Here’s Exactly What Chicago Missed Out On By Scaring the Lucas Museum Away
The noisy, messy, bloody summer battles over the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art are behind us, and this is now the season for healing. George took his gift horse and rode back to San Francisco, where according to local media reports, it is being welcomed with overwhelming support. Part of the reason the notion of the Lucas Museum failed to thrive here in Chicago is because so many people couldn’t get past the false idea that it...
Chicago Neverbuilt — Episode 9: Not the Optima Solution
Our Chicago Neverbuilt series continues to celebrate the work of great architects that, for one reason or another, failed to make the transition from imagination to reality. Last month we published a status update on the Optima Chicago Center’s second tower, known locally as Optima II (220 East Illinois Street). A reader wrote in asking about the foundation of the building, specifically its caissons which seemed to be left over...
Chicago Neverbuilt — Episode 8: City Hall Tower Solved
Our Chicago Neverbuilt series continues to celebrate the work of great architects that, for one reason or another, failed to make the transition from imagination to reality. Several weeks ago, we showed you a picture of Chicago’s city hall with a great big office tower on top of it. Of course, City Hall has no such tower and the picture we came across while digging through some archives lacked any explanation for the tower. Now...
Chicago Neverbuilt — Episode 6: 222 West Randolph
Our Chicago Neverbuilt series continues to celebrate the work of great architects that, for one reason or another, failed to make the transition from imagination to reality. 222 West Randolph Street was supposed to be the companion tower to 151 North Wacker Drive. 151 got built. 222 wasn’t so lucky. 222 was designed by friends-of-the-blog Goettsch Partners. It was going to be 44-stories tall with 763,000 square feet of office...
Chicago Neverbuilt: Episode 3 — There Goes the Sun
Our Chicago Neverbuilt series continues to celebrate the work of great architects that, for one reason or another, failed to make the transition from imagination to reality. The Sunbelt Tower (460 North Columbus Drive) comes from friends-of-the-blog Goettsch Partners, and is featured in their monograph. It was slated to go in the slot just north of the NBC Tower (454 North Columbus Drive). Sadly, today it remains a surface parking...
Chicago Neverbuilt: Episode 2 — Streeterville’s Sexiest Skyscraper
Our Chicago Neverbuilt series continues to celebrate the work of great architects that, for one reason or another, failed to make the transition from imagination to reality. While the majority of our Neverbuilt projects are from the history books, this one is a fairly recently cancelled project. This was a skyscraper designed for a big-name New York financial conglomerate by friends-of-the-blog Solomon Cordwell Buenz. It was going to...
Chicago Neverbuilt: Episode 1 — All My Spires
Part of being creative is knowing that not every idea is a slam dunk. The world’s most famous painters—Rembrandt, Van Gogh, and others— painted over their mistakes. Similarly, architecture offices around Chicagoland are populated with hundreds, maybe even thousands, of models of buildings that just never got off the ground. Putting together a skyscraper is a complicated thing, and unless the banks, the developers, the...
