Civic Opera House

The Civic Opera House is an Art-deco skyscraper designed by Graham, Anderson, Probst & White, and built between 1927 and 1929, for a reported $23.4 million dollars, in Chicago, IL.

Civic Opera House 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 Civic Opera House is also known, or has been known as, Civic Opera Building, or Kemper Insurance Group Building.

Its precise street address is 20 North Wacker Drive, Chicago, IL. You can also find it on the map here.

The Civic Opera House 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 Civic Opera House was officially declared as a national landmark on February 5^th 1998.

The Civic Opera House has received multiple architecture awards for its architectural design since 1929. The following is a list of such prizes and awards:

• Citation of Merit in the Distinguished Building Award category by the AIA Chicago in 1997
• Crombie Taylor Award for Preservation and Restoration by the Illinois Chapter of the AIA in 2011

The building has been restored 2 times over the years to ensure its conservation and adaptation to the pass of time. The main restoration works happened in 1996 and 2013.

Graham, Anderson, Probst & White 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 here is a list of the people we do know also played their part in making the Civic Opera House a reality:

• Samuel Insull as the Main Developer
• Henry Hering, Jules Guerin as the collaborating Artist

The Civic Opera House can be categorized as an Art-deco building.

The Civic Opera House 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 Civic Opera House uses a frame structure made of steel columns and 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 an Indiana limestone-clad with cutout windows. The spandrels are adorned with vertical patterns carved into the limestone.

Access is through a two-story portico adorned with carved limestone and a monumental pedestrian colonnade. At the southern end, imposing bronze doors lead into the grand foyer of the Lyric Opera House. The facade facing the Chicago River, west side, shaped like a massive armchair, houses the 12 floors occupied by the opera.