Riverside Plaza Building

The Riverside Plaza Building is an Art-deco skyscraper designed by Holabird & Root, and built between 1928 and 1929 in Chicago, IL.

Riverside Plaza Building is not the only name you might know this building by though. The building is, or has also been known as Chicago Daily News Building.

Its precise street address is 2 N Riverside Plaza, Chicago, IL. You can also find it on the map here.

At the time of its completion in 1929 the Riverside Plaza Building incorporated solutions that were quite advanced at the time, these included a public open-air plaza as part of the design, something which is way more common, and in some cases even mandatory, in modern skyscrapers design. But that was not the only urbanistic trend that this building set, it was also one of the first to ever use the air rights over another lot, in this case over the railroad tracks.

The building has been restored 2 times over the years to ensure its conservation and adaptation to the pass of time. The main restoration works happened in 2009 and 2023.

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 here is a list of the people we do know also played their part in making the Riverside Plaza Building a reality:

• Frank E. Brown in charge of Structural Engineering
• Otis as the company in charge of the elevators system
• Chicago Daily News as the Main Developer

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

The Riverside Plaza 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 Riverside Plaza 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 brown limestone.