COVID Concerns Halt Construction of Michigan Avenue Skyscraper
South Michigan Avenue is a little quieter these days. Not because of the paucity of tourists or the meagerness of office workers, but because construction on 1000M has been stopped. June 2017 Rendering of 1000M (Courtesy of Time Equities) Construction crews are no longer working at 1000 South Michigan Avenue because of the pandemic that has kept everyone from school children to responsible public leaders away from their daily...
McHugh Hardhats Make A Kid’s Birthday in Quarantine the Best Ever
Way back in April (this one fell through the cracks, sorry, we’re terrible people), Chicagoan Sawyer Morgenthaler turned seven years old. Having a birthday during the COVID-19 lockdown is bad enough. But since Master Morgenthaler lives in the South Loop, he couldn’t be treated to the celebratory suburban drive-by birthday parades that we see on the local TV news all the time. Still, young Sawyer...
Pictures From the 1000M Groundbreaking
Recently we told you that a groundbreaking ceremony was held in the South Loop for 1000M, the 74-story Helmut Jahn-designed residential building. June 2017 Rendering of 1000M (Courtesy of Time Equities) We also told you that some people are skeptical about this project, but that we’re still believers. In part because just a few months ago Chicago’s Department of Planning and Development said lawyers for the...
A South Loop Skyscraper Breaks Ground Without Breaking Ground
It’s been a very long time since groundbreaking meant breaking ground. Many decades ago the first groundbreaking ceremony I attended was for a television station. A bunch of guys in suits and hardhats lined up with ceremonial brass shovels, stuck them in a trough of finely milled soil, and in a Blitzkrieg of flashbulbs, turned spades to mark the start of construction. At that moment, the backhoes fired up...
Grant Park Skyscraper Courting Overseas Buyers
If you think that Chicago’s high rise condo buildings don’t have the allure for international buyers that buildings in Miami, London, and Dubai do, you might be wrong. Rendering of 1000M (Courtesy of Time Equities) The developers of 1000M (1000 South Michigan Avenue) have designated the 133 condominiums on floors 41 through 47 the “International Collection.” They appear to be smaller units, running from 325 (!)...
Michigan Avenue’s 1000M Focuses on Inner Space
We don’t do a lot of news about interiors around here. But then we haven’t heard too much out of 1000M in a while, either. So that’s why we’re mentioning that the people behind Helmut Jahn’s new Michigan Avenue skyscraper have picked Kara Mann to kit out the inside of the 74-story tower. 1000M (1000 South Michigan Avenue) replaces a surface parking lot that incredibly has managed to survive for years,...
Helmut Jahn Proves Better Doesn’t Have To Be Bigger
Four months after introducing the public to his proposed 1,030-foot tower 1000 South Michigan, architect Helmut Jahn was back in the spotlight Monday night to debut his new-and-improved vision for the site in the South Loop. The court of public opinion voted down the original plan as too tall for the Michigan Avenue corridor. But instead of merely lopping off a couple hundred feet, Jahn went back to the drawing board to create an...
South Loop’s High Hopes Are Now Slightly Less High
Before the changing of the calendar. Before the fat man squeezed down your chimney. Before the lights started twinkling along Michigan Avenue, there was hope that the South Loop would be the home of — count ’em — three new architectural pieces to scrape the sky. Now it looks like one of those cloud scratchers will be a little less grand. Crain’s Chicago Business reports that Helmut Jahn’s proposed 1,030-foot-tall...
Architecture Films Now Running in Chicago
If you like architecture, you’ve come to the right web site. If you like architecture and movies, then you should head over to the 51st annual Chicago International Film Festival, which starts today and runs for two weeks. That’s because this year’s festival spotlight is “Architecture + Space + Design.” It looks like there are a number of very interesting locally-themed architecture films on offer....
Architect Jahn Tries to Save His Baby from Governor Rauner’s Budget Axe
Widely considered unsightly by those who see it from the outside, and dysfunctional by those who work on the inside, there was little surprise when Governor Bruce Rauner yesterday announced he want to offload the Thompson Center (100 West Randolph Street). The governor argues that selling the building makes financial sense for a number of reasons. It’s an expensive building to run; the Loop real estate market is hot enough that...
