Most people experience great art on a schedule, a museum visit, a gallery afternoon, a curated occasion. At Optima Signature, we believe great art shouldn’t require an appointment. It should be part of the texture of daily life, as present and as natural as the lake light that moves across this building’s 57 stories each morning.

Art as Architecture, Not Addition

At Optima Signature, the relationship between art and architecture isn’t decorative, it’s structural. From the earliest stages of design, public art and sculpture are considered alongside the placement of walls, windows, and the sweeping plaza that anchors this tower in the heart of Streeterville. The result is that art here doesn’t feel installed or displayed. It feels native, as though the building and the artwork emerged from the same intention. This is a direct expression of Optima’s founding design philosophy: that the built environment should engage the whole person. The mind, not just the body. The eye, not just the foot.

The Encounter You Didn’t Plan

There is a particular quality to discovering art when you’re not looking for it. Kiwi, named after the native New Zealand bird from the country where David Hovey Sr., FAIA was born, greets residents and visitors at the entrance of Optima Signature every single day. It began as a freehand drawing, one of many through which Hovey explores form before steel ever enters the picture, and manifested into a monumental, brightly colored presence that commands the sweeping plaza on Illinois Street.

Hovey has spoken about the distinction between architecture and sculpture with characteristic directness: architecture is about function as well as aesthetics, he has said. Sculpture is really just about aesthetics. You don’t have that functional component. Kiwi is pure expression, smooth, brightly colored steel plates with cutouts in patterns of swoops, sharp points, and angles that contrast deliberately with the building’s clean horizontal and vertical lines. Its base is cemented into the ground to protect it from the intensity of downtown Chicago and the full force of a Chicago winter, a quiet acknowledgment that this work is built to last as long as the building it stands beside.

Seen differently in the sharp clarity of a winter morning, in the warm glow of a summer evening, against the backdrop of the Streeterville skyline, it is always the same work and always something new. These encounters accumulate. Quietly, persistently, they enrich the daily experience of a place and remind residents that they live somewhere that considers beauty not a luxury but a necessity.

Sculpture and the Identity of a Place

Great public sculpture does something architecture alone cannot: it gives a community a visual anchor, a sense that this particular place is unlike any other. At Optima Signature, Kiwi does exactly that, giving the plaza, and by extension the entire building, an identity that is unmistakably its own. It is part of a broader sculptural language that runs across Optima communities, each version shaped by the specific place it calls home. Art isn’t applied to this community. It belongs to it.

The Everyday Experience of Living With Art

Residents who live alongside meaningful art tend to describe something that’s difficult to quantify but easy to feel: a sense that their home takes them seriously. That the people who built it believed beauty was a foundation, not an afterthought. Over time, Kiwi at Optima Signature becomes part of each resident’s relationship with home, a shared reference point between neighbors, a source of daily pleasure as Chicago’s light changes across seasons, a quiet reminder that this place, above the lakefront, rewards attention.

An Invitation to Look More Carefully

In a world that rewards speed, an artwork that asks for your full attention for a moment is a quiet shift in pace. And a home that offers those moments, day after day, in the plaza, across the amenity floors, and against the backdrop of one of the world’s great cities, is something genuinely rare. At Optima Signature, that’s not incidental. It’s the design.

Come see the art that lives here. Schedule a tour at Optima Signature and experience a home worth looking at.