Quote:
Originally Posted by Baronvonellis
It's interesting that the Aon Center is also the 4rd largest office building by floor area in the world just behind the Mart. 3 of the top 4 largest office building by floor area in the world are in Chicago. I wonder why Chicago built all these mega huge single office buildings? It seems like it would be very difficult to fill up that much space when they were built. I'm still curious to see how the Post Office will fill up, although I hope it does since it's an awesome building, and is looking good already with the renovation.
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Most of these record-setting buildings were built for industries where Chicago absolutely dominated. Take the OPO for example. Chicago was the king of logistics just before the industry got mechanized. The OPO wasn't an office building, it was a mail sorting facility, and not just for Chicago but for the whole US since long-distance mail flowed by rail at the time. (In most cities you will find the grand old post office next to the train station).
The architects planned for mail volume to grow in the future (which did continue to grow steadily until 2001) but they did not foresee how the USPS would virtually abandon rail and switch to trucking, nor did they foresee the mechanization that would allow more mail to be sorted in less space with fewer workers.
Today there is
A) less mail flowing through Chicago, since the interstate system does not bottleneck at Chicago like the railroads did
B) less mail flowing through Chicago, since the USPS is back down to 1980 levels of mail volume and sinking fast
C) the mail handling that does take place is mostly in the suburbs, where USPS has large facilities close to interstate highways.