I was in Chicago in 1988 and walked by there and the building was locked up, chained up and placarded with a big sign saying “No Entry.” ISTR some vague memory of the building being a part of a court case of some kind, but I’m not clear on any details.
So is my memory failing me, or was the Illinois Building/Thompson Center at one point or another the subject of a legal proceeding, and was it locked up (and if so, why?)?
There were some issues with the place early on. IIRC, the biggest boo-boo was climate control being vastly undersized to handle the passive solar gain caused by sunilght streaming in through all that glass into what was essentially a huge greenhouse with very few actual internal walls. The internal office layout was “open-plan” taken to extreme. Other than fire doors at the elevators, there were no walls separating acres of cubicles from the floor lobbies and the central atrium.
I also have vague memories of the architects screwing up on the accessibility issues - the doors weren’t wide enough for wheelchairs or something.