Chicago’s skyline boasts such muscular, structurally expressive towers as the John Hancock Center, the brooding, X-braced giant that is the city’s Eiffel Tower. The 100-story Hancock was affectionately called “Big John” after its completion in 1969. Now it has a diminutive sibling, a nine-story condominium building by David Miller, FAIA, and Seattle’s Miller/Hull Partnership that might well be called “Little John.”

Miller once worked in the Skidmore, Owings & Merrill studio of Bruce Graham, FAIA, the architect of both the Hancock and the even taller Sears Tower. He freely acknowledges his debt to Graham and the Mies-influenced Second Chicago School of Architecture. Yet his building, known by its address of 156 West Superior, puts a fresh spin on this tradition, while offering a model of midblock infill design.

Located in the gentrifying River North area, a few blocks west of Chicago’s North Michigan Avenue shopping district, 156 West Superior was initially designed as a seven-story building that would slide just beneath the 80-foot limit where the costly provisions of Chicago’s high-rise code kick in. But the developer, Ranquist Development, wound up adding two stories because the economic benefits of the extra floors outweighed the added costs of sprinklers and other code-required features.

This shift improved the project’s proportions, but the brief remained challenging: design a high-end, but not top-drawer, residential mid-rise for less than $200 per square foot. Capturing unobstructed views in three directions, including prime south views of the Loop skyline, was essential to selling the units. And each unit would require its own parking space, a demand that has led developers of larger Chicago residential towers to plop their building atop street-deadening parking-garage podiums.

In addition to these internally driven requirements, Miller had to respond to the external needs of architecture and urbanism: first, giving the building a presence that belied its Lilliputian size; second, making it a good neighbor on a mix-and-match block that includes weathered brick low-rises, a new condo high-rise, and an old Howard Johnson’s motor court. The 11 condo units and 12 parking spaces were to be shoehorned into a narrow midblock site that measures 44 feet wide by 100 feet deep.