While ENR Midwest’s 2021 Best Projects run the normal gamut of project type categories from airports and transit to water and environment, a frequent theme in 2020 was contractors, owners and designers coming to together to create adaptive reuses of existing buildings and infrastructure.
ENR Midwest’s Project of the Year was the redevelopment of the historic 1916 Old Cook County Hospital into two Hyatt hotels. The other inventive reuses include turning the original Marshall Field’s flagship store in Chicago into offices, transforming a former Kmart in Waukegan, Ill., into a Cristo Rey College Prep school, converting a former Home Depot into a health care provider’s office and community center and renovating a former recycling center in Muscatine, Iowa, into a facility that turns expired food and other organic waste into fuel used to run a water treatment plant.