“The original intention was to make it exactly as it was 100 years ago,” Rades adds. The company hired architects Holabird & Root, the successor firm of the original designers, to recreate exterior and interior elements while renovating tenant spaces and infrastructure.

The team quickly found that, like many historic buildings in the CBD, the Monroe had undergone misguided renovations in the 1950s and 1960s which covered up its artistic flourishes with drywall and drop ceilings. “The building started dying then,” Rades says, and reviving it required what he calls “an archeological dig. We were literally digging out behind slabs of marble and drywall.”

In the end, an exact restoration was not possible since over the years many pieces were torn out, and furthermore, the needs of office users has changed dramatically in the last century. Many users back then occupied only 500-square-feet, and Pritzker wanted to offer new tenants the chance to occupy full floors.

However, the firm was able to fully restore one of the floors with original pieces, and Rades says someone stepping off the elevator there will enter a space that looks just as it did 100 years ago. “On the other floors we gave a nod to that history.”

The Monroe needed more than an interior makeover. “It did not have modern mechanical systems,” Rades explains. The staircases were not up to code, it did not have modern restrooms and much like other century-old office buildings, the women's restrooms were all afterthoughts.

But starting in 2007 or 2008, Holabird & Root began filling in an obsolete lightcourt, adding space for tenants, utilities and amenities. This project added about 20,000-square-feet to the tower, essentially adding a “new high-rise building inside an existing high-rise building.”

The firm finished in 2012, and Rades says the Monroe now has all the features of a modern business environment, including a full-service data center, fitness center, and bicycle storage and conference facilities. The Pritzker Military Museum & Library occupies about 40,000-square-feet and a new set of tenants, including architects, a law firm, and publishers, replaced many of the medical offices that used to occupy the spaces.

Rades does not expect Pritzker to put the building up for sale. He calls her a dedicated preservationist who launched the project due to a love of architecture. “It's a long-term hold.”