Home Insurance Building

The Home Insurance Building is a Neoclassic skyscraper designed between 1983 and 1984 by William Le Baron Jenney, and built between 1884 and 1885 in Chicago, IL.

The exact addresss of the building was 135 S. La Salle Street, Chicago, IL. However, you won't be able to find it there anymore, since it was demolished in 1931, 46 year after opening its doors to the public.

When its construction was completed in 1885, it was considered the world's first modern skyscraper, despite not being the tallest building in Chicago at the time. However, the use of steel as a structural material earned it that title. The innovative engineering techniques employed, along with its architectural features, laid the foundation for future skyscrapers.

In 1891, after the addition of two floors, the building's height reached 55 meters and it had 12 floors. The remainder of this article will focus on the original 10-floor building.

The site once occupied by Home Insurance Building is now home to the LaSalle Bank Building.

At the time of its completion in 1885 the Home Insurance Building incorporated solutions that were quite advanced at the time, these included fast and safe elevators, wind bracing supports, and modern plumbing, on top of its unique steel structural frame.

William Le Baron Jenney 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 William Le Baron Jenney in charge of Structural Engineering.

The Home Insurance Building can be categorized as a Neoclassic building.

The Home Insurance Building uses a frame structure made of steel columns and concrete, steel 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.

Although most of its structure was made of wrought iron and cast iron, it had a self-supporting fireproof steel frame that supported the building. It was the first tall building supported by a metal framework composed of both vertical columns and horizontal beams. This marked a sharp departure from earlier buildings, which relied on heavy masonry walls for support. The steel used to support Jenney's 10-story building weighed only a third of what a 10-story building made of heavy masonry would weigh

From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features bricks which completely hid, and didn't take advantage of the steel frame that supported the building. The brick facade rose above a two-story base clad in light-toned rusticated granite and was characterized by its large "Chicago windows," most of which were sash windows combined with large fixed panes, allowing ample light to enter the building.

From a composition point of view, the facade resembled a Greek column with three parts: the base, the shaft, and the capital. With the capital being adorned with various cornices as ornamentation .