Acrophobes and the faint of heart need not apply. All others will be delighted to discover that the alpha male of skyscrapers, the Empire State Building, has reinvented itself as a supergreen structure. A top-to-bottom, four-year renovation of the historic landmark began in 2009, with the chief goal of maximizing energy savings. Like King Kong, construction workers clambered around the storied 102-story building, barely noticed by the stream of office workers and visitors tha

Unity Temple in Oak Park, Illinois, has emerged from the plastic cocoon that enveloped this Frank Lloyd Wright national historic landmark for over a year. While under wraps, the building was crawling with activity. Outside, crews repaired the concrete shell, cutting out chunks, filling in holes, and mending cracks. Indoors, plaster walls and ceilings were patched up and repainted to match their original texture and color. Piece by piece, Wright’s trademark art glass and wood

School’s been out for the summer, but now college students are descending on two historic buildings in Milwaukee’s old Pabst Brewery complex, abandoned in 1996 but slowly coming back to life. Like the Brewhouse Inn down the street ( see previous article ) and the Best Place banquet hall around the corner, the two buildings--a student residence known as Eleven25 and the Zilber School of Public Health -- are both classic examples of how to shed new light (literally) on a shutt

Cream City. Brew City. Beertown. Miltown. Call it by any name, but Milwaukee is outfitting its grand old buildings with a new set of clothes at a prodigious rate. Nowhere is this trend more evident than on the city’s west side, at the 20-acre site of the former Pabst Brewery that operated there for about 150 years. An empty ghost town after the last batch of beer was churned out in 1996, the brewery complex is now being resurrected. And in a sustainable way, with specific go

Construction is underway at the 1928 two-story firehouse at 5720 N. Ridge in Chicago, called “the most ornate of the grand firehouses” by the Chicago Landmarks Commission. The brick-and-terra-cotta building will soon be reborn as the new home of Chicago Filmmakers . The independent film group plans to show offbeat movies on the main floor where fire trucks were once parked, and hold film-making classes upstairs where firefighters used to sleep. Preservation is the name of the

Some said it couldn’t be done, but…behold! In keeping with its mission of historic preservation, the Historical Society of Oak Park and River Forest [now known as the Oak Park River Forest Museum] is resuscitating the oldest municipal building in Oak Park, Illinois – a firehouse built at the turn of the last century. The firehouse, whose exterior and interior are being rehabbed to closely match their original appearance, operated there from 1898 until 1916. Subsequently, it