Fisher Building

The Fisher Building is a Neogothic skyscraper designed by D. H. Burnham & Company, and built between 1927 and 1896 in Chicago, IL.

Its precise street address is 3011 W. Grand Blvd., Chicago, IL. You can also find it on the map here.

The Fisher 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 Neogothic style. Because of that, the Fisher Building was officially declared as a national landmark in 1980, and was included in the National Register of Historic Places on June 29^th 1989.

At the time of its completion in 1896 the Fisher Building incorporated solutions that were quite advanced at the time, these included an underground passage that connected de Fishre Buiding with the Cadillac Place located across the street .

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 2015 and 2023.

D. H. Burnham & Company was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design. But there was also one other architect involved, as far as we know. We are talking about Joseph Nathaniel.

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 Fisher Building a reality:

• Edward C. Shankland in charge of Structural Engineering
• Fisher Family as the Main Developer
• Géza Maróti, Corrado Parducci, Anthony De Lorenzo and Ulysses Ricci as the collaborating Artist

The Fisher Building can be categorized as a Neogothic building.

The Fisher Building was completed in 1896. These were the late days of the Neogothic movement, which had been around for almost 200 years at the time.

Art-deco would soon take over US architecture, and therefore, even though D. H. Burnham & Company didn't venture into what was cutting edge in terms of style at the time, and took instead a more conservative approach to the design of the Fisher Building, it is possible that the design already started showing some traits that would later become characteristic of the art-deco movement.

The Fisher 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 Minnesota pink marble and Oriental granite cladding the first three floors, and Beaver Dam marble and Carthage marble on the streets fronts. The marble was cut and positioned in a way that would give varying textures across the exterior.

Other materials found at the Fisher Building include, green tiles, used for the buikding's hipped roof, bronze, seen in windows frames, elevator doors and exterior-interior ornamentation, and marble, found in walls and floors. The types of marble used include: Golden-Vein Tavernelle from Tennesse, Cardiff Green from Maryland, Carthage from Missouri, Verdi antique from Veermont, Mar Villa from Maryland, red marble from Germany, green from Austria, brown & black from Belgium, black & gold from France, white & black from Italy and rose from Spain.