As cities across the country are abandoned with office vacancies in their urban centers, a Chicago developer uses social networks to promote his plan to turn offices into apartments into a building of almost 100 years considered an architectural gem that has fallen in difficult times.
The Pittsfield Building has become a viral sensation, thanks to social media publications that millions of people from around the world documented plans to resuscitate the 38 -story tower, whose original design combines Art Deco and Gothic details, and offers broad views of Lake Michigan, Millennium Park and the loop.
Tom Liravongsa, a developer who acquired Floors 1-12 and 22-28 in the building for $ 7.5 million by 2023 at an exclusion auction. It plans to turn it from the office space into 224 residential apartments with modern comforts, maintaining the original elements of the building: a gray terracotta exterior, chest roofs, brass elevator and light accessories, a copper roof, white marble columns, ruined iron railings and wooden panels.
Ever since he started publishing updates on the building in April, 42 -year -old Liravongsa called “The Skyscraper Guy” in Tiktok and Instagram, videos have won about 80 million views and attract hundreds of thousands of followers.
Liravongsa jokes that he bought a skyscraper and now has to explain it to his wife, in videos highlighting various features of the Graham, Anderson, Probst and White building designed. Social networks that have later allowed him to build lists of people interested in renting an apartment and contractors and vendors as distant as Germany who want to participate in the renewal process.
A Tiktok publication that accumulated 8 million views shows that Liravongsa dropped a piece of email to a detailed brass chute and explain why the chutes were banned for fire safety reasons. In another video on Instagram, where Liravongsa has accumulated 381,000 followers, he points to some of the building’s random intriguing functions, including a speakeasy speakea from the ban and a hidden room that is not found in the original models. In another, he describes the basement features that he says “scared me to the key”, including a coal shot, a walkway and the bottom of a smoker extending 40 floors to the roof.
“We are discovering that people want to enjoy these older buildings,” says Liravongsa. “Say:” Here is a milestone you can enter [via social media]. It is active. You can experiment.
Tom Liravongsa shows a light of light adorned to the five -story atrium of the Pittsfield building.
Photo courtesy of Tom Liravongsa
Liravongsa, the CEO of Grand Rapids, the firm of real estate investment based on MICH. [in construction and design] 100 years ago and as it is still lasting. This craft is difficult to replicate these days. Not that you cannot, but many of this set of skills has been dissipated. “”
Liravongsa works with Chicago’s architectural firm, Papageorge Haymes Partners in adapting the building, which already houses 228 Units of apartment to eight floors owned by CMarc Realty, based in Hicago.
Jen Masengarb, executive director of AIA Chicago, says the Pittsfield building named a Chicago milestone in 2002, fits well to a residential conversion Due to its narrow tower plates and light wells that allow natural light to the building.
“But, as with any building of about 100 years, the real challenges, beyond funding, are in the modernization of systems and above the building,” Farmhouse He says.
Liravongsa says that the building has 15 to 16 lift axes with space to house MEP systems.
“The beauty of these older buildings is that you have so many more lifts than modern buildings,” he says. “You can use these axes for your systems and that relieves many problems. We have huge axes that you can execute systems without having to pierce the flats.”
The road to revitalize the Pittsfield building has not been easy. A previous owner, Morgan Reed, presented the bankruptcy of Chapter 11 in 2017, which promoted the owner of the Chinese business Xia Hua “Edward” Gong to buy the building during a bankruptcy auction. The part of the Gong building deteriorated after the Ontario values commission accused him in December 2017 of fraud of criminal values in Canada. An agreement was reached in this case, but a demand for exclusion was filed in 2022 with Liravongsa, acquiring the Gong flats in the building in 2023. Although Gong later sued for the sale of exclusion, this demand was dropped.
“Everything has been erased. They have been resolved. That’s why we have been in the races,” says Liravongsa.
Liravongsa refused to provide details of other developments that his company has managed, different from a boutique building of the time of 1871 in Grand Rapids and other projects in the initial phase in Miami and Austin, Texas.
Masengarb praises Liravongsa’s efforts to spread the word on the charms of the Pittsfield building, which according to her create an interest in the adaptive reuse of older buildings.
“When the engineers and architects who see their videos could see only a mundane air plenum, for example, Tom’s dramatic narrative skills bring the audience to discover these ghostly and apparently forgotten mechanical spaces,” he says.
“I think it’s a very smart approach,” adds Kendra Parzen, a defense head of Landmarks Illinois. “The residence is what we need and it makes absolute sense to adapt the Pittsfield building for residential use.”
Liravongsa says that the use of social media to create interest in a project is unusual for a developer.
“I would say that developers never come to social media and will come up with the idea of publishing a story,” he says. “Only they would. Tenants, come and live here. ”
Liravongsa says that social media also helps him to model the building in which the market wants and ensure that it thrives on the road.
“As developers, we have a vision and offer buildings for a future that is three to five years [or longer] Therefore, as a developer, you literally have to create the future, “he says.
