Chicago Motor Club Building

The Chicago Motor Club Building is an Art-deco skyscraper designed by Holabird & Root, and built in 1929 in Chicago, IL.

Chicago Motor Club 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:

• 68 East Wacker Place.
• AAA Building.
• Hampton Inn Chicago Downtown/N Loop/Michigan Ave from 2017 until this day.

Its precise street address is 66 E. South Water street (68 E. Wacker Place), Chicago, IL. You can also find it on the map here.

The Chicago Motor Club 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 Chicago Motor Club Building was officially declared as a national landmark on March 1^st 2012.

The building underwent a major restoration between 2015 and 2017. The architect commissioned to undertake this restoration was Murphy Asset Management, and a team of designers.

Holabird & Root was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design.

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 Henry Ericsson and Co. as the Main Contractor.

The Chicago Motor Club Building can be categorized as an Art-deco building.

The Chicago Motor Club 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 Chicago Motor Club Building uses a frame structure made of steel columns and 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 a light colored limestone cladding.