“Some Chicago preservationists seem to embrace the notion that if Louis Sullivan didn’t design a building, it probably isn’t worth fighting for.” Paul Gapp, who was the Chicago Tribune’s architecture critic, wrote these words in December 1985, lamenting the demolition of Chicago’s historic passenger train terminals, and a laundry list of other changes to the area surrounding Union Station that would eventually lead to the maximization of the West Loop.

Thirty-four years later, those words are echoing off the tomato soup red and robin egg blue panels of the James R. Thompson Center. Chicagoans know it well from the decades of trash talk about the futuristic building. It’s unsightly. It’s inefficient. It’s a waste of space.

While some of the sentiments against saving the Thompson Center mirror the criticism heard about other threatened (and demolished) Chicago architecture, the specific value-driven vitriol has a direct relationship to the Thompson Center as a building belonging to the people of Illinois and spatially, to Chicago.

Designed in 1985 by Helmut Jahn to be optimistic about government, the Thompson Center has aged to become the opposite. Jahn’s own handwritten note in March berating Chicago’s selection of Studio Gang as the chosen designer of the O’Hare International Airport expansion as “not justified by design or experience” spoke to the type of pessimism that now permeates the walls of the building he designed to be open and transparent in its ideals. The fix is in.

But what if we chose to reverse that narrative by making a case for saving the Thompson Center based on how its public utilization has reflected its architectural credo?

Since the structure opened in 1985, community activists have taken to what is unquestionably one of Chicago’s great indoor spaces, the ascendant atrium, to exercise their freedom of speech and their right to peacefully assemble, a cornerstone of democracy.

In 1986, nearly 1,000 people filed into the Thompson Center (then the State of Illinois Building) in support of ending apartheid in South Africa. In 1988, young people in Chicago gathered in front of Jean Dubuffet’s Monument With Standing Beast (affectionately known to many as “Snoopy in a Blender”) to protest then-Gov. James Thompson’s cuts to the state’s summer employment budget.

Protests were held in the building during the Gulf War, in objection to the McCormick Place expansion plan in 1991, and to expand the rights of parents who adopt children in 1994. In 1996, Latinos gathered at the Thompson Center to call attention to the racist portrayal of immigrants in a campaign commercial for President Bill Clinton, then seeking reelection. In 2000, anti-poverty activists mounted a protest rally against Cook County’s denial of access to Medicaid for low-income families. Protests against the Iraq War were staged in 2002.

All of this First Amendment activity occurring within a building that physically represented patriotism through its architectural abstraction and color palette, a pared-down classical dome with exposed bones rendered in the muted hues of the American flag.

Through its history as a place of dissent against the unjust acts of our government, the Thompson Center has remained optimistic against insurmountable odds, both from those who want to attack its design and functionality and constituents who believe that every action of our government is a swindle. Accepting these ideas and using them to bring a case against saving the Thompson Center is accepting that there is no way to win against the machine — whether you are talking Chicago, the state of Illinois or the United States.

After decades of neglect, the state finally voted to sell the Thompson Center, making demolition a genuine and timely threat. While negotiations between the state and the city are required to address zoning changes and the responsibility of the building’s future owner to maintain the CTA station, these hurdles could still lead to selective demolition of key components, including the atrium.

Mayor Lori Lightfoot has stated that she would welcome dialogue with Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s administration to devise a plan for the building’s future, yet the city remains silent on landmarking or reuse. These seemingly insurmountable odds don’t make it easy to consider how a history of protest can be celebrated as a reason why the Thompson Center is important, or how that history would be represented once the building leaves public hands. But they are worth considering as a part of the zeitgeist.

Architecture critic Gapp got it right in 1985. We can save the meaning we’ve assigned to our built environment through its use. Louis Sullivan himself once said, “Once you learn to look at architecture not merely as an art but as a social manifestation, the critical eye becomes clairvoyant.”

Elizabeth Blasius is a Chicago-based architectural historian.