Google makes progress on Chicago headquarters with windows update

Google glass has come to the corner of Randolph and Clark streets.

But not the wearable tech spectacles the company introduced about 15 years ago.

Panes of glass — huge ones — are being installed at the soon-to-be Google headquarters, replacing exterior fenestration that was installed on the building during its previous life as the James R. Thompson Center.

“We’re installing the curtain wall with high-performance, triple-pane glass sourced from Minnesota that will reduce glare and solar heat gain to enhance the building’s insulation and thermal efficiency,” Google spokesperson Ryan Lamont said.

That means once the building is completed, the glass will help keep workers from squinting at their desks because of the sun, or broiling in the summer then shivering in the winter — three of the strikes against the Thompson Center when it was built in 1985.

The project is attracting a fair amount of onlookers. And why wouldn’t it? The postmodern building was stripped down to its structural skivvies when the original glass was removed. Now it’s being re-dressed.

And glass — shiny enough to reflect the surrounding buildings, yet with a translucence that allows its insides to be seen at night — is slowly revealing the edifice’s new identity.

“The building is certainly undergoing a revisioning,” Ward Miller, executive director of Preservation Chicago, said. “We continue to be grateful for the commitment to the building by Google and the development team.”

Lamont said glass on the sloped facades will have frits — a kind of pattern that is fashioned into the windows — that will help prevent flying birds from hitting the building.

I’m glad to see the once-doomed building find a new and productive life and championed for its reuse when it was threatened with demolition a decade ago.

Yet I’m already nostalgic for original bluish-green (greenish-blue?) exterior glass that was as much a part of the building’s identity as its potbellied shape and Flash Gordon-like interior atrium.

The new version feels sleek and corporate. But it certainly beats seeing the building wrecked.

And what about those interior renovations? Google released renderings last October but has been pretty quiet about it since.

“The renovations are progressing as planned,” Lamont said. “And we continue to work closely with the development team to thoughtfully modernize the interiors of the Thompson Center while respecting its architectural integrity.”