The 1980s Onterie Center is a great piece of mimicry on the Near North Side, distilling the steel cross-bracing of nearby Hancock Center as concrete ornament. The 60-story tower, designed by Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill and pioneering structural engineer Faziur Kahn, sits one block in from the lake which ensures it gets noticed.

Lincoln Park's Belden Statford became the most recent high-profile hotel-to-rental conversion. It's a good thing, too, since its Beaux Arts potency deserves to be enjoyed by locals. The two-wing luxury building surfaced in the 1920s and is on the National Registry of Historic Places. One welcome consequence of its hotel origin is a lobby that persists as one of the city's most opulent, commercial or residential.

One of the West Loop's oldest surviving structures is the Lake Street Lofts building. The simple block was built in 1886 and converted from the Zimmerman Brush Company factory to 89 apartments in 1999. Close inspection reveals fine grained exterior detailing, and interiors were rebuilt with trinkets of its industrial past. FitzGerald Associates Architects has offices in the ground floor.

Hyde Park's Del Prado is as Alpha as apartment blocks come, adorned head-to-toe with an Art Deco Native American theme and possessing an incredibly large and high-ceilinged lobby. That's a credit to the landmark's hotel roots, built in 1918 as the Cooper-Carlton and a popular spot for passing dignitaries and A-listers of the early-to-mid-1900s (The Babe, Marilyn, etc). Antheus Development and Studio Gang Architects worked the Beaux Arts-Art Deco hybrid building into a smart collection of new apartments.

Up the shore from Del Prado is Hyde Park's other commanding presence-- the Shoreland. The pattern is the same here too, with this beast starting life as high-end hotel, working a stint as U of C dorms, and deploying a similarly hip and classy apartment transformation just this year. MAC Properties saw to the three-year conversion, which brings 330 rentals to market, carved from 1,000 rooms.

Everyone loves the Fisher Building, particularly now that it's fully restored and put to apartment use. The golden terra cotta-clad early skyscraper has impossibly intricate etchings of sea life, a play off the developer's name Lucius Fisher. The large amount of surface area given over to windows was a major innovation in the 1890s. Elements of the building's office origins are present in the lobby, gracious elevator bays, and in the hallways of each floor. Charles Atwood of Burnham & Co is the architect.

The Sheridan Plaza was designed by Walter Ahlschlager and helped make Sheridan Road fashionable. The one-time seasonal home to the Cubs, Sheridan Plaza was the tallest thing in Uptown when it opened in 1920. Vertical bands of white glazed terra cotta emphasizes the 12-story height, leading up to winged grotesques at the corners and urns along the roofline. A gorgeous lobby completes the experience. The building was named to the National Register in 1980.

Roosevelt University's bold new "vertical campus" is all the rage in the East Loop, a VOA Architects-designed blue-glass shard shimmying up 32 stories (470'). It's an eye-catcher for sure, but its status as one of the world's tallest dormitories adds significance. Only the top half is residential, but manages a 633-student capacity. Not everyone wants college kids flooding their streets, but downtown can use the around-the-clock stimulus.

Randolph Tower City Apartments is another rental adaptation of a vintage Loop office tower, and this one is a testament to patient restoration-- the 45-story icon was in want of major terra cotta rehab and a near-total interior gutting. Village Green got the job done last year and now 312 apartments and a bevy of new amenities (including a covered rooftop pool) are here for the taking.

New to the game is the wonderfully polarizing 1611 W Division, popularly known as the "Tower of Pizza Hut" (an ode to the longstanding Pizza Hut drive-thru that forfeited this site). Designed by Whealer Kearns, this breath of fresh air does major work for a neglected and underdeveloped Polonia Triangle and will do more once retail fills in. It's also a transit-oriented statement, as the developer matched 99 units to exactly zero parking spaces. To all you developers out there: it just takes guts, guys.... oh, and willing neighbors.

Architect and developer David Hovey just broke the seal on Optima Chicago Center in October, and the luxury rental is steadily filling in. Some say the 42-story Streeterville tower looks like a refrigerator, others Darth Vader, but it's fine if it's the butt of some jokes-- blue & black glass edifice was out to make a splash, particularly since the abnormally large clearing on three sides permits gawking from far afield. Two wraparound common terraces slice across the south facade at the top of the parking podium and again at a high floor. Our one concern: that the building weathers well.

The Seneca is yet another hotel-to-apartment conversion, this time in Streeterville in the shadow of the Hancock Center. The almost one-to-one conversion of rooms to units means many are quite small (er, "cozy"). The interiors, while nice enough, fail to match the handsome and nuanced brick exterior which is all that really matters to the average Chicagoan.

We've called the Presidential Towers a "fortress of crud" in the past, but our view of the staggered four-piece complex now favors peaceful coexistence. We're sure they're downright poetic to some, and it's a fact that the 1986 development brought 2,300+ apartments to a then-blighted Near West Side. The towers are each 49 stories, and Solomon Cordwell Buenz originally designed six of them. It's an odd case of a standalone being lousy, two being still pretty lousy, and four transcending to skyline sculpture.