Merchandise Mart

The Merchandise Mart is an Art-deco skyscraper designed by Graham, Anderson, Probst & White, and built between 1928 and 1930 in Chicago, IL.

Merchandise Mart is not the only name you might know this building by though. It is common for companies to want to attach their names to iconic buildings when they move in, or for the general public to come up with nicknames, and this one is no exception. The Merchandise Mart is also known, or has been known as, Merch Mart, or Mart.

Its precise street address is 222 Merchandise Mart Plaza, Chicago, IL. You can also find it on the map here.

The building has been restored 4 times over the years to ensure its conservation and adaptation to the pass of time. The main restoration works happened in 1950, 1960, 1977 and 1988.

Graham, Anderson, Probst & White 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 here is a list of the people we do know also played their part in making the Merchandise Mart a reality:

• John W. Griffiths & Sons as the Main Contractor
• Marshall Field & Co as the Main Developer

The Merchandise Mart can be categorized as an Art-deco building.

The Merchandise Mart 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 Merchandise Mart 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 limestone, terracotta and bronze.