[ardecila]

I'm happy the Thompson Center will be saved, but it's intended as a piece of public architecture, not the local palace of our corporate-tech overlords. I liked the original Reschke plan because the state would move back into the building at the end, but the public spaces could be renovated more creatively.

Now Google is taking the city's grandest interior rotunda, our local PoMo outpost of the Illinois State House, and the state is moving to a buttoned-up corporate tower on LaSalle St where bureaucrats get to hide themselves away anonymously. It's the cheapening of our public space, just like the Old Post Office getting substituted with a lowrise shitbox in the 90s and eventually becoming the local palace of Uber. Or the beautiful concourse of Union Station getting torn down for an ugly office tower and turning the station into a cramped rabbit warren. We get the urbanism we deserve, I guess - it's just sad.

(fwiw, the Harris Bank complex on LaSalle is a great piece of modernism, it's just not public-spirited the way JRTC is)