One North LaSalle Building

The One North LaSalle Building is an Art-deco skyscraper designed by Vitzthum & Burns, and built between 1929 and 1930 in Chicago, IL.

Its precise street address is 1 North Lasalle Street, Chicago, IL. You can also find it on the map here.

The One North LaSalle 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 Art Deco style. Because of that, the One North LaSalle Building was officially declared as a national landmark on April 16^th 1996.

The building underwent a major restoration in 2017.

Vitzthum & Burns 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 One North LaSalle Building a reality:

• John Griffiths & Son as the Main Contractor
• The Beitler Company as the Main Developer

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

The One North LaSalle 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 One North LaSalle 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 light-colored limestone.

Other materials found at the One North LaSalle Building include, bronce, found in the ornamented elevator doors in the lobby, and green marble, used for the walls of the lobby.