Towering Ambition

The Chicago Spire aims to be the tallest skyscraper in North America. But will it get built? The twisting tale so far

By Jay Pridmore

(page 6 of 6)

So here we are.

There's a great excavation going on at the lakefront. The sales center in the NBC Tower offers a view of the site. In January, Kelleher told me "there are currently 600 appointments made for prospective purchasers."

"We're selling to some of the wealthiest people in the world," said Dominic Grace, of the London-based realtor Savills, who received me at the sales center shortly after it previewed this past September. The place looks the part. Calatrava watercolors are framed as in a gallery. Calatrava-designed doorknobs and other details are displayed in vitrines of museum quality. The expectation is that buyers will come from other countries and that their Spire condos will be "second homes." To that end its sales force has embarked on a series of road shows around the world. Mentioned are Singapore, Shanghai, Dubai, Moscow, South Africa—these being the "low-hanging fruits," Grace said, before they go hard at Europe.

"There's sort of a melting pot that the world's rich fall into," Grace explained. "They all hang out in the same high-end resorts. Boats popping up next to each other—Cannes, St. Tropez, somewhere in the Caribbean. We're not pretending that we're going to get 1,200 of those people into the Chicago Spire. We're not pretending that all of those people will necessarily want to live in Chicago . . . not yet. But we think there are enough people who will be woken up to what a great place Chicago is." (For a more skeptical view of the international market, see Real Estate, page 76.)

Not to forget the architecture. "The Calatrava effect is very strong here," Grace added. "We hear it every day with prospective buyers. They are already totally in love with this building. They just want to be part of it. You might almost describe it as the irrational part of buying property." Nevertheless, Shelbourne insists that even these prices—some units may go for as high as $4,000 a square foot, which would set a record for Chicago—are low by world standards (London apartments can go for $10,000 a square foot). And for a 20 percent down payment you could see your investment appreciate by move-in time. That's the rational part of buying property.

By any measure, the building of the Chicago Spire is a daunting proposition, and as of presstime, bank financing had yet to materialize. But if it does go up, the skyscraper would certainly be a splendid addition to the skyline. It could also be good for the city in a lot of other ways, driving scads of new wealth from the Middle East, from China, and from Russia into the local economy. The Spire might even be the springboard that gets us the 2016 Summer Olympics, though the Spire sales force is also looking to the Olympics as a platform to sell its pricey condos.

Chicagoans grasp intuitively that architecture is more than money stacked high. But, what? Antony Wood, executive director of the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat and a professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology—who is a fan of the Spire project—points to the global boom in tall buildings and observes that marquee construction no longer addresses what cities need or even what society at large wants. Rather, many such projects, he says, "take the iconic approach." They're unabashed monuments to the economic ambitions of Malaysia, China, Dubai, and other countries. "We are talking about buildings which become synonymous with a place even if they are not inspired by it."

Which is fine, but the Spire may make Chicago nostalgic for the old days, when Louis Sullivan believed that tall office buildings were monuments "to the best that is in your people," as he wrote, and "a sane and pure accounting of democracy." For him, big buildings symbolized upward mobility and growth. Sullivan's Auditorium, which attracted early fame to Chicago architecture, sought to bring grand opera to the masses by replacing the tiers of private boxes with many more seats, together in a common space. The Sears Tower, our enduring 20th-century icon, was built for the department store "where America shops."

Now, the Chicago Spire could be a symbol of the 21st century with its own not-so-hidden meaning: The superwealthy live among us, and they don't object to being admired in our fair city, perhaps even envied, but from a definite and inviolable distance.