Rising nine stories above Ravenswood, a vibrant northside neighborhood in Chicago, the former Ravenswood Hospital building represented a challenge and an opportunity for an innovative new kind of affordable senior housing. The building was part of a larger medical-care campus that has been redeveloped in recent years, including two buildings that were converted to apartments and medical offices and the new construction of a private school.
The hospital officially closed in 2002 and had begun to deteriorate. It also was heavily vandalized, raising concerns among residents in the neighborhood. WJW Architects worked with Evergreen Real Estate Group and the Chicago Housing Authority to revitalize the structure and give the building new life as Ravenswood Senior Living, creating badly needed affordable housing in a desirable neighborhood that is largely out of reach for low-income seniors, including many who have lived most of their lives in the area.
Project Instigates Legislation
The Chicago Housing Authority has more than 10,000 senior housing units. The residents often remain in Chicago Housing Authority housing or other affordable housing beyond when they are able to fully take care of themselves. Because of this, the development team sought to find a solution that allowed low-income seniors to age in place. However, a major hurdle was related to the Supportive Living Facility (SLF) license that was needed from the state of Illinois to provide the assisted living units. Existing legislation did not allow an SLF to be shared with another use in the same building. In this case, an independent senior facility would be housed on the upper floors.
The developer worked diligently with local and state officials to find a way to make the project feasible. Ultimately, legislation was passed that permitted supportive-living senior housing to share a building with other kinds of housing. WJW Architects was then able to create a design that incorporated both affordable assisted and independent senior living in a vertical arrangement within one building.
New separate entrances met a key design requirement of the legislation, and intelligent division of space places supportive living on lower floors while independent living spaces occupy upper levels. As residents age and need more assistance with daily tasks, they will be able to easily transition between the two models—all while remaining in a familiar home.
Exterior Renovation, New Addition
The existing early 1970s concrete and masonry structure was foreboding in its original design with large expanses of windowless brick. This was partly due to an entire upper floor housing large mechanical equipment, as well as a separate surgical floor that did not need windows.
In the adaptive-reuse design process, all the existing windows were removed, and large residential-style windows were installed. In addition, new masonry openings were created on every floor of the building to open up the façade and provide light and ventilation to the new residential apartments. The large, glazed openings offer residents far-reaching views over their neighborhood’s streetscapes, and many units have an unobstructed view of the downtown skyline and Lake Michigan. The result is a building that—though is still taller than most of its neighbors—now feels much lighter and of a more residential character than it ever had in its prior institutional history.
The existing building’s floorplate was basically a 140- by 140-foot square, which is great for a hospital but not conducive to the proposed uses. Further complicating matters, the floor outline changed a number of times vertically through the building. In general, an approach was taken to centralize various resident common spaces on the floors (most are larger and there are more of them than in any comparable senior living community) and ring the perimeter with loft-style dwelling units, typically deep and narrow and some with remote bedrooms with partial-height walls. Because the new windows are so large, light travels deep into any of these units.
Coupled with the floorplate dilemma, the program for the two uses required additional units that would not fit within the existing building. Again, this was caused by the limitations of the existing structure and the need for natural light and ventilation for all of the dwelling units. Further- more, the existing property is a very tight, urban site that didn’t have much space for an addition without demolishing portions of the existing building. Various solutions were considered, including adding vertically to the wings of existing upper floors that were set back. The eventual solution was a narrow addition on the north side, which would sit on top of the existing 1-story structure that had contained electrical equipment in the basement and offices and exam rooms for the hospital. Today, the 1-story structure maintains electrical equipment in the basement and part of the SLF’s commercial kitchen and dining room, as well as a loading dock. It was clad in aluminum metal panels to integrate with the metal-clad school it faces. The refreshed façades, added windows and shining aluminum panels of the addition help create a livelier presence within the neighborhood.
Another key design goal was to provide opportunities for the residents to connect with the outdoors without necessarily having to leave the building. This was accomplished with roof decks on different levels, including a new exterior patio off the main dining room, a roof deck on top of an existing 1-story portion of the building and a roof deck at the sixth floor on top of the new addition. The new-construction deck that was added off of the SLF’s dining room provides views over the neighboring school’s athletic field, further reinforcing the potential intergenerational living opportunity of this overall campus.
Ensconced in all of these design interventions was the matter of environmental sustainability. Aside from a number of energy efficiency, water-resource management and healthy indoor environment features, possibly the greatest sustainability feature was in the reuse of this building. Given its enormous structure, a tremendous amount of landfill waste would have been generated had this building been demolished. Instead, much of this concrete and steel structure was preserved, conserving material resources and the existing embodied energy of these building materials.
PHOTOS: Andrew Bruah Photographer