Chicago architecture 2024: From new skyscrapers to Union Station redesign

What’s in store on Chicago’s architecture front this year?

Construction fences will start rising soon at Clark and Randolph streets as Google preps for its anticipated $280 million renovation of the Thompson Center.

But that’s not the only architecture news in town. Here are five projects — among many — that are worth keeping an eye on as the new year progresses.

Salesforce Tower, 333 W. Wolf Point Plaza Dr.

The 57-story glass tower at Wolf Point officially opened last month. Designed by the late high-rise master Cesar Pelli’s firm, Pelli Clark & Partners from New Haven, Connecticut, the building is the last of three new towers at Wolf Point, a once-underutilized jut of land where the Chicago River splits into the north and south branches.

It’s an attractive office tower. But I’m also intrigued by what’s inside the building and how it functions.

After all, Salesforce’s construction began in early 2020, just as the pandemic struck and caused the seismic changes in work habits that have employees everywhere trading offices and cubicles for the comforts of working from home.

How does one of the city’s first — if not the first — major post-pandemic office tower lure workers back downtown? We’ll find out.

1000M, 1000 S. Michigan Ave.

Come summer, residents are expected to move into the 73-story residential tower designed by the architecture firm Jahn.

At better than 803-feet tall, I had concerns the tower would overwhelm its far shorter neighbors along Michigan Avenue across from Grant Park.

But it doesn’t. Indeed, the building is part of a new crop of towers built over the past 15 years that, together, are nicely framing south Grant Park.

The tower’s curved face is a nice touch, as is the way the building’s south side cantilevers over 1006 S. Michigan Ave., adding floor place to 1000M without crowding out the brick-and-terra cotta Chicago School structure.

One more thing: 1000M is the last Jahn building to bear the hand of the firm’s famous namesake, Helmut Jahn, who died in a bicycle accident in 2021.

Bally’s Casino, Chicago Avenue and Halsted Street

Your architecture critic hasn’t been a betting man since I saw suckers get fleeced out of their cash playing Three Card Monte on the 79th Street bus back in the late 1970s.

But I will make an exception here. I’m betting the proposed $1.7 billion Bally’s casino and emporium — which should start moving forward in some way this year — will not get built to the scale planned.

Or at all.

And not for the reasons that should have doomed it: It’s too big, loud and Vegas-y; the neighbors don’t want it nor the traffic nightmare it would likely bring if the casino were successful.

What raises my bettor’s hand is that Bally’s last November reported it cut 300 positions nationwide, and its stock prices fell 16%, selling at $7.70 a share.

The company did trumpet the opening of the temporary Streeterville gaming spot at Medinah Temple, but also said casinos it owns in Atlantic City, Las Vegas (!) and Evansville, Indiana weren’t doing as hot as expected.

Indeed, Bally’s Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer Marcus Glover in November said the company was open to selling the Vegas casino, a facility it purchased in 2021.

“Yes, I guess the best way to answer that is I think for the right place, we’d probably unload anything,” he said.

Anything? Hmmm...

Union Station Concourse, 225 S. Canal St.

Amtrak has begun surveying riders this month on ways improve its concourse — the ugly and warren-like sibling to the beautiful, 1925 Graham, Anderson, Probst & White-designed Grand Hall on the west side of Canal Street.

Amtrak says the survey will help the agency redesign the concourse to give travelers things like more space, better amenities, more bathrooms and improved signage.

The cost of Union Station’s redesign is $93 million. But Chicago deserves the best redesign for the money, if only to atone for allowing the original concourse (see below) to be wrecked in 1971 for the abomination that sits there now.

Century and Consumers buildings, 202 and 220 S. State St.

The fate of these two vacant 20th Century skyscrapers rests with an outcome of a historic resources review — expected to be completed this year — that’s being conducted by the structures’ owners, the federal government.

The right move here is quite clear: The feds must spare the buildings and allow the city to redevelop them, rather spend $52 million to replace the towers with a security plaza for the neighboring Dirksen federal building.

Lee Bey is the Chicago Sun-Times architecture critic and a member of the Editorial Board. 

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