Prolific Chinese real estate developer and investment company Wanda Group has announced that it will build a new 1,150-foot-tall skyscraper in Chicago.
Wanda Group isn’t a household name in Chicago… yet. But it has big plans to move into the American real estate development sector very aggressively in the near future. It already has 55 five-star hotels and 78 department stores in China. In America, you may know it as the company that owns AMC Theatres.
Chinese developers say a lot of things, and we would normally consider this yet another rumor/wishful thinking/bit of puffery from our friends in the Orient. But this announcement of what might become Chicago’s third-tallest skyscraper (sorry, Aon Center) was very specific.
Specifically:
- The cost is $900,000,000
- The height is 1,150 feet and 89 stories
- 1.4 million square feet of space
- The tower will be hotel on the bottom, and apartments on top, with a retail component
- A five-star hotel with the Wanda brand is planned
- Walking distance to Millennium Park and Michigan Avenue
- 240 hotel rooms
- Opening in 2018
Oh, and we have a picture of the new tower for 375 East Wacker Drive:
Drawing of the Wanda Tower at Lakeshore East
You can see the tower built on East Wacker Drive, next to the second phase of the GEMS Academy school by friends-of-the-blog bKL Architecture. It completely fills the space between the school and The Regatta (425 East Wacker Drive).
Original SOM layout for Lakeshore East showing a huge tower straddling North Field Bolevard
You may also be able to see that the new mega-structure straddles North Field Boulevard. That might seem odd at first glance, but the very earliest sketches of Lakeshore East when it was laid out by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill show a similar tower in that location, along East Wacker Drive, straddling North Field Boulevard. Engineers and planners have long referred to it simply as “Building C.”
When we might see Building C, or the Wanda Tower, or whatever it might be called, become reality is hard to say. Wanda Group claims construction will start this year. There’s simply no way that will happen. The paperwork alone will push this into 2015.
The other big question we have is: Is this the big landmark skyscraper that Magellan co-CEO Joel Carlins told Crain’s Chicago Business he commissioned local starchitect Jeanne Gang to design for Lakeshore East?
Time will tell.
Early diagram of Lakeshore East showing “Building C” straddling North Field Boulevard
