Chitownproperty

The first sprouts of the new Trump Tower have emerged from the construction site, and the Tribune’s architecture critic Blair Kamin says that while the thought of a new skyscraper is exciting, it’s also a little scary:

The first structural columns for the 92-story hotel-condo tower have popped above Wabash Avenue and, all of a sudden, the project seems very real and, truth be told, a little terrifying.

You look at those round, gray concrete columns and you imagine them stacked endlessly in the sky. Patches of blue will disappear. So will cherished views, like the one from the Michigan Avenue Bridge of the elegant black slab of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s IBM Building.

Yet the heart beats faster at the prospect of Chicago reaching into the sky. Busting into the clouds is in the city’s blood. Nothing like this has happened since the boxy, black mass of the 1,450-foot Sears Tower, once the world’s tallest building and still the nation’s tallest, soared above the gritty Loop in 1974.

The construction is scheduled to take almost 4 1/2 years, finishing in 2008.