“Tom the Skyscraper Guy” Uses Social Media to Create Interest in Adaptive Reuse of Tall Buildings

As cities across the nation grapple with hovering workplace vacancies of their city cores, one developer in Chicago is utilizing social media to drive curiosity in his plan to transform workplace area into flats in an almost 100-year-old constructing thought-about an architectural gem that has fallen on arduous occasions.

The Pittsfield Constructing has develop into a viral sensation, because of social media posts seen by thousands and thousands of individuals all over the world documenting plans to revive the 38-story tower, whose authentic design combines Artwork Deco and Gothic particulars and provides sweeping views of Lake Michigan, Millennium Park and the Loop.

That surge in curiosity within the largely vacant constructing is credited to Tom Liravongsa, a developer who bought flooring 1-12 and 22-28 within the constructing for $7.5 million in 2023 in a foreclosures public sale. He plans to transform it from workplace area into 224 residential flats with trendy facilities, whereas sustaining the constructing’s authentic parts—a gray terracotta exterior, coffer ceilings, brass elevator doorways and lighting fixtures, a copper roof, white marble columns, wrought iron railings and wooden paneling.

Since he began posting updates concerning the constructing in April, Liravongsa, 42, who calls himself “The Skyscraper Man” on TikTok and Instagram, the movies have garnered about 80 million views and attracting tons of of hundreds of followers.

Liravongsa jokes that he purchased a skyscraper and now has to elucidate it to his spouse, in movies highlighting varied options of the Graham, Anderson, Probst & White-designed constructing. The social media following has allowed him to construct lists of individuals enthusiastic about ultimately renting an condominium and of contractors and distributors from as distant as Germany that need to be concerned within the renovation course of.

One TikTok publish that racked up 8 million views reveals Liravongsa dropping a chunk of mail down an ornately detailed brass mail chute and explaining why chutes have been later banned for hearth security causes. In one other video on Instagram, the place Liravongsa has accrued 381,000 followers, he factors out a number of the building’s random intriguing features, together with a speakeasy from the Prohibition Period and a hidden room that’s not on the unique blueprints. In one other, he describes options within the basement that he says “low-key scare me” together with a coal chute, a catwalk, and the underside of a smokestack that extends 40 tales to the rooftop.

 “We’re discovering that folks need to get pleasure from these older buildings,” Liravongsa says. “We are saying, ‘Right here’s a landmark which you can go in [via social media]. It’s energetic. You may expertise it.’”

Tom Liravongsa reveals off an ornate mild fixture within the five-story atrium of The Pittsfield Constructing.
Picture courtesy of Tom Liravongsa

Liravongsa, who’s managing director of Grand Rapids, Mich.-based actual property funding and asset administration agency L’Cre Global, says the posts additionally present “what individuals did [in construction and design] 100 years in the past and the way it’s nonetheless lasting. This craftsmanship is difficult to copy nowadays. It’s not which you can’t do it, however plenty of that talent set has dissipated.”

Liravongsa is working with the Chicago-based architectural agency Papageorge Haymes Partners on adapting the constructing, which already homes 228 condominium models on eight flooring owned by Chicago-based Marc Realty.

Jen Masengarb, govt director of AIA Chicago, says the Pittsfield Constructing, named a Chicago Landmark in 2002, is effectively suited to a residential conversion due to its slender tower flooring plates and lightweight wells that enable pure mild into the constructing.

“However, as with every constructing nearing 100 years previous, the actual challenges— past the financing—lie within the modernization of the constructing’s techniques and envelope,” Masengarb says.  

Liravongsa says the constructing has 15 to 16 elevator shafts with area to accommodate MEP techniques.

“The fantastic thing about these older buildings is that you’ve got so many extra elevators than trendy buildings,” he says. “You should use these shafts to your techniques and that alleviates plenty of issues. We have now enormous shafts which you can run techniques by means of with out having to drill by means of the flooring.”

The street to revitalizing the Pittsfield constructing has not been straightforward. A earlier proprietor, Morgan Reed filed for Chapter 11 chapter in 2017, which prompted Chinese language-Canadian enterprise proprietor Xia Hua “Edward” Gong to buy the constructing throughout a chapter public sale. Gong’s portion of the constructing deteriorated after the Ontario Securities Fee charged him in December 2017 with felony securities fraud in Canada. A settlement was reached in that case, however a foreclosures lawsuit was filed in 2022 with Liravongsa buying Gong’s flooring within the constructing in 2023. Though Gong then sued over the foreclosures sale, that lawsuit was dropped.

“It’s all been cleared. They settled that. That’s why we’ve been off to the races,” Liravongsa says.

Liravongsa declined to supply specifics of different developments that his firm has dealt with aside from a 1871-era boutique constructing in Grand Rapids, and different early-stage tasks in Miami and Austin, Texas.

Masengarb praises Liravongsa’s efforts to unfold the phrase concerning the charms of the Pittsfield constructing, which she says are creating curiosity in adaptive reuse of older tall buildings.

“The place engineers and designers watching his movies would possibly see only a mundane century-old air plenum, for instance, Tom’s dramatic storytelling abilities brings the general public alongside to find these ghostly and seemingly forgotten mechanical areas,” she says.

“I feel it’s a really intelligent strategy,” provides Kendra Parzen, advocacy supervisor for Landmarks Illinois. “Residential is what we’d like and it makes absolute sense to adapt the Pittsfield constructing for residential use.”

Liravongsa says utilizing social media to create curiosity in a challenge is uncommon for a developer.

“I’d say builders really by no means get on social media, and so they’d cringe on the thought of posting a narrative,” he says. “They simply would. Even I do generally. However I’ve spent a lot time on this constructing that I feel it’s not proper to maintain it to myself after which say ‘It is a cool constructing. Tenants, come and stay right here.'”

Liravongsa says social media can be serving to him mould the constructing into what the market needs and guaranteeing it thrives down the street. 

“As builders, we have now a imaginative and prescient, and we’re delivering buildings for a future that’s three to 5 years [or longer] out, so, as a developer, you actually should create the long run,” he says.