Blue Demons’ New Home Being Built With Blue Steel

McCormick Place Event Center and Hotel expansion (Courtesy of Joe Zekas/YoChicago!)

The expansion of the McCormick Place convention center to include a new flagship hotel and arena continues to transform the South Loop south of the Prairie Avenue District.

While the Pelli Clarke Pelli-designed Event Center remains officially a multi-purpose facility that will be able to host smaller conventions that would normally skip Chicago, it will also be home to the DePaul University Blue Demons basketball team. And appropriately, when the crowd “raises the roof” (do people still do that?) the roof in question will be blue.

Or at least it’s blue right now, as seen in these photos taken by Joe Zekas of YoChicago!. You can see the trusses that span the arena and keep the roof from becoming the floor are, indeed, blue.

Will they remain blue after the construction? We checked with DePaul, and the answer is a resounding Yep.  Though not visible from the outside of the building, Bob Janis, the Vice President of Facility Operations says the blue will be visible from inside.

from Chicago Architecture http://www.chicagoarchitecture.org/2016/08/24/blue-demons-new-home-being-built-with-blue-steel/