Blue Chip’s Spa Blu Tower brings a broad curve and blue-green glass to Michigan City, Indiana. Its architect, Lucien Lagrange, describes a design with two reference points: a nautical response to the local setting and the streamlined glamour of earlier Las Vegas hotels. The project was completed in 2009 with 302 guest rooms.
A curved outline assembled from a building system
The colour and silhouette are only the visible part of the facade story. Specialist contractor Harmon records 107,000 square feet of unitized, structurally silicone-glazed curtain wall. Its project credits identify Lucien Lagrange Architects and general contractor Walsh Construction. The description explains how an apparently continuous skin depended on a named enclosure system and coordinated installation.
A unitized curtain wall is assembled from repeatable facade units. That makes the tower interesting at two scales: its sweeping outline reads from a distance, while the repeated joints and glazing modules organize the surface close up. The design’s fluid appearance does not mean the exterior was made as one continuous curved piece of glass.
The rooms changed inside the established shell
A later layer arrived with Boyd Gaming’s October 2024 announcement that all 302 rooms and suites in Spa Blu Tower had been renovated. The operator distinguished 242 standard rooms from 60 suites and described a more contemporary apartment-like interior, while retaining floor-to-ceiling views toward Lake Michigan and the surrounding area.
Taken together, the records show how a resort can keep a recognizable exterior while changing the rooms behind it. The 2009 architecture and the 2024 interior work belong to different phases. Reading both dates gives a more useful picture of the tower than treating its appearance as evidence that everything inside is original.
Explore the property directory entry for location and resort context.
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