I've seen that somewhere(4)

203 N. LaSalle (better known by its former name the Loop Transportation Center) was constructed in 1985 to designs by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. It takes up the block between Clark and LaSalle and Lake to Haddock. It has lobbies on both LaSalle and Clark Street: the Clark Street lobby is under a 12 storey atrium while the LaSalle Street lobby is under a 4 storey atrium. The building has entrances and atria on both  LaSalle and Clark streets.

The building is 27 storeys tall, with parking on the lower 10 storeys. (A recent renovation has added some tenant amenities on the first and second floors.) It connects by skybridge to the apartment building on the east and with a tunnel to a government building to the south, but both these were built later so neither bridge nor tunnel were part of its original conception. But access to CTA rapid transit trains was part of the buildings original design. The original name "Loop Transporation Center" suggests a range of uses for the building, from urban mass transit to car rental to luggage retail.

LaSalle Façade

Clark Façade

But the fact that this structure is a parking ramp AND a CTA station AND has two façades ultimately leads the idea that this isn't a location in itself but merely a stop on the way to somewhere else, somewhere more important. If you want to go somewhere you might pass thru this building, say, to take the L to the airport. Or you've a meeting nearby, you could park your car here. Or pick up some luggage because you goinf on a trip. So this building's original design condemned it to liminality (from the Latin limen "boundary, threshold") because it's sort of a passage to another place. (Apparently 'liminal' has a pejorative sense in architectural discourse, as if it were a synonym for junkspace. I think that's mistaken. A liminal space is simply a space between two places. Michelangelo's entryway into the Laurentian Library is a masterpiece of Baroque design, but it's liminal but hardly junk.)

When 203 N. LaSalle was designed, there was apparently a fashion for "terraced tops": buildings that, after a certain number of floors begin to slope back: I can think of several other commercial buildings in Chicago's Loop built in the same era with this kind of terracing.

As noted above, this 23 floor building has about 10 floors of parking. I wonder if this amount is intentional. At sometime in the middle of the 20th Century, parking structures in the Loop were severely discouraged. I don't know any details -- when it was or where in effect. (I spent some time looking at the building codes, but all I got out of it is that there IS indeed regulation of parking structures.) Was it to encourage the use of mass transit, to reduce pollution caused by automobiles, or to preserve the character of the Loop. Was parking limited to building tenants? Was the extent of parking limited to some percent of the building, e.g. less than 50% of floors? 

When I saw drawings and photographs of a project designed by Paul Rudolph, of course I was reminded of it. It is a project from 1971 in Nagoya, Japan, built as a local office and distribution center for the Daiei Company, a large grocery chain. Nagoya isn't a large city, and Rudolph's building is much shorter than the Loop Transportation Building: ~10 vs ~30 storeys. 

(But wait: who was Paul Rudolph? He was a very prominent U.S. architect and among the most famous at the time, being the head of  architecture at Yale University. He very much looked like an American architect of the first half of the '60s and '70s: flat-top haircut, round eyeglasses, bow tie. His visibility and acclaim in North America essentially evaporated in the early 1970s. I suspect this was a result of all the cultural upheavals of the late 1960s and early 1970. I think of Rudolph as the consummate technocrat: an artist, yes, but fully versed in the science of materials and structural physics. Robert McNamara was a technocrat as well: fully versed in the science of manufacturing and organizational economics. In the 1960s, technocrats were widely admired. But the cultural upheavals of the late 1960s generated distrust for technocracy. Or maybe it was brutalism.) 

The Daiei building is still extant. If my interpretation of these photographs is correct, the existing structure isn't exactly like Rudolph's drawings, but I can't tell whether these differences were there when constructed or represent later changes

There are two similarities that catch my eye. First, there is the terraced top.  To my eye, this make the Daiei building fit into the scale of its neighbors: but is distinctive, modern and western. All of which fits with what could be Daiei's desired image: a local company that is also in touch with the modern world.

 Second, there is on the Clark Street façade some unusual detailing including a circular structure. There is also detailing on Rudolph's builing. This detailing on each building is distinct, but it helps to give it distinctiveness.

(Illustration credits: Laurentian Stairs from a 1907 Putnam's Magazine article via the University of Chicago Library; photo illustrating the shape of the building from the building's website; drawing of Daiei House from the project archives at the Paul Rudolph Institute for Modern Architecture; all other photos by the author.)