The 20-foot-tall letters spelling “T-R-U-M-P” on the city’s second-tallest building prompted Chicago aldermen four years ago to regulate the installation of large signs on office buildings.

Now, Mayor Rahm Emanuel wants to tweak that ordinance to help secure a huge expansion by software firm Salesforce in a new riverfront skyscraper.

The city’s Department of Planning and Development [...] unveiled a plan that would allow larger signs on office towers, depending on how high signs are placed. — Chicago Tribune

Between 2007 and 2013, Fotiadis designed all or part of six Trump-branded developments: a Trump Tower in Kazakhstan; a Trump-branded seaside resort in the republic of Georgia; a 47-story Trump Tower in Tbilisi, Georgia; hotel rooms at the Trump Tower in Istanbul; a Trump movie studio complex in Florida; and major portions of the Trump Parc Stamford, a condominium tower in Connecticut. — CNBC

Architecture, we forget at our peril, is inherently violent. It invariably subtracts from the range of available possibilities, especially the perennially attractive option of building nothing at all. In this sense, construction sites are crime scenes.

—Herbert Muschamp, NY Times — Numéro Cinq

New World Design Ltd. has shared a hypothetical proposal that would partially obscure the view of the infamous Trump Tower Chicago sign with four giant, gold-colored balloon pigs. [...]

the pigs would be tethered to buoys in the Chicago River and provide “visual relief to the citizens of Chicago,” many of whom are presumably tired of seeing Trump’s name everywhere. — consequenceofsound.net

The Republican who would be president has been accused of exaggerating his own height by an inch. To suggestions that he has abnormally short fingers, he has responded by boasting, during a presidential debate, about other parts of his anatomy.

He has tried and failed to develop the world’s tallest building at least three times. And when he wants his buildings to seem bigger than they actually are, he enlarges them...with sheer bluster. — the New York Times

Over the years, Trump has courted me, comforted me, criticized me and sent me a handful of sometimes-fawning letters and notes. I saved the correspondence. Wouldn't you? [...]

And the missives are telling. Combined with other things he's said and written, they show that Candidate Trump isn't all that different from Developer Trump. He remains a master media manipulator who can be charming, mercurial and vengeful. Only now he wants to be the most powerful man on earth. — Blair Kamin – Chicago Tribune

By living above 800 feet, Estis and Enkin are two members of an unexpectedly exclusive group in Manhattan. In my estimation, no more than 40 people currently live above that line, scattered among just three buildings...

As my elevator descended and my ears popped, it occurred to me that I would almost certainly never take in such a view again. And in fact, maybe nobody will, if these apartments wind up becoming empty investments. — The New York Times

“Trump ... believes in using expensive materials that convey prestige and wealth, and people buy into that,” said Jerold Kayden, professor of urban planning and design at Harvard University. He said in some ways the legacy of Trump buildings is a matter of taste. “To some they are the height of ambition and the height of prestige and to others they are gaudy, but he has certainly pioneered with some others architecture as brand.” — marketplace.org

Adorned with gold and marble, [the Trump Tower] looks like Saddam Hussein went on a shopping spree with Liberace.

To make way for its construction, Mr Trump demolished the handsome Art Deco Bonwit Teller department store. He promised to donate its bas-relief carvings to the Metropolitan Museum of Art but it turned out they were too expensive to remove so they were smashed to pieces on site instead. — Financial Times

Watching two grown men in a social media hissy fit over a building sign is actually a lot more amusing than one might think.

In this corner, Donald Trump, rich guy, who, in the view of one esteemed newspaper critic, has defiled our fine city by slapping his name on the side of his silvery, shiny building.

In the other corner, Blair Kamin, decorated architecture critic for the Chicago Tribune and defender of building aesthetics. — chicago.cbslocal.com

On Thursday, Mayor Rahm Emanuel belatedly jumped into the fray after a public campaign against the sign on Chicago's second-tallest building spearheaded by the Chicago Tribune’s Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic Blair Kamin.

“Mayor Emanuel believes this is an architecturally tasteful building scarred by an architecturally tasteless sign,” Kelley Quinn, the mayor’s newly-appointed communications director, said in an emailed statement. — politics.suntimes.com