The Sofitel's program includes 415 rooms, 63 suites, meeting and banquet facilities, a ballroom, a fitness center, a cafe, a gourmet restaurant, and a street-level bar, all within an envelope containing 35,000 sm (375,000 sf) of space. While the hotel's amenities - fairly typical of urban American hotels - do not overtly convey a European way of life, it is nevertheless intriguing to see the Sofitel in relation to its Modernist predecessors in Chicago, particularly Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. While local critics and architects are upset over high design commissions, like the Sofitel, going to foreign architects, they are forgetting that the influential skyscrapers that brought fame to the city as a bastion of Modernism were designed, or directly inspired by, foreign architects. While Jean-Paul Viguier is not in exile, he designs at a time when foreign commissions are a growing trend, one that Chicago architects participate in elsewhere as much as non-local architects come to Chicago to build. And it is apparent that Viguier came to Chicago and captured its character, while injecting some of his own, in the hotel's design. Sofitel Hotel.....................Chicago, Illinois