyyve L3C and Alligood Song. These two smart triangular structures will be located along 63rd at each end of the 63rd/Ashland Green Line station. They’re relatively small, with 18 units each and some ground floor retail spaces, but their gracefully curved brick and glass corners sport a sleek contemporary look that should be a notch above many recent city-backed efforts in the neighborhoods of the South and West sides. 

While each of these projects is promising, there’s still a deep design conservatism to each of them. Not every building needs to be — nor should be — extraordinary. But Chicago is a city of great achievers: John Wellborn Root, Daniel Burnham, Wright, Mies, Harry Weese, Helmut Jahn, Carol Ross Barney, Jeanne Gang, John Ronan and many others. 

While none of these new projects reaches those heights, they promise good architecture — which isn’t always easy to find these days. 

Edward Keegan writes, broadcasts and teaches on architectural subjects. Keegan’s biweekly architecture column is supported by a grant from former Tribune critic Blair Kamin, as administered by the not-for-profit Journalism Funding Partners. The Tribune maintains editorial control over assignments and content.

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