The City Has Finally Picked An Architect For Union Station's Overhaul

By Gwendolyn Purdom in News on Jul 15, 2016 4:23PM

After years of talk about modernizing Union Station, the city may finally be chugging toward action this week.

Amtrak, the city and transportation officials have chosen a design team to overhaul the iconic 1925 building. International architecture firm Arup (the firm behind the famous Sydney Opera House in Australia) will take on 13 initial improvement projects for Phase 1 of the overhaul, the city announced Monday, including widening the station's platforms, expanding concourses and entrances, upgrading pedestrian passageways and, commuters will be happy to know, dealing with the building's infamous ventilation issues.

The fourth busiest Amtrak hub in the country, Union Station handles nearly 3.3 million Amtrak riders a year, plus an additional 130,000 Metra commuters a day--a capacity the Daniel Burnham-designed structure just wasn't built to handle. Maintaining the Amtrak-owned station's historic character while upgrading the facility to meet its current demands is a top priority, according to the city.

“This work is essential to developing plans to address critical pedestrian flow and ventilation issues at Union Station, but we still have much work to do,” Metra Chairman Martin Oberman said in a press release. “We will need to work together to identify the funding to undertake this major public improvement in order to advance this work. I look forward to continuing to work with all of our partners to secure that funding so that we can transform this historic building into a modern facility.”

While a final pricetag for the project hasn't been released, Oberman told the Sun-Times he'd put the figure somewhere near "several hundred million dollars." Phase 1 of the renovation is estimated to last 18 months.