As Portland goes, so goeth Illinois?

 Back in April I remarked on the decision by Mr. Rauner to take the necessary administrative steps toward
seeling the old State of Illinois Center (now known as the Thompson Center) in
Chicago. The new governor judged that the building was inefficient, decrepit,
and inappropriately designed for its purpose and ougt to be sold, and that the
State of Illinois could house its Chicago workers better and cheaper in other
sites.

In that column I noted that municipal officials in Oregon’s
biggest city were facing
the same dilemma with their main office building.

 The Portland Building, by post-modernist
Michael Graves, opened three years before Jahn’s building. Whimsical on the
outside, the building inside is dark, it leaks and it is cramped. People don’t
like to work in it, and the city doesn’t like to keep spending money to
maintain it. As the State of Illinois has done with its building, the City of
Portland neglected Graves’ building for years, ignoring major structural
problems that now will take some $100 million to fix. The alternative is to
tear it down and build something new that would cost probably four times that
much. 

Coincidentally, just as Mr. Rauner restated
his desire to rid The People of the Thompson Center, the Portland city council approved
a plan to renovate the Portland Building for a cost not to exceed $195 million. More
good money thrown after bad? Not according to the city’s Office of Management
and Finance, which concluded that renovating the building was the least
expensive alternative for housing the workforce.

Is there wisdom there that Illinois might profit from? I
think not. The Portland Building suffers from the usual ills resulting from
low-bid construction. The Thompson Center was ill-built too (single-pane glass
in an all-glass, south-facing building? really?) but most of its considerable
cost owed to a design that was hard to build and that would, even if upgraded
mechanically, remain hopelessly wrong for its purpose.

I am troubled that state government would no longer have a
symbolic presence in the heart of Illinois’ great city. But I also have lost
faith in the ability of the State of Illinois to handle building projects. Were
the state to purchase another office building in Chicago, it would simply be allowed
to rot the way the Thompson Center has. Better that the servants of  the Commonwealth be trusted to the care of a
private landlord.  

This article appears in Oct 22-28, 2015.