Architectural Review Ι May 20, 2024
‘Now we’re replacing the state with Google,’ says the fresh‑faced Evan Jahn, son of high‑tech postmodernist Chicago architect Helmut Jahn and president of his father’s firm. Delivered in Starship Chicago II (2023), a documentary by Nathan Eddy, it is a praiseworthy statement, for its truth on both literal and metaphorical levels.
Evan Jahn was referring to his father’s classically proportioned, structurally expressionist State of Illinois Building, later renamed the James R Thompson Center after the governor who commissioned it. This cocaine‑boardroom behemoth bellows ‘1985!’ with the swagger of a Huey Lewis and the News chorus, having survived clumsy attempts at market discipline. It was instead purchased by a pair of local developers in 2022, to be handed over to Google. Helmut Jahn died in 2021, but his firm will handle big tech’s renovation of what was the state of Illinois’s administrative centre in Chicago.
Quirky, noisy, and chaotic enough to be understood as a truly democratic space, the building in Chicago’s Loop will survive. But its function, accessibility and signature 17‑storey atrium seem likely to change radically, denuding this messy public forum for grievance, commerce and service with the technocratic anaesthesiology of Silicon Valley’s surveillance apparatus.
Conceived in the late 1970s – when confidence in cities was at a low ebb – the Thompson Center was a watershed in Chicago, moving the city past the high modernist Miesian dogma that placed as much faith in the rationalist grid as the city’s economic engines placed in the hundreds of miles of grid‑plotted farmlands that founded the entire enterprise. It demanded superlatives from the day it opened. ‘Helmut Jahn’s State of Illinois Center is the most cerebral, the most abstract, yet easily the most spectacular building ever constructed in the Loop,’ wrote Chicago Tribune architecture critic Paul Gapp. With its colonnade, atrium oculus and sliced dome, it recast classical proportion with contemporary materiality in a way that was traceable, yet wholly synthetic and original. It is a very Chicago take on pomo, incorporating traditional motifs not from superficial facade applications but from structural elements. Each element (panel, truss, beam, tile) is forcefully articulated, part of a fractal constellation of steel and glass and a palette of salmon, robin egg blue, and mirrored glass. It is wildly photogenic, a bit goofy and approachable. The atrium was conceived as an indoor public plaza, and to step inside it is to be awed.
Local preservation firm Preservation Futures, which has done more to champion the protection of the building than anyone, called the Thompson Center the best instance of postmodernism in Chicago in their 2020 National Register nomination. This went unheeded, as the building’s owners objected to the nomination, and the National Park Service followed suit.
There was a persistent aura of penny pinching and cheapness throughout the construction of the Thompson Center, and just a year after it opened, state auditors were pointing out flaws. Office workers above found the noise from the atrium, as well as the smells emanating from the food court, distracting. Temperatures would soar up to 32°C inside, and by 2016, 30 years after it opened, it had racked up US$326 million in deferred maintenance. Replacing the HVAC systems alone would cost US$60–80 million.
The state’s previous governor called for the building to be demolished, until the developers Prime Group and Capri Investment Group emerged with a plan to renovate it for Google. The building was sold in 2022 for US$105 million, and since then, Google has described its plans for it in the boosterish tone of ‘third‑space’ hangouts. Last December, Google wrote that it hopes that the Thompson Center can be a ‘thriving community destination for all Chicagoans in a revitalised Loop neighborhood’.
There are concerns that the people able to use this space for basic urban respite in the future won’t be as heterogeneous a group as it had been. And the process of gentrification seems to have already started. During the 2023 Chicago Architecture Biennial, the Thompson Center hosted the gala’s opening party between a gunmetal concave‑tiled bandstand set up for an Illinois Institute of Technology review helmed by Joel Putnam (who is also Capri’s chief design officer) and a venue for NPR’s Tiny Desk concerts. The theme of the biennial was ‘This is a Rehearsal’ – and they were certainly trying to get it right for this Chicago design critic, though perhaps not for the general public.
Google has said the atrium will be largely accessible, though they haven’t released any imagery of the interior to determine what signature elements will remain or how it will be accessed. The company declined to comment for this article, as did Jahn. Jonathan Solomon, Blasius’s partner in Preservation Futures, says it would be an ‘unnecessary and unforgivable loss to privatise that atrium space’.
Interior renderings that predate the current plan, and which are credited to Jahn, show a sterile, off‑brand Apple Store. It is a distillation of what the critic Kyle Chayka has dubbed ‘airspace’, a globalised and anonymous hospitality aesthetic that emerges from social media and market optimisation. Writing in City of Quartz in 1990, Mike Davis reminds us that this, too, was a pre‑internet phenomenon: ‘Designers of malls and pseudo‑public spaces attack the crowd by homogenising it. They set up architectural and semiotic barriers to filter out “undesirables”.’
This kind of homogenisation is a universal market benefit, as it makes an asset more liquid and less noticeable, and money moves fastest and most efficiently when people aren’t looking. Iconic idiosyncrasy, on full display at the Thompson Center, means visibility and accountability, and that is not convenient. ‘The market forces homogenisation,’ says Solomon. ‘The more globalised the market is, the more homogeneous the work [becomes].’
The neoliberal economics that have enveloped the Thompson Center ‘masquerade under the same pretension of universal democratic rights fused with the particular interests of an assertive and naturally rooted yet fundamentally transnational capitalist class,’ write Setha Low and Neil Smith in the introduction of the 2005 anthology, The Politics of Public Space. ‘The advent of neoliberalism clearly threatens a return to the exclusionary liberalism of its 18th‑century template,’ they write, ‘but with the technology of the 21st century.’
With Google, this technology will be developed in the Thompson Center. Here, our movements and keystrokes will be moulded into an ouroboros of efficiency, paid for in the distraction and digital surveillance which binds us all. Two weeks after announcing its plans for the Thompson Center, the company agreed to settle a US$5 billion privacy lawsuit for tracking users’ internet habits even when they used private browsing options. In this type of atmosphere, public dissent is going to lose one of its most visible homes in the city. I am quite comfortable in saying that the Chicago Teachers Union, the most militant teachers’ union in the nation, will not be returning to stage protests at the Thompson Center, given that the technology developed above is capable of tracking movements, search histories and purchases.
The collision of public space and surveillance predates the neoliberal turn that the Thompson Center illustrates so well, as described by geographer David Harvey in his chapter of The Politics of Public Space. Here, Harvey traces this impulse back to Haussmann’s Paris, and the symbiotic need for surveillance to accompany burgeoning markets and capital investment. Haussmann’s boulevards cleared out the Marxist rabble and made Paris legible and rational for capital; a process of ‘embourgeoisement’ that seems comparable to the gentrification we recognise today. But the still‑extant heterogeneity of the 19th‑century metropolis meant a sense of ‘insecurity and vulnerability, of bourgeois anxiety behind the turbulent mask of spectacle and commodification,’ Harvey writes. ‘To be effective in the public space, therefore, the network of informers and secret police … were everywhere. “Even the walls,” advised [Pierre‑Joseph] Proudhon, “have ears.”’ Today’s informers fit in our pocket and we’re loath to leave home without them.
Harvey’s scholarship lays at our feet the basic question of whether our cities can be a true ‘body politic’ or must they be degraded into a ‘tabula rasa for the accumulation of capital and the bourgeois pursuit of wealth and power’. If you watched a line of riot police muster outside a big box store during the 2020 Black Lives Matter uprisings, you know where we’re at. Nodding to cheerier times, Harvey writes, ‘that was what the Paris Commune was all about and I sometimes wonder if we have ever moved beyond that polarity within the whole historical geography of urbanism under capitalism’.
As a public building, the Thompson Center makes the standard material and rhetorical allusions to transparency and open governance with its glass facade, but this reads very differently now. We will be able to see into this largely inscrutable apparatus across the street from Chicago’s decidedly opaque masonry city hall, without any illusions that we can change it. The glass will now remind us that unaccountable power no longer needs sublime brutalist concrete to both broadcast imperious supremacy and hide its administrative processes. The new regime is hidden and dematerialised, as are the borders between public and private space.
‘You used to be able to know when you were in public spaces, [or] when you were in private spaces, when you were being watched and when you weren’t,’ says Solomon. ‘Now, you’re being watched constantly. We have private security on the streets. Every move we make is monitored by our phone and we’re not able to control where that data goes.’
It’s possible that integrating the Thompson Center into the expanding bubble of upscale surveillance urbanism might actually be one of the least consequential ways that Google controls and directs the paranoia and angst of our cities. The algorithmic panopticon and our furtive accommodations are omnipresent, but remain a largely invisible dynamic. The difference at the Thompson Center is that, with architecture, we can see where the borders of democratic urbanism erode.