Chicago's two decks stage the clearest argument in American sightseeing: height against composition. Skydeck is 300 feet higher and lets you stand on glass over the street. 360 Chicago stands north of the river, which means the skyline is in front of you instead of underneath you, with the lake beside it. Ask locals and they'll mostly tell you the view here is better and the thrill there is better.
What nobody tells you is that in 2026 you're walking into a building site.
What's actually happening up there right now
Two things, and both affect your visit.
The glass is being replaced. Over two hundred windows on the 94th and 95th floors — each five feet by eight, about 350 pounds, roughly an hour a pane — swapping the tower's original 1960s glazing for double-pane low-iron. That matters because *dirty windows* is the single most durable complaint this deck has, running consistently through a decade of reviews, and worse on the inland faces away from the lake. The replacement is the answer to it. Depending on when you go and which way you turn, you may get the new glass, the old glass, or a work platform.
And the two floors above you are gone. The Signature Room on the 95th and the Signature Lounge on the 96th shut permanently on 28 September 2023 — abruptly enough that a wedding booked for that weekend lost its venue. The observatory's own parent company bought both floors in June 2024, hired SOM (the tower's original architects, back after sixty years), and is building a two-storey observation deck plus a 14,000 sq ft event space joined by a three-storey atrium and a bespoke staircase. Opening slipped from 2026 to about mid-2027. No restaurant is coming back.
The workaround that died, and the advice that hasn't caught up
For thirty years the Chicago move was: don't buy the observatory ticket. Ride to the 96th floor, buy a cocktail in the Signature Lounge, and get a *higher* view for *less* money. It was in guidebooks. Lonely Planet's own entry told readers to do exactly that.
It's dead, and an enormous amount of surviving advice still recommends it. CloudBar on the 94th is the successor — eighteen seats, cocktails themed on Chicago's 77 neighbourhoods, no reservation, no dress code, no minimum spend — but it sits inside the paid deck. You need a ticket to reach the bar. That's the whole difference, and it's the thing most guides get wrong about Chicago right now.
TILT, and the one time not to do it
TILT is a patented amusement ride — genuinely: US design patent D741977, invented by two structural engineers at Thornton Tomasetti, the firm that both conceived and engineered it. Eight people stand against triple-laminated glass in a 26-foot enclosure while three overhead hydraulic actuators push the whole assembly out past the face of the building, in stages: nineteen degrees, then twenty-five, then thirty. About seventy-five seconds of movement inside a two-minute experience.
Here's the part that decides whether it's worth $14–18: **TILT faces south and west.** In daylight that's Michigan Avenue and the Loop, and it's terrific. After dark it's low-rise rooftops and a black gap — one reviewer described being tilted to look at a dark roof. The lit skyline you paid to see is behind you.
Do it in daylight, then walk to the north side for the evening.
The building exists because a private club said no
This site was meant to hold two towers. The Casino Club, a private members' club immediately east, refused to sell its lot. Bruce Graham concluded the shrunken site couldn't carry two buildings, and the numbers said a single tapered tower was cheaper anyway.
So Fazlur Rahman Khan gave it the trussed tube — those enormous X-braces are not decoration, they're the structure, which is what let SOM delete the internal columns and build the world's first mixed-use skyscraper. It tapers for a practical reason too: floor plates shrink as you rise because shops need more depth than flats do.
One more thing, since the deck advertises its lift speed. In November 2018 an express elevator in this building fell from the 95th floor after two hoist cables snapped, with six people aboard including a pregnant woman. It stopped near the eleventh. Because the shaft is blind for most of that run, the fire service had to break through a masonry wall from an adjoining car park to reach them. They were trapped almost three hours. Everyone lived.
