Hilton Chicago

Documenting a building like Hilton Chicago means balancing scale, logistics, and history.

Working in coordination with on-site hotel management, Pointknown surveyed interior spaces across the property during the winter slow season, when selected floors could be temporarily taken offline to support fieldwork with minimal disruption to operations. The scope included detailed documentation of guest room interiors, corridors, and back-of-house conditions, along with electrical devices, communications ports, outlets, switches, and visible fire protection elements throughout each room.

Originally opened in 1927 as the Stevens Hotel, Hilton Chicago was once the largest hotel in the world, occupying an entire city block on Michigan Avenue with 3,000 guest rooms. That kind of scale matters when planning renovations, phased upgrades, or systems coordination — and it is exactly where accurate existing conditions become essential.

For a property with this much architectural and operational complexity, the goal was simple: create a reliable digital baseline so ownership, consultants, and design teams could move forward with confidence. Before today’s lighter, faster capture tools were available, projects like this required disciplined field planning, careful coordination, and a lot of groundwork. Old school, but effective.

And every once in a while, jobs like this came with a little Chicago magic. One evening after wrapping up for the day, we were heading out to dinner, stepped toward the crosswalk, and saw Buddy Guy come out of his club across the street with a guitar in hand, take a look around, and head back inside. We tried to follow. Private party. End of story.