Until now, diners could smoke in designated areas if four feet of space or a six-foot partition separated smoking and nonsmoking sections.
The office was divided by grey, seven-foot-high partitions that made up the individual offices.
Ceilings throughout the building have been restored to their original height of 18 feet, and partitions have been removed in the part of the building that will be leased, where supporting columns are 24 feet apart in one direction and 48 feet in another.
To make professional basketball's inspirational story lines all the more evident, the league this year decided to turn the greenroom for the top fourteen prospective draftees into more of a holding pen, putting the players down near the stage, visible to all, and separated from the live audience by only a three-foot-tall bunting partition.
A free-standing partition 15 feet long, it comes in 1- to 8-foot-tall modules in a choice of kraft paper, a polyethylene fiber or a tissue paper.
It seemed like a studio of about 250 square feet, but with a partition.
Thirty-five feet away, at another partition, a maniac called Brand was in what looked like flirtatious conversation with a tall toothy red-headed woman.
"There are so many things," Rizwan Raja, a Pakistani driver, said, rattling off a list of his pet peeves: putting one's feet up on the partition, smoking, crossing the street lackadaisically.
It has about sixty bunk beds, separated from one another by a few feet, without any partitions.
The column-free studios, ranging from 1,200 to 6,200 square feet, can be partitioned or expanded, depending on space requirements, and can be rented for a day or however many days are required to shoot the commercials or photograph the ads.
If Chicago's mayoral candidates had made it to the sprightly U.I.C. Forum last week, they would have found simple insights for the future amid the 36-foot-tall moveable partitions that hang from 124-foot trusses on the otherwise bleak concrete campus.
