A Striking New Sculpture is Coming to the Thompson Center: So Why Can't I Be Happy?

 

If the Thompson Center were a new building, we'd all be praising it to the skys.  The boldness of that great sweeping curve of glass in front, the soaring, public spirited atrium, topped by a skylight.  The exposed elevator shaft, the graceful arcades.  

But it's not a new building.  It's a gut rehab, created out of the bones of one of the greatest civic spaces and structures of the 20th century.  Preservationists are praising it to the skies, "Look - we saved the Thompson Center - Victory!"

So I get to be the old man yelling at clouds, or more, accurately, the little boy saying, "I say it's spinach, and I say to hell with it."

Not that there's, when it comes to the interior, much to go on.  As far I as know, no reporter has ever been let inside, no one's talking; there's only period proclamations from on high.  Google releases images much as Mike Ditka said Bears owner George Halas did salaries, "He tosses nickels around like manhole covers."  Every many months, there's a carefully controlled release of a couple more renderings, following Google's basic business model of sucking up all our personal data while allowing only the smallest sliver of light to escape their black hole of an operation.

So it is with today's announcement; no spokesman made available, no questions taken.  The building's opening has been pushed back again from next year to 2028.  Crain's Danny Ecker picked up this fact by finding it in a post on Google's Thompson Center blog.  That bit of key info is slipped in as if it were an afterthought, in the last paragraph: "... and plan to officially open our doors to Googlers, tenants and the public in 2028."

Monument with Standing Beast sculpture, Jean Debuffet, original Thompson Center

The one piece of unambiguously good news.  Jean Dubuffet's Standing Beast sculpture that stood in front of the building for nearly fifty years has been consigned to the junkyard storage, but there will be a bold new 30-foot-tall sculpture, Vector, by Sanford Biggers, in the pride of place just outside the entrance.

The rest of renderings are another story. Google is patting itself on the back for saving the rosette on the basement floor that was thought endangered after an art project by Judy Chicago ended in debacle.  

lower level rosette and flooring from original Thompson Center

However, the power of the original was in how the rest of the granite floor mirrored and radiated out from it.  In Google's "saving" it's an isolated object surrounded by a nothingness of blank flooring. Similarly, Google is "saving" by apparently keeping open elevator stack clad in blue glass - stripped of the red accents, of course.  These are less "saves" than artifact trophies of the spoils of conquest.

The design of the activated base of the atrium still looks a Woodfield wanna-be, but at least it attempts to be lively.  What's above is not.  Stripped of the original's bold color, which humanized the structural starkness, the atrium in the renderings has all the charm of Stateville Prison's panopticon (again, an appropriate symbol for Google's relentless surveillance of users' personal data).

As we've written before, all the color has also been stripped from the massive glass facades on LaSalle and Lake.  

Their only character is in the reflections of the buildings around it.  Maybe it'll look better once it starts being lit from within.  The base is even more depressing, once colorful columns and fascia transformed into dark, Darth-Vader-vibe monochrome.  

The entrance to the CTA station is still shrinking within plywood and metal scaffolding.   

In November of 2024, Lee Bey reported "it will move next year to the northeast corner of the building on Clark Street." "Next year" is now last year, and 2026 is in its final months.  As seen in the renderings, the new corridor has a definite metal-clad maximum-security look.

Assuming the AI bubble doesn't burst and send everything into the basement by then, when people encounter the new Thompson Center sometime in 2028, they'll still be gobsmacked by that great spaceship curve of glass, and the soaring atrium.  Maybe the experience will be a lot less sterile and generic than the renderings intimate.

People, after all, loved to hate Helmut Jahn's Thompson Center, its colors, its descending, free-standing columns.  People who worked there hated the over-heating and the smells from the basement food court.  But those of us who knew original know the dirty little secret: while fine buildings continue to be constructed in Chicago, it's long reputation as a consequential city in world architecture, as represented in the Thompson Center, is now a matter of history.  The "realists" of our brave new AI/surveillance state/data center world have driven out the barbarians who dared.

What Fresh Hell is This? Stern vs. Atwood at the Museum of Science and Industry

 No debate.  No real public input.

On Friday, the Chicago Department of Planning and Development went on social media to reveal plans, with a grand total of four - count 'em, four! - cheap-looking renderings that look like they were generated in AI "skimp on the tokens" mode - of the Peter Griffin Museum of Science and Industry's intent to completely redo its main northern entrance.

The design, from Robert A.M. Stern Architects, which gave us all those ham-fisted advertising kiosks masquerading as bus shelters, is intrusive and dispiriting.  The current pair of squat, graceless entrance pavilions at least have the decency not to obscure the view of the great stair and grand classical facade - they're on either side of it.  The Stern rehab envisages a massive berm all along the driveway, centered with an even more massive new glass entrance that seems to stretch all the way to the grand stair itself, which is cut in two, with a new entrance carved into the middle.

A key takeaway is that the four renderings - deliberately? - are inadequate to providing a full and accurate picture of the scope, character, and details of the construction.  What appears to be the case is that visitors would now enter a big glass barn, only to be funneled into another big barn, a/k/a the current great entry hall for ticketing, where it seems (again, unclear in the rendering) it's only bit of character - those shiny-thing giant columns - may be replaced by what can only be described as dying-shopping-mall whitewall.

Also unclear is the actual circulation.  The rendering shows the new entry promenade leading directly at street level to that new entrance cut into the stairs, but the ticketing hall is below street level.  How do visitors get down there?  Same as now?  Something different? The renderings offer no clue, but the design of that transition is as important as anything else.

You can see how this proposal addresses a real problem.  For its first half-century, when admission was free, the grand entrance was the grand entrance.   You climbed up the great staircase (little consideration for disabled access in those days), hopefully took a glance back at the great view of the grand buildings of Hyde Park across the street, and passed through the great bronze doors into Alfred P. Shaw's stunning Art Deco stairway entrance, leading directly to ticketing and the museum's great central hall.  

When the unsightly, sprawling front surface parking and entrance hall were moved underground in the late 1990s, the entrance from the driveway became those ugly twin entrance pavilions, which lead to a series of not especially graceful escalators, stairways and elevators with a POMO vibe.  The redesign looks to streamline that procession, a laudable goal.  The execution is another story.

This ain't no I.M. Pei Louvre Pyramid, where his radical structure is given room to breath in the middle of a plaza, allowing the classical facades around it to survive unscathed. 

By Hteink.min - commons:File:Louvre Pyramid.jpg, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38292385

This is a self-aggrandizing obstruction, deliberately upstaging and deprecating the classic entrance facade that has been a Chicago landmark all the way back to the days of the 1893 Columbian Exposition.  If it has really become an anachronistic obstacle, tear it down and create something spectacular truly worthy of Chicago's great architectural tradition; we'll still have classicism in the soon-to-be restored south portico.  Just be honest about it.  Don't try to sneak it in the back door with a mediocre, dominance-seeking redesign of the front door.

And that's what may be most dispiriting about this whole thing - it smacks of trying to pull a fast one, with renderings released only after the Landmarks Commission Permit Review committee gave the project is rubber stamp.  Did they know they were dealing with a turkey, but realize it's the norm that the powerful usually get a free pass?

It's too big.  It's too stupid.  It's too arrogant.  Respect Charles Atwood's original architectural vision. Cut it back to a truly complementary glass entry pavilion stretching from driveway to grand stair that's low and only as wide as the pathway to the staircase. Let the spectacle begin on the inside.  "Less is More" + "First, do no harm" - remember?

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Jumpers

 A visit to Montrose Beach is my Labor Day tradition, starting at the Montrose Dog Beach, then on to the Montrose People Beach, watch a little volleyball, hit the Montrose Beach Dunes Natural Area and the Montrose Point Bird Sanctuary for a bit of shade, and ending the afternoon at the Breakwater rocks, which today had the population of a small city. Far more improv than the beach proper, free from the strictures of lifeguards yelling that you can't have floaties, watermelon-fashioned or otherwise, in the water. They disappear tomorrow anyway, as Chicago's beaches are, officially, closed after Labor Day.

The cautious gingerly climb down the ladders into the lake, while others, more adventurous, transform the usually metaphoric - and hostile - admonition, "Go jump in the lake," into something literal, bracing, and joyous.  The last day of summer felt like something you never wanted to end.

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