Singer Building

The Singer Building is a Neogothic skyscraper designed by Mundie & Jensen, and built between 1925 and 1926 in Chicago, IL.

Its precise street address is 120 S. State Street, Chicago, IL. You can also find it on the map here.

The Singer 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 Singer Building was officially included in the National Register of Historic Places on February 10^th 1983.

The building underwent a major restoration in 1997. The architect commissioned to undertake this restoration was Hasbrouck Hendersen Architects.

Mundie & Jensen 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 Singer Manufacturing Company as the Main Developer.

The Singer Building can be categorized as a Neogothic building.

The Singer Building was completed in 1926. 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 Mundie & Jensen 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 Singer Building, it is possible that the design already started showing some traits that would later become characteristic of the art-deco movement.

The Singer Building uses a frame structure made of columns and beams.

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 glazed terracotta found in neogothic ornamentation molded into glistening forms.