Clark Adams Building

The Clark Adams Building is an Art-deco skyscraper designed by Burnham Brothers, and built between 1926 and 1927 in Chicago, IL.

Clark Adams Building is not the only name you might know this building by though. The building is, or has also been known as Bankers Building.

Its precise street address is 105 West Adams Street, Chicago, IL. You can also find it on the map here.

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 2006 and 2011.

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

The Clark Adams Building can be categorized as an Art-deco building.

The Clark Adams Building was completed in 1927, right when the Art Deco movement was at its peak, so it kind of went with the trend at that time.

The Clark Adams 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 stone base that spans the first 5 floors. From there on, the facade combines bricks of two different tones to achieve its distinctive design.