Most people experience great art on a schedule, a museum visit, a gallery afternoon, a curated occasion. At Optima, we’ve always believed that great art shouldn’t require an appointment. It should be part of the texture of daily life, as present and as natural as the light that fills our buildings each morning.
Art as Architecture, Not Addition
At Optima, 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 open space. The result is that art in Optima communities doesn’t feel installed or displayed. It feels native, as though the building and the artwork emerged from the same intention, which in many cases they did. 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. A sculpture anchoring the courtyard at Optima Sonoran Village seen differently in the morning than at dusk. A commissioned work in the lobby of Optima Lakeview that stops you on the way to the elevator on a Wednesday. A large-scale piece on the terrace at Optima Kierland that you’ve passed a hundred times but only truly noticed today, in this light, at this angle. At Optima Verdana, David Hovey Sr., FAIA’s sculpture Curves and Voids stands at the building’s entry, present every morning on the way out, every evening on the way in, always offering something new to those who look.
These unplanned 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
Every sculpture in an Optima community is an original work by David Hovey Sr., FAIA, the architect, artist, and founder whose creative vision is the foundation of everything Optima builds. Just as Hovey’s architecture is designed in direct response to each community’s setting, light, and landscape, his sculptures are conceived with the same specificity. These are not works selected from a catalog or acquired after the fact. They are created as part of the community itself, expressions of the same design intelligence that shaped the building they live alongside.
That connection between sculptor and architect being one and the same produces something rare: a seamless relationship between the built environment and the art within it. At Optima Signature, Kiwi, born from Hovey’s freehand drawings, commands the sweeping entry plaza with a boldness of color and form that gives one of Chicago’s most significant residential towers an identity that is unmistakably its own. At Optima Verdana, Curves and Voids anchors the building’s entry with grand sweeping steel and laser-cut voids that catch the North Shore light differently in every season. Each work is singular. Each belongs entirely to the place it calls home.
The Everyday Experience of Living With Art
At Optima, art extends beyond the sculptures in our plazas and courtyards. Throughout every community, contemporary art and furniture are chosen with the same deliberateness as every architectural decision, selected to complement the building’s design, set off our spaces, and bring shape, color, and texture to the experience of daily life. A carefully curated piece in a lobby. Furniture in a common area that is as considered as it is comfortable. Works that give a corridor a sense of destination. These choices are part of the same design language that runs through every Optima community, and they are what make the difference between a beautiful building and a place that genuinely feels like home.
Residents who live alongside meaningful art tend to describe something difficult to quantify but easy to feel: a sense that their home takes them seriously. That beauty here is a foundation, not an afterthought. Over time, the art woven through an Optima community, from David Hovey Sr., FAIA’s original sculptures to the contemporary works and furniture throughout the shared spaces, becomes part of each resident’s relationship with home. A shared reference point between neighbors. A source of daily pleasure as light changes across seasons. A quiet reminder that this place 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. A home that offers those moments, day after day, around every corner and across every season, is something genuinely rare. That is what Optima’s commitment to public art is built to provide. Not spectacle, but depth. Not decoration, but meaning that grows.
Come see the art that lives here. Schedule a tour at an Optima community and experience a home worth looking at.
