In July, Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker announced the $105 million sale of the beleaguered James R. Thompson Center to Google, which will use the former state office building as its second Chicago headquarters. The building, designed by the late Helmut Jahn in 1985, has been threatened with demolition since the early aughts, when state officials argued that it was too expensive to maintain and proposed selling it. Saving the building gained traction as a preservationist cause in 2017, when the state government formally put it on the market. In 2019 the National Trust for Historic Preservation listed the building as one of the most endangered in the country.
“The Thompson Center is obviously one of Helmut’s iconic statements,” says Phillip Castillo, executive vice president of JAHN, the firm formerly led by Jahn. “It was about transparency in government–whether we want to laugh about that now is another issue.” The 17-story building’s glass exterior, soaring atrium, and exposed structure and circulation pay homage to that ideal, but when it opened in the mid-80s, its bloated price tag ($172 million, nearly double the original budget) drew derision from Chicagoans already critical of the state government’s notorious corruption. Reactions to Jahn’s design, which is marked by a distinctive interior palette of salmon-pink and blue, were mixed.
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