Approaching the Thompson Center from the south-east, the building conjures the image of an enormous birthday cake rendered in architectural terms during the ‘80s. At the same time that the structure is laughably ugly in that manner, it also seems to be reaching upwards. The fact that government is in place to uplift the common people, or at least that’s how some see it, could be the ideal related here.

What compounds the haughty feeling of achievement is the Jen Dubuffet sculpture that sits out front. This particular piece of public art compliments the building in that it points upwards, again, making its viewer feel that there is an ideal that Chicago is close to grasping.

Of course, it’s odd that in a building that houses governmental offices and sports a sculpture out front, there’s a ring of retail stores on the first level of the building if one decides to circumambulate the Thompson Center. After figuring that the inclusion of a Pay-Less and a USPS serves as something of a convenience for the workers who have offices in the building, it makes a bit more sense.

Unfortunately, after entering the building, the sunken level might make a visitor think that the building holds some hidden malevolence. And after making it up to the second floor, that doesn’t seem to be too much of a stretch.

Apart from the fact that there’re guards seated outside each bank of elevators disallowing anyone without a proper ID card to remove themselves to the offices upstairs, the escalators, which we civilians are relegated to making use of require walking the half-circle span of the deck in order to head back down stairs. Seeing as there’s not too much to actually look at on the second level, that maneuver is basically mandated by a building that, from the outside, appears to be a harbinger of good things.

As visitors make their way from one side of the second level to the other, the Illinois State Museum appears to be a hospitable store front, but its inside is overwhelmed by folks milling about with no aim or direction.

Just beyond the interior’s one cultural point of interest is a blood bank. Allowing a business to cohabitate a structure with government offices that’s for the poor to sell their insides in order to either buy things that all people should have a right to or drugs points to the pratfalls of commerce and government living side by side.

The fact that escape from the building should be made easy by trains running both behind the Thompson Center below it is a bonus. The manner that transit is wound around the building, unfortunately, leads commuters on a serpentine route up or down stairs and through a clutch of half lit hallways. The governmental bureaucracy and its run around has accidentally been turned in as architecture.