Hello, global visitors to the third Chicago Architecture Biennial. Welcome!
One of the most disturbing is playing out in real time just three short blocks from the biennial’s main venue. To check it out, exit the Cultural Center on its north side and turn left, where a five-minute walk on Randolph Street will bring you face to face with what looks like an alien space transport vessel—a massive, squat, pink and bluish anomaly plopped down across from City Hall in the midst of Chicago’s towering skyscrapers.
But Jahn was also breaking with tradition. He made the first two floors of the Thompson Center a multiuse hub of public activity, including retail, restaurants, and one of the city’s busiest el stations. And he left every floor of the state offices that rose in concentric half circles above that commercial area open to it, as a symbol of and facilitator for a transparent, corruption-free Illinois state government.
In 32 years of annual “most endangered” designations from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the Thompson Center is the youngest building ever to make the list. It’s also a prominent presence on the endangered lists of local activist groups Preservation Chicago and Landmarks Illinois (which, looking at the environmental impact, estimates that demolishing the center would create 145 million pounds of waste).
