The governor of Illinois, whose family started the Pritzker Prize, is set to sell Helmut Jahn's James R Thompson Center in Chicago, putting the fate of the postmodern building in "serious trouble".
Jay Robert Pritzker signed a bill on 5 April 2019 paving the way for the sale, and likely demolition, of the German-American architect's massive 17-storey structure.
Pritzker was elected to office on 6 November 2018 and is part of the philanthropic Pritzker family. His father Donald Pritzker is the brother of Jay A Pritzker, who established the revered architecture prize in 1979.
His signing of the bill forms part of the continued controversy surrounding the fate of Jahn's Thompson Center.
Calls for Jahn's Thompson Center to be landmarked Completed in 1985, it is celebrated as one of the city's best examples of postmodernism ? an architectural style developed in the late 1970s as an ideological reaction against the utopian ideals of modernism.
Despite this, the building is not titled as a historical landmark, and thus protected from future sale or demolition, which has resulted in the recent bill.
"The Thompson Center should be landmarked, period," filmmaker Nathan Eddy told Dezeen. In 2015, he captured the building in a video in a bid to reinforce the architectural importance of the building to Chicago's heritage, and to protest to its projected demolition.

"The building is unquestionably an architectural landmark of the first rank, according to...