The Leo Burnett Building is a Postmodernist skyscraper designed by Roche Dinkeloo & Associates, in association with Shaw & Associates, and built between 1986 and 1989, for a reported $100 million dollars, in Chicago, IL.
Leo Burnett Building is not the only name you might know this building by though. The building is, or has also been known as 35 West Wacker.
Its precise street address is 35 West Wacker Drive, Chicago, IL. You can also find it on the map here.
Roche Dinkeloo & Associates was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design, in association with Shaw & Associates.
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 Leo Burnett Building a reality:
The Leo Burnett Building can be categorized as a Postmodernist building.
Postmodernism in architecture emerged in the United States during the late 1960s as a reaction against the starkness of the International Style, which part of the new generation of architects argued was too impersonal, sterile, and disconnected from historical and cultural contexts.
Postmodernism challenged the International Style's austerity by reintroducing historical elements and ornamentation, although this time not as literally as in the Neo-Classic buildings. Instead, they reinterpreted them within the context of modern materials and construction techniques.
Postmodern buildings often feature bold, contrasting colors, unconventional forms, and a playful blend of various architectural elements from different eras and cultures.
In the United States, Postmodernism was not just an aesthetic choice but also a philosophical stance. It represented a democratization of design, where architects sought to create buildings that were accessible and meaningful to a broader range of people, not just designers and intellectuals.
The Leo Burnett Building was completed in 1989. At that time Postmodernism was the prevailing style. Fresh, bold and daring, architects were exploring the freedom of designing without having to follow the strict, sometimes arbitrary rules of a specific architectural movement (which ironically became a movement itself). The Leo Burnett Building was therefore every much in line with what the architecture community, and the people liked and wanted at the time.
The Leo Burnett Building reaches an architectural height of 636ft (194m). It has a total of 50 floors, 46 above ground and 4 basements, served by 28 elevators, which combined offer a total of 1,118,036 sqf (103,869m2) of usable space.
In regards to parking space, the building has a total of 113 spots available, which roughly equals 2 spots per floor (above ground), or one parking spot per every 9,892 sqf (919m2) of usable space.
Ever since opening its doors to the public in 1989, the Leo Burnett Building has mainly been used as Commercial space.
The structure is linked to the 200 North Dearborn Apartments and the Loop Pedway System through a sky-bridge that spans Dearborn Street. On the Lake Street side, a retail corridor provides direct access to the Renaissance Hotel located to the east
The Leo Burnett Building uses a trussed tube-in-tube structure , with a concrete core and steel columns and concrete and steel slabs.
A trussed tube-in-tube structure uses a central core, known as inner tube, which usually holds stairs, lifts and installations, and a perimeter of columns around it, which form the exterior tube. The interior tube is tipically more massive (often made of reinforced concrete), and the exterior tube is "lighter" (made of steel or concrete columns). Both tubes are conencted via horizontal elements which make up the floors and also transmit any horizontal froces from the facade to the core.
The facade of the building is load bearing. This is a direct consequence of the integration of the exterior "tube" into the facade, something which most trussed tube-in-tube buildings do in order to liberate the interior space from structural elements and achieve a more flexible interior.
So the facade of the builing is techinically load-bearing, yes, however, in between the load-bearing colums we find a window-wall facade system, which by itself would not be cosnidered load-bearing.
From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features a green granite clad in three different finishes, thermal stippled, honed and polished. The rectangular grid created by the granite frames the windows, which feature highly reflective glass, and are divided vertically in half by a stainless steel bar, a design which is typically known as "Chicago windows".
Other materials found at the Leo Burnett Building include, Rosa Portugala marble, , and pine-green African granite, used to clad the lobby's walls.
