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
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.
