Our architecture critic evaluates Trump's new restaurant

Chicago architect Joe Valerio, who designed the new, up-in-the-sky restaurant in Donald Trump's still-growing 92-story tower, likes to say it is a community space for everyone who can afford the price of a Coke at the bar. Well, a Coke at Donald Trump's bar will set you back $4.50, which tells you that this is a community space not for average Joes but for people in high tax brackets or star-struck types who will shell out big for a remote chance to get an in-person glimpse of The Donald.

Yet even if there is a load of pretense in Valerio's notion that Sixteen, as the restaurant is called, is a truly populist locale, it is nonetheless open to the public, and that is no small thing in the post- 9/11 era, when it would have been easy for Trump to cordon off his hotel-condominium skyscraper, the tallest built in America since the Sears Tower, by citing the boogeyman of "security concerns."

Sixteen, it turns out, is a dramatic, sometimes elegant, sometimes underwhelming perch in the sky, one that reflects the sophisticated tastes of the client — not The Donald, but his ever-more-visible daughter Ivanka. If Daddy has a thing for cramming too many expensive materials into too little space, Daughter seems to like restrained but dynamic minimalism. It feels right in this city of less is more — certainly more right than the overwrought glitz palace that is the lobby of Trump Tower in New York.

Sixteen, which has been serving breakfast and dinner since early February, and opens for lunch Monday, is blessed with million-dollar views, though they're not the sort of airplane-window panoramas you get in the Signature Room near the top of the 100-story John Hancock Center. Its vistas are more intimate, practically putting you eyeball-to-eyeball with the Wrigley Building's clock tower and the flying buttresses of Tribune Tower.

But the real question is what an architect does with such scenery and how he overcomes hurdles placed in his way by the building in which he's designing. Valerio, whose credits include the sleek but sensuous Garmin flagship store on North Michigan Avenue, performs well on both counts, though not flawlessly..You can get to Sixteen from the hotel floors of the Trump International Hotel & Tower Chicago, as the Trump skyscraper is known. It is, as its name suggests, on the tower's 16th floor. The name itself offers a welcome relief from Donald Trump's annoying habit of naming both his buildings and attractions in them after himself.

If you are coming from outside, you stroll beneath the protective scaffolding that will be in place until the tower is completed next year. White-gloved, gray-suited doormen greet you. You pass through the high-ceilinged, hotel lobby and are whisked upstairs by an elevator lined in marvelously tasteless zebra wood.

The zebra wood is Old Trump. The restaurant proper is New Trump.

You emerge in a calm, T-shaped foyer — the "T" is not an homage to the client, Valerio insists — and you look down a passageway lined on either side by a wine vault with floor-to-ceiling glass. Reds on one side. Whites on the other. The bottles are displayed like precious objects in custom-designed wine racks of architectural bronze. A ceiling, with colored rice paper sandwiched between two layers of glass, floats above. Views of the Wrigley and Tribune buildings beckon ahead. An architectural drama is about to unfold.

Designing this space, which sits about 250 feet in the air, was harder than it looks. Working within an envelope shaped by the tower's architects, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill of Chicago, Valerio had to deal with a variety of column shapes — some square, others round, still others rectangular. He was further hampered by the bland coolness of skyscraper's aluminum window frames and by the presence of a garage for window-washing equipment, which gobbles up precious floor space overlooking the Chicago River.

Valerio, who designed the project with Randall Mattheis, a principal at the Chicago-based firm of Valerio Dewalt Train Associates, responded to this challenge by doing what architects do best. He turned practical problems to his advantage, using the window-washing garage, for example, as a space divider that creates an intimate scale in the restaurant's two small dining rooms.

More important, Valerio sculpted a sequence of spaces that unfolds as you move through them. The spaces don't reveal themselves all at once. You experience them in time. Architects call this sort of thing "procession."

As you walk past the wine vaults, for example, the Wrigley Building clock tower and the Tribune Tower's neo-Gothic crown come fully into view and you're not alive if the sight of them, so close up, doesn't make your heat skip a beat. Some clunky details, such as the outdoor light fixtures on a still-to-be-finished rooftop terrace formed by the skyscraper's first setback, chop up the view. But that's a quibble. Once construction wraps up and the terrace opens for outdoor dining next year, I hope the Donald will tell the fixtures, "You're fired."

In Sixteen's grandly scaled dining room, a curving wall of West African wood deftly plays off the curve of the skyscraper's east end, boldly carves out a domelike space-within-a-space and appropriately orients everything outward to the views. Valerio further engages with cityscape with a modern chandelier — it has more than 19,000 individual crystals — that talks to the neighboring Jazz Age towers, resembling nothing so much as an upside-down skyscraper.

Even if the big room doesn't entirely succeed at mediating between the vast scale of the skyline and the human scale of its leather bolster backrests, it exudes a restrained elegance that you don't typically associate with the brash aggression of Mr. T, er, Trump.

Valerio uses the same formula — curving wood walls, a contemporary chandelier and killer views — to good effect in the low-ceilinged dining room just across the wine vault from the big room. And he offers some welcoming, domestic touches in the bar, such as metal legs that suggest a table, though the bar's negligible views in no way merit $4.50 for a Coke.

By day, all this works well enough, but the coolness of the window frames and the unfinished terrace impinge with their banality. The terrace also acts as something of a barrier between diners and the skyline, in contrast to NoMi, the equally posh eatery at the Park Hyatt. There, a huge bay windows thrusts diners beyond the building's frame, making it seem as if they're hovering over the historic Water Tower.

At night, however, everything comes together. The rooftop terrace fades into the darkness. The chandeliers cast a golden glow that warms the cool curtain wall. And the cityscape around Sixteen twinkles with romantic vitality, from the blinking Ferris wheel at Navy Pier to the headlights of cars on Lake Shore Drive. Only then does Sixteen fulfill its promise as a spectacular skyline aerie, where inside and outside fuse into a single, memorable whole.

A thumb's up for a restaurant inside a skyscraper hardly guarantees a positive overall review, of course. Already, judging by my e-mails, there are those who consider the unfinished Trump Tower the ultimate McMansion in the sky. Well, Sixteen may be for them what the restaurant in the Eiffel Tower was to the great 19th Century French writer Guy de Maupassant. De Maupassant hated the Eiffel Tower so much that he regularly used to eat lunch in its restaurant. It was the only place in Paris where he didn't have to look at Gustave Eiffel's iron giant.

bkamin@tribune.com

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