Most people experience great art on a schedule, a museum visit, a gallery afternoon, a curated occasion. At Optima Verdana, 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 North Shore light that moves across the building each morning.
Art as Architecture, Not Addition
At Optima Verdana, 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 public plaza that connects this building to the village of Wilmette around it. 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. Curves and Voids, David Hovey Sr., FAIA's steel sculpture, stands at the entry plaza of Optima Verdana, present every morning on the way out and every evening on the way in.
The work is rooted in Hovey's lifelong fascination with steel and its potential. Combining his love of art with a deep interest in materials, he began manipulating steel to explore what the material could express beyond structure, and Curves and Voids is one of the fullest expressions of that inquiry. The sculpture plays with steel's potential through grand, sweeping curves that make up its various components. Meanwhile, voids are laser-cut within the steel planes, holes that provide gaps and textures to contrast and juxtapose with the movement of the curves. The result is a work that is simultaneously about solidity and absence, presence and space, the material and what's been taken away from it.
Like all of Hovey's original sculptures, Curves and Voids appears across Optima communities in different colors, sizes, and orientations, each iteration shaped by the specific place it inhabits. At Optima Verdana, the work catches the North Shore light differently in every season: the pale clarity of a winter morning, the warm richness of a summer afternoon, the long gold of an autumn evening. It is always the same work and always something new. These daily encounters accumulate, quietly, persistently enriching the experience of coming home and reminding 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 Verdana, Curves and Voids does exactly that, giving the entry plaza an identity that is unmistakably its own, and tying the building to its North Shore setting through a work that rewards attention across years and seasons. David Hovey Sr., FAIA's has always approached sculpture as yet another component of thoughtful design, experimenting with form, function, size, and color to breathe new life into each version. At Verdana, that intention is visible every time a resident passes through the door. 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, Curves and Voids becomes part of each resident's relationship with Optima Verdana, a shared reference point between neighbors, a source of daily pleasure as the North Shore light changes across seasons, a quiet and reliable reminder that the place they live in 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, every morning, every evening, across every season of a North Shore year, is something genuinely rare. At Optima Verdana, that's not incidental. It's the design.
Come see the art that lives here. Schedule a tour at Optima Verdana and experience a home worth looking at.
