Thompson Center, now Google Center (originally the State of Illinois Center), Chicago's Postmodern Civic Masterpiece
I've been in love with, & mesmerized by the Thompson Center (originally known as the "State of Illinois Center" and soon changing to the Google Center) in Chicago since I was a child. It is the most important postmodern public building in the world -by far. It is an incomparably complex, virtuoso & ambitious symphony of geometry, polychromy, structure, space & ornament… It's why I have spent probably more time creating the Architectural Icons collection for this building than for any other on the store... have a browse HERE
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It is a late twentieth century testament to Chicago’s architectural genius -the city that birthed the skyscraper, and, arguably, modern architecture itself- by the great maverick Helmut Jahn who made the windy city his home, and who mixed Hi-Tech structural gymnastics with Miesian sophistication and postmodern richness of effect to create absolutely singular spaces...
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Its exterior is a dramatic musing on the meeting of crystalline geometries & the historic context of both the city grid, which dramatically slices the buildings sides, & the surrounding architectural context which it echoes in its modernist curtain wall & its postmodern stone arcade..
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An example of how Jahn uniquely managed to fuse the futuristic & the historical, reveals itself when you look at the ground of the atrium -which is itself no doubt the grandest hi-tech interior space in the world- where one sees stone paving that is inspired by the paving of Michelangelo’s Campidoglio in Rome. The Campidoglio was the administrative centre of Renaissance Rome, and the paving marked the civic heart of the city, so this is a clear statement by the architect, through an historical reference, that this atrium is resolutely a space for the people & civic society...
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The mesmerizing use of mirrors in the Thompson is a dazzling modern update of the enlightenment use of mirrors in places like Versailles & Tsarskoye Selo (the summer retreat of the St Petersburg Court) to multiply light and space in such a way as to dazzle & entertain visitors, but here on a scale that is quite hard to fathom, and completely scintillating...
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Its really the upper levels where one gets the strongest sense of the Thompson Center’s bravura structural inventiveness, with all members proudly displayed and painted bright red, one viscerally feels the forces being distributed around the almost impossibly large space.
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Heres me lying in the very centre of that Michelangelesque paving, and what I am looking up at directly above... this is me basically in heaven...
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The building was bought by Google, and is currently being transformed into their Chicago Headquarters, with the building being upgraded to contemporary standards, although sadly it will be losing all its colour, mirrors, stone and razzmatazz, above is a render of how the atrium will look (or click here for more detail from Google)....
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It was because the building is being changed (thankfully not demolished though!) that I decided now was the time to commemorate it in the form I have loved it in my whole life, with all its glorious architectural and engineering theatre and drama front and centre. For this I have made the largest collection of prints and products of any building on our site, all of which involved the creation of a fully-detailed, gigantic 3d model, a section of which you can see in the image above...
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I hope you like the collection, please do let me know if there is anything you think is missing, or you would like a different coloured version of... Also, I wrote THIS article on the building for Icon Magazine, which you might enjoy reading.
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