They gray currently up looks very bad. (Solar’s photo makes it look OK, but it looks quite different in person) I am still holding out that this is just a primer. Of the test swatches they painted this was easily the worst one for the building. The dark brown that was similar to the base or one of the lighter options would have been better.

Tonally, the tower doesn’t have enough contrast with the base anymore so there is a weird visual tension that wasn’t there before. Even worse, even though the building is wasn’t great, the light beige would have been a great backdrop for the glassy gray/blue buildings in front. The color contrast would have helped make the foreground buildings stand out more. Now it will look like a muddy dark mess.

Dec 22



Found where they buried the foundation piers.


A pair of spread footing piers poke their tentacled heads above the clay. Ready for the long sleep(er).




One of the rock-socketed piers. I believe the blue wires are for O-Cell testing.

Dec 27





Dec 29

I have to agree.

Anybody know if they refurbished the inside too? The carpet there has to be the most hideous I've ever seen. And certainly not conducive to walking in a straight line after some drinks.

Jan 3




Note the "bricks" put under the bottom rebar so it is positioned correctly at the bottom of the pour

Amazing pictures! :tup:

Construction site of the year award, this is the one I'm watching the most!

^ I love it, my office is directly across the river on Wacker peering straight down into this thing.

God you really gotta hand it to these guys for enduring this weather in that pit. Geez. I hope they get overtime or something.

Future architectural historians/people of Chicago are fortunate to have people like those in this forum out taking such great pictures.

I also agree that the Holiday Inn touch up is an improvement. The whole building will thankfully be blocked from view soon enough, so no need to stress about the conflicting base and tower.

So are they done digging down now?

The hole for the elevator mat (the hole with the wood lagging on the left in the last pic) is gonna go down a bit more but the general hole itself isn't gonna go down more

Does anyone have access to the basement floorplans to see if the WPE garage and the current garage will have access to each other? Or are they going to stay seperate?

Jan 5



The wet looking area is the base coat put down before the mat is assembled.


The ends of the re-bar are fitted with bolts so that they can be extended

As long as the image hosting sites stay up/people's accounts stay open. Looking through old threads is often a link graveyard. I'm also not sure if the Wayback Machine would capture any of the embedded content, haven't checked.

I think in 30 years most of the pictures will be lost because people did not back up their files. Atleast back the the "old" days you had to use up the film and throw it in a box and store it in a closet. Now hosting sites and old computers and cameras erase everything for you unless you remember to back them up.

This is and will end up being a real problem in a few years when people start to realize they have lost most of their memories.

^ You could lose old negatives too, not like things were iron clad back then either. It all comes down to personal organizational skills.

Either you are the type of person who backs things up (be it film or digital files), or you aren't.

Not really. With film you had hardcopies no matter if you wanted to or not. No hard copies for digital unless you save them. My parents and grand parents used to find old photos all the time they forgot about, but they still had them. People load their baby photos up onto websites and for some reason they think those websites will be here in 30 years.

Couple hundred bucks for a 6-10 TB Raid backup drive. Problem solved.

January 4, 2018

A 3 excavator line to get dirt out..nice. Makes we wonder what acrobatics they will need to pull for tower 3.