James R. Thompson Center Redevelopment and Google Chicago Headquarters

Helmut Jahn’s salmon-and-blue state building was the most argued-about structure in Chicago for forty years. Half the city wanted it landmarked. The other half wanted it gone. What actually happened is stranger than either: it got stripped to the bone and rebuilt by Jahn’s own successor firm.

The James R. Thompson Center redevelopment is a $280 million build-to-suit converting the 1985 postmodern landmark into Google’s Chicago headquarters. Roughly 2,000 Google employees will occupy 1.2 million sq ft across 17 stories.

Project Scope

Prime/Capri Interests, a joint venture of Michael Reschke’s The Prime Group and Quintin Primo III’s Capri Investment Group, bought the building from the State of Illinois for $105 million in 2022. Google agreed the same year to buy it for $105 million once complete.

Clark Construction Group is running the base building as construction manager at risk. Skender is handling interior renovation packages, with Partners by Design as architect of record for interior work. The exterior is JAHN, the successor to Murphy/Jahn, replacing the original skin with high-performance energy-efficient glazing.

The 17-story atrium stays. So does the name, confirmed in March 2026. A new smart HVAC system replaces the one responsible for the building’s decades of temperature complaints, which is arguably the single most requested change in the structure’s history. A separate $85 million city permit for interior renovations was issued December 17, 2025.

Why It Matters

Recladding a fully glazed atrium building while keeping the atrium is a harder problem than demolishing it. The original envelope was both the weather barrier and a substantial part of what made the interior legible as architecture, so the replacement had to hit modern thermal performance without flattening the thing into a generic curtain wall. Handing that to Jahn Studio wasn’t sentiment. It was the only firm with the original drawings and the standing to make the changes without a preservation fight.

Google’s move-in slipped from 2026 to 2027, a real schedule change rather than an aggregator’s rounding. Commercial leasing for the non-Google space opened in March 2026.

For the Loop, the arithmetic is straightforward: 2,000 daytime workers returning to a building that sat mostly empty, in a submarket where office vacancy has been the defining problem since 2020.

Project Team & Details