Every new year brings its own set of architectural developments in Chicago, from big projects being announced — or wrapping up — to vintage places and spaces in need of rescue.
What will 2025 bring? Here are a few things worth watching.
Bad news, Bears
Last fall, Chicago Bears CEO Kevin Warren said the team planned to start construction on that monstrously large lakefront stadium “sometime in 2025.” But the chances of that happening this year are as thin as the Bears’ current O-line.
That’s because the team wants at least $1.5 billion in public infrastructure funds — which means reaching into city and state taxpayers’ pockets — in order to build its $5 billion stadium designed by the Kansas-based architects Manica.
It’s a bad idea all around. Who, besides the Bears, wants to see public money thrown around like that, especially in these economically lean times for state and local government?
And on top of that, the Bears and their cheerleader-in-chief Mayor Brandon Johnson want to remake 70 acres of public parkland, including Soldier Field, to make room for the stadium.
Gov. JB Pritzker and top state legislators rightfully said last year that Illinois has bigger priorities than funding a Bears stadium. They should stick to their guns on this.
And while Johnson is giddy about letting a private billion-dollar football franchise plan and build on the lakefront, Friends of the Parks and other open space advocates in town are not. And they’ll no doubt sue to block construction, in the unlikely event Springfield weakens.
Meanwhile, the Bears have been quietly eyeballing space on the former Michael Reese Hospital campus in Bronzeville, a site the team originally rejected as too narrow.
With all those kinks, complications and headwinds, and Arlington Heights remaining as a possibility, a lakefront stadium groundbreaking in 2025 seems about as likely as the team making the Super Bowl next year.
Obama’s Home Court
The Obama Presidential Center, still under construction, isn’t expected to open until 2026.
But a 45,000-square-foot standalone athletic facility called Home Court is set to wrap up construction on the south end of the campus near 63rd Street this year.
Designed by the Chicago office of architecture firm Moody Nolan, the facility will contain an NBA-sized basketball court, practice courts and space for banquets and events, as well as room for athletic training and fitness equipment.
In renderings, the building looks landscaped, glassy, functional — and quite careful not to outshine the main Obama Presidential Center buildings now taking shape on the campus to the north.
And about those buildings…
I’ve been largely waiting until the $700 million presidential center is finished before fully weighing in.
But for now, I’ll say this: The new parks and recreational space accompanying the Obama Center better be damn good — and I mean superlative — to justify the gobbling-up of 20 acres of Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux’s Jackson Park.
Furthermore, the center’s 225-foot tall granite museum tower seems much too big and husky for its park setting. And in its unfinished state, the building looks funereal enough to fit in at another historic South Side greensward: 183-acre Oak Woods Cemetery at 67th and Cottage Grove.
Still, the completed campus needs to be seen. So until then, I’ll be quiet. Or try to.
A new West Side Story
The 1901 Project — an ambitious $7 billion, multi-year, mixed-use redevelopment project surrounding the United Center — kicks off this year when construction begins on a 6,000-seat music hall at Damen Avenue and Adams Street.
Led by the Wirtz family, who own the Chicago Blackhawks, and the Reinsdorfs, owners of the Chicago Bulls, the 1901 Project — named for the United Center’s address — is the kind of large-scale redevelopment the West Side has needed for more than 60 years.
The music hall is a big building, more than 80 feet tall and about 1,000 seats larger than the mammoth Arie Crown Theater.
How will it look? Hard to tell. In a ground-level rendering released by the United Center Joint Venture Group and RIOS architects, the building resembles the result of a shotgun marriage between a community college and a suburban multiplex theater.
But the hall is a bit more graceful in an aerial rendering that shows the building topped by sloping park spaces.
One for the books
Big, midcentury suburban corporate campuses are continuing to go the way of the dodo bird. And that’s too bad, because many of them were quite well-designed and would seem ripe for reuse.
The next headquarters to fall might well be Glenview’s former Scott Foresman campus, designed by Perkins & Will.
The finely turned modernist brick and glass campus was built in 1966 for Scott Foresman, publisher of the once-popular Dick and Jane schoolbooks. It’s been vacant since 2020.
Glenview officials last month approved rezoning the property so that it can be wrecked and replaced by 60 single-family homes.
With its landscaped courtyards and glass enclosed walkways, the complex was worth saving. Perkins & Will architects Jerry Johnson and Tom Kaszni created a reuse proposal for the headquarters, but to no avail.
“The fate of the Scott Foresman site is symbolic of the ongoing uncertainty over the future of high-end, modern designed suburban corporate campuses,” Landmarks Illinois said when it listed the complex among the state’s most endangered buildings in 2021.
Lee Bey is architecture critic for the Sun-Times and appears on ABC7 News Chicago. He is also a member of the Editorial Board.
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