Completion 13: Glen Town Center
Cost: $150 million

The Glen Town Center in Glenview, Ill., is a 48-acre redevelopment of the former Glenview Naval Air Station, a 1,200-acre U.S. Navy airfield from the 1930s to the 1990s.

The project brought about 13 restaurants, 50 stores, 155 townhouses, apartments and parking. The major elements included a 150,000-sq.-ft. Von Maur department store, 80,000-sq.-ft. Galyan's sporting goods store, 10-screen movie theater and two mixed-use buildings.

In total 2,533 public parking spaces will be located in the Glen, in garages and elsewhere throughout the development.

Diverse Design Style

Diversity was the goal in the choice of architectural styles and construction materials used in the retail center.

This includes wood construction, steel, precast concrete and cast-in-place concrete.
The finished product was intended to remind visitors of downtown areas of old Chicago suburbs and possesses a pedestrian feel.

Design features include gable roofs, abundant masonry and a variety of window shapes, sizes and colors. It also meant putting parking lots behind buildings and avoiding setbacks to give streets a lively pedestrian orientation.

Logistics was a major issue because of the need to keep hundreds of workers functioning efficiently in a constrained area overrun with trucks and sites.

More than 1,200 workers onsite had to be managed, as well as trucks and deliveries, and still be able to give the general contractors proper access to their individual sites.
Planning was essential because of the project complexity.

The mixed-use buildings, for instance, incorporate basement parking, ground-floor retail and second- and third-story apartments. These had to be designed and built to allow for the future requirements of ground-floor commercial tenants.

That included installing 64 rated shafts from the first floor through the roof to serve as the means for future tenant improvements.

Von Maur and Galyan's had their own program requirements, meaning the retailers not only designed how their interior space looked but how the buildings themselves looked.

Not all the buildings are new.

One structure, an aircraft hangar, is the oldest on the site, having been built before the U.S. Navy acquired the property. The structure, a centerpiece of the Glen, will house a bookstore, cosmetics shop and other stores.

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