One Magnificent Mile Building

The One Magnificent Mile Building is a Postmodernist skyscraper designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, with Bruce Graham as lead architect, and built between 1978 and 1983 in Chicago, IL.

One Magnificent Mile Building is not the only name you might know this building by though. The building is, or has also been known as One Mag Mile.

Its precise street address is 940-980 North Michigan Avenue, Chicago, IL. You can also find it on the map here.

In 1984 the One Magnificent Mile Building was awarded with the Best Structure Award by the Structural Engineers Association of Illinois.

The building underwent a major restoration in 2018. The architect commissioned to undertake this restoration was Development Solutions.

Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, with Bruce Graham as the lead architect, 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 Fazlur Rahman Khan in charge of Structural Engineering.

The One Magnificent Mile Building can be categorized as a Postmodernist building.

The One Magnificent Mile Building was completed in 1983. 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 One Magnificent Mile Building was therefore every much in line with what the architecture community, and the people liked and wanted at the time.

The One Magnificent Mile Building uses a frame structure made of concrete columns and concrete and 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.

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.

The building consists of four hexagonal reinforced concrete tubular structures, featuring a sloped roof and varying heights: 5, 21, 49, and 57 stories. The tubes' heights were calculated to minimize afternoon shadows on the beach

From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features dark pink Spanish granite clad panels, framing a consistent pattern of dark-glass windows.