James R. Thompson Center

The glass and steel building ahead earned its architect the nickname Flash Gordon when it opened in nineteen eighty five, and it earned the state employees who worked inside it decades of complaints about temperature. Architect Helmut Jahn designed a soaring, curved glass atrium that was meant to be genuinely futuristic for a state government building, all openness and light and sweeping curves where most state offices were plain concrete boxes, with a rotunda meant to put government itself on public display. But construction costs ran so far over budget that builders swapped the planned double paned, insulated glass for cheaper single pane panels at the last minute just to save money and finish the job.

Single pane glass does a poor job holding back heat or cold, and on a building wrapped almost entirely in glass from its base to its curved roofline, that one substitution defined the place for the rest of its working life. Interior temperatures reportedly climbed past ninety degrees on hot summer days and plunged uncomfortably on cold winter ones, year after year, because the heating and cooling systems were never actually built to compensate for walls that could not insulate anything at all. State workers joked for decades that the building ran two seasons, roasting and freezing, with almost nothing comfortable in between. Illinois finally sold the building in twenty twenty two. The buyer was Google's parent company, Alphabet, which agreed to pay one hundred five million dollars for a landmark the state itself could never quite keep comfortable, with plans to renovate it into new technology offices.