SCB’s design for 135 South LaSalle—an ambitious adaptive reuse project and a cornerstone of the City of Chicago’s LaSalle Street Reimagined program—is featured in an ENR story exploring office-to-residential conversions in major US cities.

Formerly known as the Field Building, 135 South LaSalle is the largest development in the LaSalle Street Reimagined portfolio, encompassing 624,000-square-feet. Once complete, the project will deliver 386 new residential units and 92,000-square-feet of retail and commercial space, helping to usher in a vibrant new chapter for the historic LaSalle Street corridor.

A Chicago landmark, the Art Deco skyscraper was the last major tower built in the city before construction paused during the Great Depression and World War II. Its revitalization signals a revival for the building and a broader shift in how cities are reimagining their downtown cores.

While office-to-residential conversions offer a promising path for reducing vacancies and increasing urban housing supply, SCB President and CEO Chris Pemberton explains how they can pose significant design and economic challenges.

“The economics are critical” on conversions “because you’ll get to a threshold where it might lay out nicely, but it’s too expensive to support the future income. Further, you have to bring [a historic building] up to current code. We’re reviewing the energy model for the exterior envelope very closely. We’re going to replace all of the windows with more modern ones, but it is a landmark facade. We’ll work in close collaboration with the landmark preservationists on that.”

Beyond design and financial considerations, Sara Beardsley, an SCB Associate Principal and Director of Technical Design, points out how adaptive reuse can also deliver substantial environmental benefits.

“When we look at carbon studies, for a building like 135 S. LaSalle, the most carbon intensive parts of these buildings are the structure, the aluminum, the limestone facade and the caissons. You’re saving all that and just redoing the windows and mechanical systems. It’s such a better thing to do environmentally.”