Posted by Leo Clark. on Saturday, November 5th, 2016 at 8:06pm.
A pair of spectacular new office towers is being planned for the 300 block of South Wacker, just steps from the Willis Tower. As first reported by Crain’s, the ambitious new project is being spearheaded by local developer John Murphy, who’s planning to close on the parcels at 301 and 321 S. Wacker sometime before the end of the year.
Although only in the planning stages at this point, the new towers would essentially replace a small park and plaza at 301 S. Wacker, and a surface parking lot at 321 S. Walker, which has seemingly occupied that space for as long as we can remember.
The good news for developers is that zoning for the gleaming new towers is already in place, and as you can see from the rendering, much of the design work also appears to already be out of the way. Noted in the Crain’s report, the only obstacle that could delay the project moving forward is finding tenants to occupy the 1.2 million square feet of office space each of the twin 48-story buildings would include. But with downtown commercial and office space at its lowest vacancy level in years, now seems like the perfect time to develop this kind of large-scale project.
Should everything go according to plan and developers secure tenants for the new South Wacker towers, construction is only estimated to take around two years.