Why you should experience Hotel EMC2, Autograph Collection in Chicago, Illinois.
Hotel EMC2, Autograph Collection is an inquisitive design hotel where Streeterville's scientific culture, artistic experimentation, intellectual curiosity and appetite for invention converge through a concept built explicitly around the relationship between art and science.
Set along East Ontario Street near North St. Clair Street and just steps from The Arts Club of Chicago, the hotel rises 22 stories from a purpose-built structure at 228 East Ontario Street, with Chicago-based KOO serving as architect of record, directing the brand strategy and originating the interior concept before collaborating with Rockwell Group on its realization. KOO gave the tower a patterned metal rainscreen and a three-tone stainless-steel base organized around isometric cube graphics, while Rockwell Group translated the conceptual structure inside through rose gold, glass, books, scientific instruments and spaces modeled on the collecting instincts shared by artists and scientists. Developer Scott Greenberg, president and CEO of SMASHotels, drove the project around a conviction that artistic and scientific inquiry belonged within the same intellectual continuum, with Leonardo da Vinci supplying the conceptual figure whose writings introduce that concept at the entrance. The result is a hotel where Greenberg, KOO, Rockwell Group and da Vinci turn Streeterville's proximity to medical, artistic and academic institutions into a contemporary Chicago experiment in hospitality as intellectual theater.
What you should know about Hotel EMC2.
Hotel EMC2, Autograph Collection is best known for opening in May 2017 as a 195-room member of Marriott International's Autograph Collection, with nearly a dozen commissioned artists contributing to a property whose 120-seat restaurant, the Albert, takes its name from Albert Einstein and whose event spaces reference mathematician Emmy Noether and the scientific principle of symmetry. The original culinary program placed Executive Chef Brandon Brumback, previously associated with Thomas Keller's The French Laundry as well as Blackbird, Ria, Grace, Acadia and GreenRiver, alongside Food and Beverage Director Rebecca Royster, whose earlier Hogsalt Hospitality work included Gilt Bar, Au Cheval, Dillman's, Cocello and Maude's Liquor Bar. West Coast surrealist Paul Bond and Chicago artist Jonathan Plotkin supplied commissioned work for the Albert, while Royster developed house infusions dispensed from the restaurant's glass chandelier-like “infusary” above an open kitchen conceived as another intersection between experimentation and creative production. Greenberg's executive assistant Justyna Chrupek spent 17 months assembling 12,000 books for the hotel and restaurant, expanding an initial search for science and mathematics volumes through art and literature with assistance from Chicago nonprofit Open Books and turning the Albert's 40-foot-high shelving into one of the project's most substantial physical collections.
Project SYNCERE extends the hotel's science thesis into Chicago education through a partnership supporting the organization founded in 2008 by three Black professionals concerned by underrepresentation in engineering and financial management, with Hotel EMC2 helping place 20 high-school students into hands-on engineering programming built around Project Lead The Way curriculum and a six-week summer component. Savioke created another expression of that technology culture through Leo and Cleo, the three-foot robotic “Senior Transport Ninjas” introduced with the hotel in 2017 and engineered to navigate independently between floors through integration with the building's elevators. The Albert's culinary authorship later passed to Chicago chef Steven Chiappetti, a James Beard Foundation Rising Star Award recipient whose family restaurant lineage reaches Chiappetti Lamb and Veal and whose contemporary work at the hotel continues the restaurant's emphasis on named Chicago practitioners. Together, Project SYNCERE, Savioke, Leo and Cleo, and Chiappetti extend Greenberg's original concept beyond interior design into STEM education, robotics and culinary authorship, allowing the art-and-science premise to remain an active institutional identity.
How to fold Hotel EMC2 into your trip.
Hotel EMC2, Autograph Collection works as the anchor for an afternoon tracing the unusually close relationship between experimental art, modernist patronage and engineering ambition through Streeterville.
Begin at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, founded in 1967 under curator and art historian Jan van der Marck at 237 East Ontario Street, where opening-day programming included John Cage, Alison Knowles and Dick Higgins before the institution staged Dan Flavin's first solo museum exhibition and, in 1969, became the first American building wrapped by Christo; Josef Paul Kleihues later won his first United States commission for the museum's current home, which opened in 1996 with more than 25,000 people attending its 24-hour preview. Continue to The Arts Club of Chicago, founded in 1916 and shaped by patrons who brought figures including Constantin Brancusi, Gertrude Stein, Alexander Calder and John Cage into Chicago's cultural orbit before Rue Winterbotham Shaw commissioned Ludwig Mies van der Rohe to create its celebrated 1951 interiors; architect John Vinci preserved Mies's steel-and-travertine floating staircase when the institution moved to its current building in 1998. Conclude at Chicago Water Tower, where William W. Boyington completed the castellated Gothic Revival structure in 1869 from Lemont limestone to conceal a standpipe within Chicago's expanding water system, creating a piece of engineering architecture that survived the destructive path of the 1871 Great Chicago Fire and entered the National Register in 1973. The progression moves from van der Marck's laboratory for experimental art through Shaw and Mies's collaboration between patronage and modernism into Boyington's fusion of infrastructure and architectural expression, giving Hotel EMC2, Autograph Collection an unusually precise cultural itinerary through the same disciplines that animate the hotel.
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