900 North Michigan Building

The 900 North Michigan Building is a Postmodernist skyscraper designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates, in association with Perkins+Will, and built between 1987 and 1989 in Chicago, IL.

900 North Michigan Building is not the only name you might know this building by though. The building is, or has also been known as Bloomingdale's Building.

Its precise street address is 900 N Michigan Avenue, Chicago, IL. You can also find it on the map here.

This mixed-used building is in many ways inspired by the success of its neighbor, the Water Place Tower, located just one block south on Michigan Avenue

Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design, in association with Perkins+Will.

That being said, architecture is a complex discipline involving many professionals from different fields, without whom this building would have not been possible. We will surely be leaving out a lot of names here, but here is a list of the people we do know also played their part in making the 900 North Michigan Building a reality:

• Alfred Benesch & Company in charge of Structural Engineering
• J.A. Jones Construction as the Main Contractor
• Urban Retail Properties as the Main Developer

The 900 North Michigan Building can be categorized as a Postmodernist building.

The 900 North Michigan Building was completed in 1989. At that time Postmodernism was the prevailing style. Fresh, bold and daring, architects were exploring the freedom of designing without having to follow the strict, sometimes arbitrary rules of a specific architectural movement (which ironically became a movement itself). The 900 North Michigan Building was therefore every much in line with what the architecture community, and the people liked and wanted at the time.

The 900 North Michigan Building uses a frame structure made of steel and concrete columns and reinforced concrete slabs.

A frame structure uses a combination of beams and columns to sustain the building's weight. The walls in this case are non-load bearing, which allows for more flexibility when distributing the interior spaces.

The facade of the building however, is load bearing. This doesn't imply that it is a traditional load-bearing wall. Rather, it means that the structure's exterior pillars have been pushed to the very edges, becoming integrated with the facade, and therefore, technically, a part of it.

The building's structure combines a reinforced concrete frame with a pure steel frame for the top part of the building after the last volumetric setback that can be appreciated from the outside.

From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features light-colored limestone and green-tinted glass. Most of the facade is organized in vertical bays, emphasizing the verticality of the building.

From a volumetric point of view the building features several setbacks, and is crowned by four towers with 4-sided pyramidal roofs.