Like what? I'm not too familiar with their history

I'm not 100% sure, don't quote me on it but timeframes were mentioned in the article that revealed the 1,422' height bump.

Only nerds like us actually care that much. To everyone else they're just new, tall buildings. ;)

The new elevation showed it may possible be taller than that.

I wonder if Salesforce is planning to put their logo atop this tower. I have mixed feelings about that. Although of course they can do whatever they want. The screen atop the one in SF looks amazing.

Also, Handro, Is there a chance that the 844/58fl is just the occupied office component, minus the crown, mech space?

I feel like every bright eyed whipper snapper on this forum says things like Ironwright does. I appreciate your enthusiasm, dude, but what jives with economics is ultimately what counts.

If we can’t command the rents or the sales prices, we ain’t gettin limestone nor certain heights for given buildings factoring in the cost of construction. Sorry, it’s like complaining that Chicago doesn’t have warm winters. You can’t change reality.

Anyhow, it’s not a big deal because unlike some forumers who rank Chicago by number of 1000 footers, I don’t personally view urban success that way. Hell, let Houston build 9 1000’ towers for all I care, it will still be lame ass, auto-hell Houston.

Yes, many designs haven’t been the best, but I think we have had the best boom ever for the past 20 years. We have carpeted downtown so extensively with development that it’s unrecognizable from a prior generation. It is evolving into America’s second true 24-7 live work environment, and you can thank a lot of the smaller, 20-40 story buildings for playing most of the part in that.

It would help to have just a little foresight to realize that it is better to invest in creating a world class environment before reaping the rewards by following that up with eye-popping 1000 foot towers left and right. I mean, Manhattan is only having this boom NOW, after being way ahead of Chicago in this game for a very very long time.

Ok, now rank these by GDP, per capita GDP, and quality of life, all those Chinese cities disappear.

I'm not worried about Chicago ahving the most skyscrapers, I'm worried about it having the BEST. Sears is still the champion tower globally after 45 years by actual size (i.e. SF). That is the BEST (also the first by most measures due to things like sky lobbies and double decker elevators) megatall after decades. Our built environment is dozens of times better than anything China has to offer, IDGAF how many tower in a park sculptural garbage towers (often designed in Chicago) they build, it doesn't make up for 1/10th of Wicker Park or Lakeview.

Likewise, I don't care how tall this tower is as long as it's reasonably taller than everything around it and of the highest quality.

Me neither. I think a measure of quantity is overrated sometimes (or maybe often times - depends on what you're talking about). I was just showing why along with the previous growth number (more than +200 million people in China since 1990) the number of skyscrapers has skyrocketed there. Nothing more than that. When you can build fast and cheap, you basically go with that to accommodate a skyrocketing population in various places. The point is that people will ask why China is increasing so much with these numbers - for 1 they have a crap load of people and for 2 their growth in some cities is ridiculous. It makes way more sense when you think about it in those terms

You're turning into an old fart. The planet is warming so you can most definitely change reality.

But more to the point, we're talking about real estate, which isn't objective reality; it's just one of the many market fictions we use to order society. And if we can change the weather, we can definitely change the norms of the real estate industry toward more thoughtful planning and partnership with city government.

To be sure, this development is decent, but was "decent" the expectation anyone had for Wolf Point a few years ago? If this had been done right, there would be only two towers and a very large public space along the riverfront. I welcome the next generation to try where we have failed.

If I'm not mistaken the Hudson Yards in NY is a different Related, this is Related Midwest.

But yea we'll just have to wait and see, who knows. It could suck, it also could not.

the Chicago that was during the burnham era of "make no little plans" and into 70's is no longer..everything is watered down now and the developers bottom line is what matters...grand plans and new out of the box designs i fear will not never come to fruition...everything will get downsized, VE'd to death. Nothing unique that you cant find in any other mega cities. Buildings like tribune tower and Wrigley were built by true visionaries and it was all about how beautiful you can make your building...I wish we still had that type of thinking today

Because skyscrapers aren't supposed to be built for the sake of being tall, that's never why they were built here in Chicago. Skyscrapers started being built here because suddenly, in the explosive growth and chaos of the peak industrial era, it suddenly became profitable to stack many floors of office space in one place. Was Chicago a failed city in the early 1900s when NYC had the Singer Building and we weren't even close? No, because the buildings we we're building we're more innovative, better looking, and just downright more interesting than the ugly ass Singer building. It is literally totally irrelevant if the Salesforce tower in Chicago is 850' or 950'. It does. not. matter.

It's a totally arbitrary number when the point of this tower is to house a shit ton of Salesforce employees. We don't build for the sheer sake of building. Sears was only ever as large as it was because Sears really was that dominant and gigantic of a company at the time, they really believed they would need all that space eventually. In fact, Salesforce tower will be a worse building if it is made taller than it needs to be for the sheer sake of height sacrificing the efficiency of it's design for aesthetics. If they need to add more stairs and elevators and that makes the floors less efficient and costs SF more causing them to hire or grow less, is that a good thing? No, because the point of the economy (and outgrowths of the economy like skyscrapers) is not to look cool, it's to make money. Given Chicago's history as THE crucible of the modern industrial and free market era, suggesting that a building should be taller just because it would be "cool" is a travesty.

Form follows function my friends, don't you ever forget it. What we want is good planning and design coupled with optimal economic growth not another 100' so we can have a metric super tall of which we already have many more than 99.99% of cities on Earth including some of the earliest, most revolutionary, and beautiful examples of highrise design in history.

Well, Vista tower got a height increase and that's the second highest roof in Chicago.

Other than that I thought Wolf Point or OSC was our next best chance at a supertall. I'm not sure how likely it is for the other projects to see the light of day or not be downsized.


Yea true, but a little ambition/competitive attitude are nice though.

The design is way more important than the height to me - as long as it is a solid 150 ft taller than WPE to give some visual steps to the development.

We all love tall buildings, but let’s not confuse tall buildings with greatness—whether it be a city’s greatness, or even the greatness of the building itself. These are two different things, and I’m not seeing any argument here that convinces otherwise.

This is really just about personal aesthetic preferences, which I understand. But this whole “Chicago doesn’t win any more” (that tone sound familiar?) because a tower’s height was chopped by a couple dozen feet is some serious hyperbole.

No it's not. It's the same company. Related Midwest is a wing of Related that focuses specifically on development in Chicago for the Related Companies. It was a few years ago that they branded it as this, but they had been doing things in Chicago development-wise before that.


http://www.relatedmidwest.com/ourcom...urhistory.aspx

They have other brandings, such as:

Related California: http://www.relatedcalifornia.com
Gulf Related (i.e. Abu Dhabi): https://www.gulfrelated.com
Related Beal (i.e. Boston): http://www.relatedbeal.com/

It's all the same company. They just happen to have a few "Related ____" brands in their larger markets outside of NYC.

This whole convo is making me want to research how Sears and JHT came to be. How big of a driver was the market, how big of a driver was government. How have things changed since vis a vis market practices and risk assessment, short term vs long term thinking.

Agreed, although the design we've seen so far was only cool due its ~300 meter height. Hopefully this one is sleeker, more imposing.


Oh okay, my mistake. I suppose the Chicago branch is known for less ambitious projects then since HY in NYC is something else.


JHT is mixed use which I think helped (and still does today). Sears, well, the time was right and they wanted to show off?

The Chicago branch is like 2 or 3 years old - Related Companies is over 45 years old now.

Development is a bit more different in Chicago than NYC due to things like Aldermen. I don't think it has anything to do with "Related Midwest" itself. It's the same damn company.

^^^ No, I'm saying the only way in which height matters to me is that for THIS site, being perhaps the most prominent in the city, we should see something reasonably tall. That's not to override everything else I said, that's to express what good planning would dictate for a massively prominent site like this which, in case you didn't notice, is something I called for: good planning. Good planning is not trying to force developers to add height to buildings so they can become a metric super tall which is a totally arbitrary number. It's about opening the door for them to maximize its potential. In other words they should be allowed to build as tall of a building here as they want, but not required to. Saying "at this prominent site the building should be taller than everything around it" is not arbitrary because it is based off the nature of the site and surrounding buildings, not a random number like 1000 feet or 300 meters.

How about some slight speculation? What? That's not how this works, they aren't going to just speculate just for the hell of it. Developers make decisions based on what they think they can do profitably. It's never just wild speculation for the hell of it and it's ended badly every time that's happened (see Chicago Spire). They have a sure bet here in building a very large office building to house SF, why on Earth would the make that sure bet less profitable just to "speculate more"?

Also no, if the reverse had happened I wouldn't be here saying this because guess what, you all wouldn't be bitching and griping about how Chicago is now a cowtown because they lowered the roof height of a building by like 100'. I'm not just randomly saying this stuff, I'm saying it in response to the mind numbing griping going on which would not be happening if they had upsized it. And no, it wouldn't be a violation of what I said before if the developers had decided their proforma would work better if they added condos or hotel to the top. Because that's literally my point, these developers know a hell of a lot more about what will work here than either of us. Attempting to determine what will work here without an expensive and massive analysis of the site and market is literally just talking out your ass. These developers spend years looking at different programs and floor layouts to determine what works. If they determine they can add 20 floors of hotel on top it's because they think the costs to the office portion are outweighed by the hotel and it's no more reasonable for us to question that conclusion than it is to question their decision to go office only. The point I'm making is that these simply aren't random decisions made for vanity, they are well thought out conclusions about the best way to maximize the economic value of the site. That has not changed in Chicago since the cornerstone of the Monadnock or the Home insurance buildings were laid.


I know you are hoping for something else, but the government was even less involved with the construction of these buildings than it is today. Sears and JHC we're built before there was any height or significant zoning regulation in the downtown area. They were basically as-of-right, NIMBYs go to hell, developments because back then developers and companies could basically build whatever they wanted downtown as long as the city issued permits for the design.

I agree but at the end of the day, this was an absolutely *perfect* place for a ~300 meter tower. We all have every right to be very disappointed.

Also, I was really curious about this assertion that Related in NYC somehow does bigger projects to which this post above was replying to....

1. 30 Hudson Yards | NYC | 1268 feet
2. 400 N LSD South Tower | Chicago | 1100 feet
3. 35 Hudson Yards | NYC | 1009 feet
4. 50 Hudson Yards | NYC | 985 feet
5. 15 Hudson Yards | NYC | 914 feet
6. 10 Hudson Yards | NYC | 878 feet
7. 400 N LSD North Tower | Chicago | 850 feet
8. Park Tower | Chicago | 844 feet
9. One Bennett Park | Chicago | 843 feet
10. 55 Hudson Yards | NYC | 778 feet
11. Time Warner North and South Tower (2 towers) | NYC | 749 feet each
12. 725 W Randolph | Chicago | 680 feet
13. 1 MiMA Tower | NYC | 638 feet
14. One Madison Park | NYC | 621 feet
15. OneEleven | Chicago | 613 feet
16. The Avery | San Francisco | 575 feet
17. Transbay Center | San Francisco | 550 feet
18. 500 N Lake Shore Drive | Chicago | 497 feet
19. 170 N Peoria | Chicago | 495 feet
20. The Century | Los Angeles | 478 feet
21. The Strathmore | NYC | 450 feet
22. One Carnegie Hill | NYC | 428 feet
23. Manhattan Plaza Apartments I and II (2 towers) | NYC | 428 feet each
24. The Easton | NYC | 425 feet
25. Icon Buckhead | Atlanta | 420 feet
26. 1500 Mission Street | San Francisco | 400 feet
27. One Hudson Yards | NYC | 393 feet
28. Equinox Hotel | Los Angeles | 379 feet
29. Abington House on the Highline | NYC | 366 feet
30. One Flagler | West Palm Beach | 365 feet
31. The Clarendon | Boston | 336 feet
32. The Veneto | NYC | 335 feet
33. Landmark West Loop | Chicago | 308 feet
34. The Monterey | NYC | 303 feet
35. Tribeca Park | NYC | 299 feet
36. Cornell Tech Residential | NYC | 270 feet
37. The Caledonia | NYC | 250 feet
38. Superior Ink | NYC | 188 feet
39. 520 W 28th Street | NYC | 135 feet


Funny, because Park Tower in Chicago, which was built in 2000, was the single tallest building that Related did in the entire world for over a decade and only recently got overtaken thanks to some of the towers in Hudson Yards. Even if they lopped off 75 feet from the 400 N LSD South Tower, it would still be the 2nd tallest building in Related's entire portolio. Out of the top 10 tallest buildings in the world belonging to Related, 4 of them are for Chicago and the rest in NYC - all of the ones in NYC are in the very recent/still being built Hudson Yards. By the way, Related is not the only developer of Hudson Yards just for the record. Related also has over 20 buildings under 500 feet in their portfolio - 14 of which (over half of those) in NYC.

But yes, let's keep pretending that somehow Related's Midwest arm is taking it easier than the other places.

Great post. Never knew how tentacled and expansive Related was until now.

I always thought of them as a local group that cuts corners at all costs.


My eyes are open now.

Kudos to them.

Chicago is lucky to have them IMO.