When you’ve been publishing a blog as long as we have, you end up with one heck of a photograph archive. Fortunately, the interwebs gave us “Throwback Thursday,” an excuse to re-purpose our snapshots from ten years ago.
Here we have One South Dearborn when it was still shiny, new, and not yet open for business. The 40-story building still has packing peanuts the size of water buffalos stuck to it from when Hines unpacked the skyscraper from its Sharper Image box. This tower replaced a surface parking lot that was at one time proposed to be the home of the world’s tallest building. Seven South Dearborn would have risen 1,576 feet and 112 stories into the Chicago skyline. But things didn’t work out the way everyone planned.
One South Dearborn holds something of a special place in this blog’s heart. It was designed by DeStefano, Keating, and Partners, and architect Richard Keating spoke to us at length about this project. He was the first architect we interviewed, and one of many in the long history of The Chicago Architecture Blog.