Shoreline Apartments

The Shoreline Apartments is a Neogothic skyscraper designed by Henry K. Holsman, and built in 1928 in Chicago, IL.

Its precise street address is 2231 E. 67th Street, Chicago, IL. You can also find it on the map here.

The Shoreline Apartments is a structure of significant importance both for the city of Chicago and the United States as a nation. The building embodies the distinctive characteristic features of the time in which it was built and the Neogothic style. Because of that, the Shoreline Apartments was officially included in the National Register of Historic Places on September 5^th 2017.

The building underwent a major restoration between 2016 and 2019.

Henry K. Holsman was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design.

The Shoreline Apartments can be categorized as a Neogothic building.

The Shoreline Apartments was completed in 1928. These were the late days of the Neogothic movement, which had been around for almost 200 years at the time.

Art-deco would soon take over US architecture, and therefore, even though Henry K. Holsman didn't venture into what was cutting edge in terms of style at the time, and took instead a more conservative approach to the design of the Shoreline Apartments, it is possible that the design already started showing some traits that would later become characteristic of the art-deco movement.

The Shoreline Apartments uses a frame structure made of columns and beams.

A frame structure uses a combination of beams and columns to sustain the building's weight. The walls in this case are non-load bearing, which allows for more flexibility when distributing the interior spaces.

The facade is a non-load bearing masonry facade. This type of facade became common during the period when buildings, especially taller ones, transitioned from load-bearing wall systems to frame structures.

Frame structures allowed facades to be independent from the building's frame, enabling the use of lighter materials and larger openings. However, it took some time for architects to incorporate these new posibilities into their designs, and so for a while they simply replicated the look and feel fo buildings people where used to seeing.

From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features a light-colored stone on the first two levels and red brick on the rest of the facade.

Another material found at the Shoreline Apartments is wrought iron, found in the lobby's lighting fixtures.