Huntington Towers (Champaign, Illinois)

 tower, office building

Huntington Towers, a mixed-use office building near the Urbana/Champaign border, is a minor landmark in Champaign -- at 12 stories, it's one of the taller buildings in town, exceeded only by a few high-rise dormitories of the nearby University of Illinois.

Called "a strange, round, pink building" in a 1989 article in "The Scientist", the building actually has 12 sides, as if it were a giant Easter Island sculpture of an early Cray supercomputer. Walking the circular hallway inside feels like being on the Starship Enterprise. The Huntington Towers has been the home of Wolfram Research (creators of Mathamatica) and of subLOGIC (creators of Flight Simulator, now sold by Microsoft).

In the mid-1980s the building became even taller with the addition of a microwave communications tower on the roof. Once the metal frame was assembled, the three microwave antennae were trucked to the top of the building's adjacent parking garage, and a helicopter was used to lift each dish into place. Those of us who watched the event will never forget how the helicopter lifted the third microwave dish to its full height, only to have it accidentally slip from the lifting hook, and flutter to the ground like a ten-foot-diameter autumn leaf, crushing the rear half of a small car on impact. (The car was occupied and moving at the time, but the driver escaped unharmed.)
The microwave dishes were removed in August 2007.

The 1986 "Hands Across America" human chain passed through Champaign along Springfield Avenue, directly in front of the building.

Despite the plural name ("towers"), there is only one tower.

Huntington Towers
201 West Springfield Avenue
Champaign, Illinois 61820

Wolfram: www.stephenwolfram.com/interviews/89-scientist
subLOGIC: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SubLOGIC