LaSalle-Wacker Building

The LaSalle-Wacker Building is an Art-deco skyscraper designed by Holabird & Root, and built between 1929 and 1930 in Chicago, IL.

LaSalle-Wacker Building is not the only name you might know this building by though. The building is, or has also been known as 121 West Wacker Drive.

Its precise street address is 221 LaSalle 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 1998 and 2005.

Holabird & Root 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 Andrew Rebori.

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 Smith & Brown in charge of Structural Engineering.

The LaSalle-Wacker Building can be categorized as an Art-deco building.

The LaSalle-Wacker Building was completed in 1930, right when the Art Deco movement was at its peak, so it kind of went with the trend at that time.

The LaSalle-Wacker 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 light-colored limestone and granite cladding.

Another material found at the LaSalle-Wacker Building is terracota, used for some of the facade details and ornamentation.