Century Tower

The Century Tower is an Art-deco skyscraper designed by Thielbar & Fugard, and built between 1929 and 1930 in Chicago, IL.

Century Tower 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 Century Tower is also known, or has been known as, Trustees System Service Building, Corn Products Building, Skyline Century of Progress, The Lake and Wells Building, or The 201 Towers.

Its precise street address is 182 West Lake Street, Chicago, IL. You can also find it on the map here.

The Century Tower 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 Century Tower was officially declared as a national landmark on January 9^th 2003.

The building underwent a major restoration in 2005.

Thielbar & Fugard was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design.

The Century Tower can be categorized as an Art-deco building.

The Century Tower was completed in 1930, right when the Art Deco movement was at its peak, so it kind of went with the trend at that time.

The Century Tower uses a frame structure made of reinforced-concrete columns and beams.

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.