Loop the Loop pix

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe designed two glass-box towers and placed them around a modern-day piazza—everything proportioned and positioned to look larger than it really is. "It's the last of the Mohicans," Skidmore, Owings & Merrill associate partner Nada Andric comments upon arrival. "I doubt whether it could be achieved today by one architect's brain."

This restaurant by the Johnson Studio is a pioneer in the art and science of flavor. Creative genius extends to the walls, which display a collection of blue-chip contemporary artists from Donald Judd to Ed Ruscha. Selected by the Alan Koppel Gallery, the works play off and, at times, break up the symmetry of the space. Carlos Martinez, Gensler's regional design director and principal, calls the effect "minimal opulence." There's humor, too. Presiding over one table is a Vik Muniz photograph from his series made with chocolate.

Tucked away atop an old industrial building on the West Side, this 1,500-square-foot duplex was Studio Gang Architects's first project. Susann Craig cofounded Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art, a local nonprofit, and her home's floor-to-ceiling open bookcase of unfinished lumber displays her extensive personal collection. From her loft bed, Craig can survey the living space below. "It's like being inside a memory," she tells the visitors. "Everything I look at has a story."

Florian Architects received an AIA National Honor Award for renovating this neoclassical interior—an exceptional take on adaptive reuse. The task involved creating resonance and balance between the 1928 hall's ornamentation and contemporary interventions. For example, Paul Florian restored bronze details while partitioning the space with scrims of brushed stainless-steel mesh. Plaster ceiling medallions were repaired and painted with slightly more red and honey to echo the red onyx of the glamorous reception desk.

Everyone turns up at dusk to view this residence on the 22nd floor of Mies van der Rohe's glass tower, because that's the best time to experience Krueck + Sexton Architects's "painted apartment" with all its shades of violet. Asked to make the clients feel as if they were "living in a work of art," as Design Collaboratives principal Mary Beth Rampolla puts it this evening, Ronald Krueck formulated the design, and Mark Sexton implemented it by hand, painting subtle decorative elements on the walls, floor, and ceiling.

"It's vintage and seminal, an extraordinary experience," Interior Design Hall of Fame member Neil Frankel says of this testament to the 1980's. Then, on a lighter note, he adds, "It's also just to the right of Austin Powers."

Art is a major concern for designers of both public and private spaces in Chicago. Pablo Picasso's Cor-Ten steel sculpture, installed across from City Hall in 1967, set the gold standard for municipal art.

This 91-year-old institution has had several homes, including Mies van der Rohe's only interior in a building not his own. When that space was infamously destroyed to make way for a mall-cinema complex, Vinci/Hamp Architects relocated his suspended stair to a location in the shadow of the John Hancock Center. The club's salon is furnished with vintage pieces, including velvet-covered crescent sofas and shiny black cocktail tables. Andric notes how John Vinci "skillfully manipulated the space with such simple but luxurious devices as gold and silver curtains." She also gives high marks to the stairwell's travertine cladding—laid horizontally, just like it's formed by nature.

Built by Goettsch Partners, this 51-story building boasts a shell and core that are the first anywhere to be certified LEED Gold. Andric is married to James Goettsch, so she acted as guide, pointing out that the foundation was partially existing. The Hyatt Center, up the street, might have had all the pedigree—the top-shelf client and out-of-town architect—but this project, Martinez chimes in, is a sleeper hit.

For almost 25 years, one short stretch of Madison boasted two major public sculptures, Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen's Batcolumn and Louise Nevelson's Dawn Shadows. Then this building's owners hired Powell/Kleinschmidt to build a glass winter garden around the Nevelson—thereby expanding the lobby. Measuring 75 feet square, the transparent box is anchored by Italian white marble flooring. "The simpler it looks, the harder it is to achieve," Interior Design Hall of Famer Robert Kleinschmidt says. Chicago's AIA chapter must have appreciated that: It bestowed its Divine Detail Award on the project.

Garofalo Architects conjured this cultural venue out of a bland brick warehouse—on zero budget, as more than one tour member mentions. "This is about neighborhood," Frankel says. "It has no pretense of architectural achievement." The building has received mixed reviews and a lot of negative reports for being unfinished. Now that it's in use, though, it's finding its voice.

Part of a new development on the lake end of the Chicago River, this collector's apartment has picture-postcard skyline views. However, the 80-foot depth of the 6,000-square-foot space made it particularly difficult for Tigerman McCurry Architects to shape the interior. Everyone admires Margaret McCurry's solution: a series of foyers to create symmetry—and good walls for art.

This building by Rafael Viñoly Architects was universally praised for many reasons. Outside, substantial overhangs make a sensitive gesture toward Frank Lloyd Wright's Robie House across the street. Inside, Andric says she's impressed by the finishes: "I'm hoping that students coming out of here, as future clients, are going to be asking for the same high quality."

The city's most recent grand gesture of urban design was the logical place to end. Our 11 participants gathered at Gehry Partners's Jay Pritzker Pavilion, an outdoor concert stage of brushed stainless steel that blossoms against the canyons of the Loop. "It's one of the few free classical venues left in America," Kleinschmidt says. "And you can picnic." During the years of construction, as the city announced ever more features, Martinez was among those who feared that the project would become a collection of amusement-park attractions rather than a cohesive expression. So he says he couldn't be happier with the result: "It's not a Navy Pier thing." While Anish Kapoor's giant Cloud Gate sculpture reflects the group members, who, in turn, reflect on their experience, Frankel sees the park as the perfect synthesis of the city as a whole: "It's a social effort. It fits the politics. Metaphorically, it's Chicago."