Best predictive text on the likely fate of the James R. Thompson Center

In his essential compendium “Why Architecture Matters,” Tribune architecture columnist Blair Kamin wrote, “As ever, the quality of the built world depends on the choices we make… in the end, the marketplace and the marketplace of ideas are far more positive—and powerful—agents of change… Every building is a new piece of the evolving metropolis, a new layer of the ever-changing urban collage. This collective work of art forms an unflinching record of who we are and what we do. It connects us in time and space to those who went before us even as it represents our legacy—for better or for worse—to those who come after.” Those words resound after hearing ditch-and-run plans floated for the James R. Thompson Center since the Pritzker inauguration, to, in the vulture capitalist coinage, “unlock value.” That “spaceship-like building, Helmut Jahn’s James R. Thompson Center… still seems like a brash intruder butting up against the classical dignity of Chicago’s City Hall,” Kamin wrote, but also described it as a structure that explained Chicago’s “timidity” in architecture. “Jahn’s glassy glitter place,” he wrote, “spawned a reaction against risk-taking that turned reactionary, leading to such backward-looking buildings as the Washington library … and the United Center and Comiskey Park.” In the post-Rahm construction era of shiny-shiny and shinier, plus reckless demolition left and right, Jahn’s remains a provocation that could well be obliterated in the service of further momentary profit and consistent with the accelerating anti-preservationist mood. (Ray Pride)
The James R. Thompson Center Historical Society, preservationfutures.org

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