From the Obama Center to Google's Chicago headquarters, here's what's happening architecturally in 2026

Chicago faces — and braces — for another new year.

What will 2026 bring architecturally? Here's my annual look at the year ahead.

The Obama Presidential Center

After years of legal battles and a lengthy federal review, both triggered by the city's and the Obama Foundation's decision to build on historic Jackson Park, the 20-acre, $850 million complex is finally scheduled to open in June.

The project has brought together some of the nation's best design talent such as Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, landscape architects Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates and Moody Nolan, the country's largest Black-owned architecture firm.

But will it be enough to offset the center's hard-edged 225-foot tall museum tower and the shock of building over a section of a National Register-listed park designed by Frederick Law Olmsted? We'll find out in June.

Google headquarters gets completed

The $280 million conversion of the former James R. Thompson Center into Google's new Chicago headquarters is set to wrap in 2026.

The new exterior glass facade and revised ground level entry have come at the cost of the building's original 1980s postmodern-meets-Flash-Gordon look.

Renderings released by Google in 2024 show a more sober interior as well, although the building's atrium will be kept. That the architectural firm Jahn — the late Helmut Jahn's firm and the building's original designers — is at work here is a good sign, though.

A Bears stadium, somewhere?

The longer the Chicago Bears' itinerant hunt for a new stadium site goes on, the less it looks like a search for the perfect place and more like a traveling show scouring the region for a government that's sucker enough to help them pay for a new facility.

Now the team is looking at Northwest Indiana after buying and wrecking Arlington Park Racecourse, then running into brick walls in Springfield after unveiling a wrongheaded plan to build a giant Roomba-looking stadium next to Soldier Field.

If public funds just have to be spent on the thing, here's hoping the New Year brings some clarity to the situation and a solution that seeks to benefit the public instead of fleecing it.

The Big Casino

Construction of Bally's $1.7 billion casino is set to finish in 2026, with a fall opening planned.

Rambling along the Chicago River, at Chicago Avenue and Halsted Street, the complex will include a 3,000-seat theater, various eateries and a 500-room hotel.

I'm withholding full judgment until the HKS-designed casino opens, but the renderings make the casino look as if it would be more fitting sitting along an interstate than up against one of the world's great urban waterways.

And the accompanying 2-acre park seems as if it will be pretty measly in size for such a large-scale riverfront casino.

DuSable Park

Construction is scheduled to begin this year on DuSable Park, a 3.4-acre green space to be built on an former industrial site at the mouth of the Chicago River.

Designed by Ross Barney Architects and Brook Architecture, the park will memorialize Jean Baptiste Point DuSable. The Haitian-born trader and businessman set up his home and post along the river in the 1780s, making him among the first non-Indigenous people to see the economic potential of what would later become Chicago.

The park will have a statue of DuSable and a pavilion in which visitors can learn more about him and his Potawatomi wife, Kitihawa.

The park will include an entry plaza that connects to an elliptical promenade. Also planned is a boardwalk wetlands, prairies, a trio of hills and a connection to the Riverwalk and Navy Pier's Flyover, the elevated path of the lakefront trail that's on the east side of DuSable Lake Shore Drive.

Related Midwest contributed $10 million of the park's $15 million cost. The development company is constructing the 400 Lake Shore residential towers on the old Chicago Spire site across LSD from the planned park. Kudos to Related for pitching in, but shame on the Chicago Park District for not at least matching what Related has contributed.

The DuSable doesn't have to be the next Millennium Park, but given its namesake, location and that Chicagoans have waited 39 years to see this project come to fruition, the park district should spend money to make sure what's built is good — and not just good enough.