Surgeons with jackhammers are busy at work at 1118 North State Street, where the former Cedar Hotel (or “Hotel Cedar,” depending on how you read the sign) is the latest building in Chicago to get a façade-ectomy. Two years from now this will be an 18-story glass Viceroy Hotel, with the 1924 Cedar’s brick-and-stone facade pasted on the front of the lower levels.
This is hardly Chicago’s first exercise in preserving history by building a new, modern building in behind an old facade. From bank skyscrapers on LaSalle Street to hotels on Michigan Avenue, we see this sort of thing happen every couple of years. Gold Cost Spy Joel hit our tip line with this picture of the work in progress.
Hotel Cedar being demolished/Viceroy Hotel pre-construction (Courtesy of Gold Coast Spy Joel)
Also popular in Chicago these days are boutique hotels, which are addressing the huge demand for lodging by filling in the smaller gaps in the cityscape that aren’t big enough for the major brands to occupy.
The Viceroy is being developed by Convexity Properties, with friends-of-the-blog Goettsch Partners doing the design work. The idea is to disassemble the facade of the former flophouse, store it somewhere safe, build the new building, then re-install the old facade. A company called Compass Surveying did a detailed laser scan (called a “point cloud” in industry jargon) of the facade before it was touched. That’s what you see in the video at the top of this article.
Rendering of the Viceroy Chicago
Location: 1118 North State Street, Gold Coast
Editor founded the Chicago Architecture Blog in 2003, after a long career in journalism. He can be reached at chicagoarchitectureinfo@gmail.com.
