Three days after moving to Chicago in 2017, I attended a Labor Day rally. We marched from a McDonald’s on the city’s West Side, where we’d rallied with workers from the Fight for $15 campaign, all the way downtown to the plaza in front of the James R. Thompson Center. That plaza, Jonathan Solomon — cofounder with Elizabeth Blasius of Preservation Futures, the Chicago-based preservation firm working to get the Thompson Center listed on the National Register of Historic Places — tells me, is one of only three outdoor spaces in downtown Chicago where you can protest without a permit (the other two being Daley Plaza and Federal Plaza).

Last month, after a few years of debate about what to do with it, Illinois governor J. B. Pritzker put the Thompson Center up for sale. Neglected for years after its construction in 1985, the Thompson Center’s spans of glass and metal would take $300 million for needed repairs and retrofitting. It’s too much of a burden for the state, Pritzker seems to believe. Let someone else deal with it. In fact, let someone else pay me to deal with this problem.

The Thompson Center is on Randolph Street between Clark and LaSalle on the northern edge of Chicago’s downtown “Loop.” It sits far from the curb, and its asymmetrical form looks like someone hacked a chunk off a giant glass cone. It would seem almost like a spaceship descending onto land were it not for the neoclassical-nodding colonnade that extends the building’s hand out to passersby, making it marginally more approachable. It’s peak postmodern architecture, full of tongue-in-cheek references to architectural eras gone by: the colonnade, the giant oculus at the top of the atrium, the Campidoglio-inspired tile pattern on the floors, even its hyper-reflective glass allows architectural history — the images of the surrounding buildings — to be read on its surface.