Pittsfield Building

The Pittsfield Building is a Neogothic skyscraper designed by Graham, Anderson, Probst & White, and built between 1926 and 1927 in Chicago, IL.

Its precise street address is 55 E. Washington Street, Chicago, IL. You can also find it on the map here.

The Pittsfield 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 Neogothic style. Because of that, the Pittsfield Building was officially declared as a national landmark on November 6^th 2002.

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 Pittsfield Building a reality:

• William Braeger in charge of Structural Engineering
• Henry Ericsson and Co. as the Main Contractor

The Pittsfield Building can be categorized as a Neogothic building.

The Pittsfield Building was completed in 1927. These were the late days of the Neogothic movement, which had been around for almost 200 years at the time.

Art-deco would soon take over US architecture, and therefore, even though Graham, Anderson, Probst & White didn't venture into what was cutting edge in terms of style at the time, and took instead a more conservative approach to the design of the Pittsfield Building, it is possible that the design already started showing some traits that would later become characteristic of the art-deco movement.

The Pittsfield 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 polished black granite on its ground story and grey terracotta on its upper floors.

Other materials found at the Pittsfield Building include, copper-clad, used to cover the distinctive pyramidal roof, and bronce, used for some of the most precious ornamentation.