Carbide & Carbon Building

The Carbide & Carbon Building is an Art-deco skyscraper designed by Burnham Brothers, and built between 1928 and 1929, for a reported $4.75 million dollars, in Chicago, IL.

Carbide & Carbon Building is not the only name you might know this building by though. It is common for companies to want to attach their names to iconic buildings when they move in, or for the general public to come up with nicknames, and this one is no exception. The building has changed names several times over the years, and is also known as:

• Hard Rock Hotel Chicago between 2004 and 2017.
• St. Jane Chicago Hotel between 2018 and 2020.
• Pendry Chicago Hotel from 2021 until this day.

Its precise street address is 230 Michigan Ave, Chicago, IL. You can also find it on the map here.

The Carbide & Carbon Building is a structure of significant importance both for the city of Chicago and the United States as a nation. The building embodies the distinctive characteristic features of the time in which it was built and the Art Deco style. Because of that, the Carbide & Carbon Building was officially declared as a national landmark on May 9^th 1996.

Black buildings were not common at all before Mies and the International Style made them popular in the 1950's. So the Burhman brothers deciding to make the Carbide & Carbon Building black, and top it with gold, was definitely a statement and a guarantee that rebuilding would stand out from the light limestone facades that most buildings had at that time.

In this particular case the building was supposed to evoke "luxury", and it is said that the Burhman brothers got inspired by the bottle one of the drinks with more caché there is: champagne. Champagne bottles are usually made in dark glass and are topped with a golden metal wrap. So by following this same structure and color palette the architects attempted to give the building a certain luxury feel.

The building underwent a major restoration between 2001 and 2004. The architect commissioned to undertake this restoration was Lucien Lagrange & Associates.

Burnham Brothers was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design.

But that's not all, there was also a whole team of architects involved, which included: Daniel Burnham, Hubert Burnham, and Daniel Burnham Jr..

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 at the very least we know that there was one other part involved, that was Charles Harkins in charge of Structural Engineering.

The Carbide & Carbon Building can be categorized as an Art-deco building.

The Carbide & Carbon Building was completed in 1929, right when the Art Deco movement was at its peak, so it kind of went with the trend at that time.

The Carbide & Carbon Building uses a frame structure made of steel 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 is a non-load bearing masonry facade. This type of facade became common during the period when buildings, especially taller ones, transitioned from load-bearing wall systems to frame structures.

Frame structures allowed facades to be independent from the building's frame, enabling the use of lighter materials and larger openings. However, it took some time for architects to incorporate these new posibilities into their designs, and so for a while they simply replicated the look and feel fo buildings people where used to seeing.

From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features black polished granite on the lower floors and dark green terracotta from there on.

Another material found at the Carbide & Carbon Building is 24 karat gold leaf, used for the top of the building features.