Skender Completes Chicago Office Tower Renovation

Skender has announced the completion of the capital improvement program at 225 W. Wacker Drive, a 615,000-square-foot Class A office tower in Chicago. Cushman & Wakefield was in charge of management and represented the property’s owner, Spear Street Capital.

According to CommercialEdge, Spear Street purchased the 31-story building in 2020 for $210 million. The company appointed Skender as the general contractor of three different construction projects at the property, including upgrades to the lower lobby and Franklin Street entrance, fourth-floor amenity space and roof deck.

Skender worked together with Valerio Dewalt Train as architect, Kohn Pederson Fox Associates as designer and Oehme Van Sweden as the appointed landscape architect of the rooftop terrace.

Project details

The first phase of the renovation focused on the tower’s tenant amenity floor, which has been transformed into a luxury space equipped with Skyfold partitions for conferences, high-quality audio and visual equipment, green areas and a commissioned art collection that is paying tribute to Chicago River, incorporating different minerals.

Connected to the property’s fourth-floor interior, the redesigned open terrace features vegetation with drainage and water filtration systems, curtainwall openings and a new vestibule space. Using high-end materials, the Skender team also redesigned the lobby while keeping the space fully functioning for office tenants.

Wood was used for the building’s flooring, an overhead slab was cut to achieve double-ceiling heights and the tower’s exterior now offers a new curtainwall on the Wacker Drive side.

The renovation began in 2021 and was mostly complete by November 2022. The office property is now a revitalized asset that can accommodate tenants’ hybrid work needs. The tower has also received a LEED Recertification, reaching the Gold level status as of October 2022, according to USGBC.

Earlier in 2022, Skender, together with JLL Construction acted as general contractors for a 200,000-square-foot office building in Chicago’s Fulton Market. Completed in 13 months, Sterling Bay’s project was designed to achieve LEED certification. According to a recent Commercial Property Executive listicle, Illinois had more than 7.8 million square feet of LEED-certified office space during the first half of 2022, representing 6.7 percent of the total national volume. Chicago had 7.3 million square feet of office space that achieved the green certification, including a LEED Platinum award.