Luring office workers back to downtown high-rises after more than two years of working from home during the Covid pandemic can be challenging. But employers in the revamped Willis (formerly Sears) Tower have a leg up, thanks to a half-billion-dollar makeover by Gensler that upgrades the iconic supertall’s appeal, to tenants and visitors alike, while transforming its relationship to the surrounding streets in Chicago’s Loop.
When completed in 1974, the tower, at a height of 1,450 feet and 110 stories, was the world’s tallest building. It is still the city’s tallest. The Skidmore, Owings & Merrill team responsible for the existing building—architect Bruce Graham and structural engineer Fazlur Kahn—designed it as a nine-square grid of bundled steel tubes, rising to graduated heights from a podium. As a structurally expressive architectonic form punctuating the skyline, it succeeded handsomely. But as an urban place-maker, it was a modernist failure—a geometric abstraction disconnected from the city, described by former Chicago Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin as “a dud at street level.”
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