Inland Steel Building

The Inland Steel Building is an International Style skyscraper designed in 1956 by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, with Bruce Graham and Walter Netsch as lead architect, and built between 1957 and 1958, for a reported $6.00 million dollars, in Chicago, IL.

Its precise street address is 30 W. Monroe Street, Chicago, IL. You can also find it on the map here.

The Inland Steel 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 International Style style. Because of that, the Inland Steel Building was officially included in the National Register of Historic Places on February 18^th 2009.

The building incorporates many modernist concepts, perfect proportions, attention to detail, high-quality materials and the Miesian desing concept of universal space, with column-free interiors.

The building's shape is defined by two towers: a 19-story office tower and an adjacent 25-story tower that houses all the essential services and facilities of the building, including bathrooms, elevators, and stairs. A one-story unit that contains auxiliary facilities is attached to the service tower. This arrangement of the central core in the service tower frees up space in the adjacent office tower, offering an open floor plan, column-free, because all structural elements have been pushed out, all the way to curtain wall of the building.

This wide-span structure is in part possible thanks to the seven columns on each of the longer facades, supported by steel piles that go as far as 26 meters deep into the bedrock, and are clad in stainless steel with nickel-chromium, which give the building its distinctive silvery, shiny look.

At the time of its completion in 1958 the Inland Steel Building incorporated solutions that were quite advanced at the time, these included being the first fully air-conditioned building in Chicago, the first to have an indoor underground parking, the first constructed on steel pilings, and the first with an automated window washing and mail distribution systems. So the Inland Steel Building definitely took Chicago's architecture scene one step closer to modernity.

The building underwent a major restoration in 2018. The architect commissioned to undertake this restoration was Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.

Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, with Bruce Graham and Walter Netsch as the lead architect, was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design.

Skidmore, Owings & Merrill was in charge of the architectural design, however, architecture is a complex discipline, which usually involves 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 Inland Steel Company as the Main Developer.

The Inland Steel Building can be categorized as an International Style building.

The Inland Steel Building was completed in 1958. By 1958 the International Style movement had already left its early days behind and could be considered a mature movement, which does not mean it was loved and accepted by everyone, on the contrary. The International Style was accepted by the architecture community way before it was by the general public, and it is therefore likely that the Inland Steel Building was not well received by everyone at the time.

The Inland Steel Building 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 of the building however, is load bearing. This doesn't imply that it is a traditional load-bearing wall. Rather, it means that the structure's exterior pillars have been pushed to the very edges, becoming integrated with the facade, and therefore, technically, a part of it.

From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features two towers rising above a glass vestibule. Mullions and transoms of the curtain wall are made of stainless steel, glazed with aquamarine-tinted laminated glass and porous concrete panels.

On the east and west sides, 7 slender and prominent columns covered in brushed steel stand out, rising above street level and continuing to over the end of the structure as the only decorative element. In this case, the structure, a purely functional element, gives the building its distinctive aesthetic. This is a clear case of function over form.