New Chicago Skyscraper Design: Fordham Spire

It’s a birthday candle! It’s a tampon! It’s a screw coming out of the ground. No, wait…it’s the Fordham Spire, a planned addition to the Chicago skyline. When I polled friends and colleagues about the new Chicago skyscraper design, those are some of the derisive responses I received. Before you read the rest of this article, visit the Fordham Spire website and take a look at the new Chicago skyscraper design: http://www.fordhamcospire.com/. 

Conceived by Santiago Calatrava, whose Milwaukee Art Museum design has become the symbol for Chicago’s northern neighbor, the Fordham Spire will be located just south of Navy Pier. The new Chicago skyscraper design will occupy just over two acres where the Chicago River meets Lake Michigan. Like every other plan developed by the Spanish architect, the Fordham Spire has been met with praise from the architecture community and a mix of awe and curiosity from the general public. Developers are calling the style “poetic” and “crystalline,” and it definitely reflects Calatrava’s other work, which is known for its visual sense of movement and its insistence on airiness.

Although it won’t threaten either the in-progress Burj Dubai or Al Burj superstructures for the title of “world’s tallest skyscraper,” at a height of over 600 meters, the Fordham Spire would surpass both the box-shouldered Sears Tower in Chicago and the proposed dual-perspective Freedom Tower in New York to become America’s tallest building. Its roof would rise to somewhere around 1500 feet, with the tip of the spire then climbing to a summit of 2000 feet – over two hundred feet taller than the quasi-obelisk planned for the Big Apple.