Palmolive Building

The Palmolive Building is an Art-deco skyscraper designed by Holabird & Root, and built between 1927 and 1929 in Chicago, IL.

Palmolive Building 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 building has changed names several times over the years, and is also known as:

• Playboy Building between 1965 and 1989.
• 919 N. Michigan Building between 1989 and 2001.

Its precise street address is 919 North Michigan Avenue for the commercial spaces, and 159 East Walton Place for the residences, Chicago, IL. You can also find it on the map here.

The Palmolive 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 Palmolive Building was officially declared as a national landmark on February 16^th 2000.

The building underwent a major restoration in 2000.

Holabird & Root 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 Verne O. McClurg in charge of Structural Engineering.

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

The Palmolive Building was completed in 1929, right when the Art Deco movement was at its peak, so it kind of went with the trend at that time.

The Palmolive 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 Indiana Beford Limestone cladding.

Other materials found at the Palmolive Building include, terra cotta, used for the top of the building features, and steel and aluminum, used for the mast that rises on the rooftop and used to serve as an aviation beacon.