Glad Union Station is being left alone. I wouldn't be opposed to an addition on the station itself, but it would need to be something that's done well. Not the crap we've been seeing so far.

As for the tower... wow is it uninspiring. Hopefully there are refinements to the design coming. And when I say refinements, I mean a damn near total redesign please, lol.

I'm surprised they aren't shooting for a taller tower. Its located immediately adjacent to the busiest commuter rail station outside of New York City, and a few blocks from a half dozen transit lines as well.

Looks like they won't be building over the Union Station Transit Center either, as was the plan in earlier designs.

exactly my thoughts on the rumor by sneed...guess just wait and see how this all plays out just seems like for such a short snippet of a particular large story since it involves thousands of jobs and nobody else has picked it up yet?..:shrug:

Which major banks don't have an office in Chicago at this time? Might be a good place to research.

Y’all tripping
 

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I hope it's not the real rendering, but I wouldn't put it past them to do this after what they pulled before with the original proposal. I could live with this though, especially in comparison to the original design

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I'll admit, that is a really good looking building, and that is exactly what the leaked photo looks like. I guess i'm just gonna go back to biting my tongue until we see the official images haha

Several thousand jobs new to the city...I like the sound of that. Obviously I hope it's Amazon or Google, but several thousand new jobs if it's a good company that pays well is awesome regardless.

I hope that tower in the rendering is a placeholder. I mean know that Architects have to reuse some things but damn let's get some new ideas Goettsch.

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I wasn't suggesting that the design should be "hyper aggressive" design or that it shouldn't be rectilinear. I was simply suggesting that Goettsch try out some new material instead of doing their Nth variation on the One North Wacker design.

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The new building looks alright, certainly nothing grand. Goettsch does good work, but I wish more of our newer office towers were designed by someone else (maybe just not Ronan). The big/better news is that it looks like the rooftop addition to Union Station is gone, and that alone is worth celebrating. The possibility of an anchor tenant also being finalized is pretty exciting. Overall, it looks like this new plan is headed in the right direction.

Ugh this whole scheme sucks. Even if the tower is a placeholder. More plaza space is not needed in this location when there is literally a continuous chain of plazas along the river. I would much prefer a significant retail podium at the base, maybe akin to WFC/Brookfield Place in NY, or closer to home, what Blackstone is planning for the base of Sears/Willis Tower. This would have the added bonus of swallowing up the bus station, which is elegant in isolation but really a very suburban design that doesn't belong right on top of the region's biggest transit hub.

Also, I still think Union Station needs a vertical expansion. The proportions of the building, as designed by Daniel Burnham, are clunky AF because they were always intended to be Phase I of a larger development. We shouldn't let the grand plan remain unfinished because we got used to the incomplete look. In their haste to avoid the atrocious design pitched by Goettsch, the city overreacted and basically told O'Donnell to shit-can any plans to expand the station headhouse, which IMO is a big mistake, the proper architect could design a very handsomely detailed precast or even limestone addition. Adrian Smith already figured out a creative way to panelize real limestone into precast units at low cost for NBC Tower.

^Agree with ardecila on all of the above except the design precedent for the tower addition should be more Hearst and less NBC...

Yes, Union Station was designed as pedestal and should have something placed on top.
But that SCB design is so incredibly hideous I'm cool keeping it topless for now...

Now, let's not get carried away. Daniel Burnham had been dead nearly a decade when the railroads stopped construction and went back in with new caissons so they could add some office floors on top. The designer of the Union Station we know was Peirce Anderson, using a parti developed by Thomas Rodd of the Pennsylvania RR. After Anderson's 1924 death, Alfred Shaw took over.

Nor should Burnham's signature mean much to us regarding architecture. He was a great rainmaker, was very good at persuading clients to create quasipublic spaces, and was a gifted planner (of floor layouts, of sites, of cities). But Burnham always kept much more talented people (Charles Atwood, Peter Weber, Anderson, Ernest Graham, Edward Bennett) around to handle actual building design.

Here's the last design Burnham would have been aware of:

https://i.imgur.com/FnhkxlU.jpg

For those interested, I highly recommend the new book Chicago Union Station, by Fred Ash.

Definitely. Goettsch is solid, but let’s mix it up with new/different design talent for Loop office towers. The reason they’ve been so busy on this front really comes down to Riverside Development’s (O’Donnell’s) impressive string of success landing anchor tenants....

Anchor
 

Much more likely to be an existing large traditional industry tenant relocation....

My best guess is BMO Harris....just a guess though.....could be either of a couple others....

Yes, I vaguely remember you mentioning this before. But this just reinforces my point that the unfinished state of Union Station is not some genius architectural masterwork by a civic icon. Fans of good architecture should be advocating for something to be built on top of the headhouse, ideally something in line with the boxy proportions of the original tower scheme. It would echo many historic Loop buildings in a familiar way (Conway Building, Insurance Exchange, Builders Building, etc). Even Lucien Lagrange was prepared to give us a stripped-down version of this design back in the 1980s before that proposal fell through.

This subtle distinction won't mean much to the lay observer of architecture. Most people know Burnham (along with Sullivan) as the genius architect from Devil in the White City.