The Bell Building

The The Bell Building is a Postmodernist skyscraper designed by Holabird & Root and built between 1963 and 1966 in Chicago, IL.

The Bell 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 The Bell Building is also known, or has been known as, 225 West Randolph Street, Illinois Bell Telephone Buidling, or Ameritech Building.

Its precise street address is 225 W. Randolph St, Chicago, IL. You can also find it on the map here.

The The Bell 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 Postmodernism style. Because of that, the The Bell Building was officially declared as a national landmark on February 6^th 2021.

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 1989 and 2025.

Holabird & Root was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design.

Holabird & Root was in charge of the architectural design, however, architecture is a complex discipline, which usually involves 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 The Bell Building a reality:

• Frank Henderson in charge of Structural Engineering
• A.L. Jackson as the Main Contractor

The The Bell Building can be categorized as a Postmodernist building.

The The Bell Building uses a framed tube-in-tube structure , with steel columns and reinforced concrete slabs.

A framed tube-in-tube structure uses a central core, known as inner tube, which usually holds stairs, lifts and installations, and a perimeter of columns around it, which form the exterior tube. The interior tube is tipically more massive (often made of reinforced concrete), and the exterior tube is "lighter" (made of steel or concrete columns). Both tubes are conencted via horizontal elements which make up the floors and also transmit any horizontal froces from the facade to the core.

The facade of the building is load bearing. This is a direct consequence of the integration of the exterior "tube" into the facade, something which most framed tube-in-tube buildings do in order to liberate the interior space from structural elements and achieve a more flexible interior.

So the facade of the builing is techinically load-bearing, yes, however, in between the load-bearing colums we find a curtain-wall type of facade, which by itself would not be cosnidered load-bearing.

From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features a colonnade clad in white marble at street level, that creates a public space behind which lies a recessed, glass-encased lobby. The columns, with a base of dark concrete measuring 0.61 meters, extend from the ground to the pinnacle of the building on all four facades, forming bays covered by a black Vitrolux glass curtain wall. At the top, a prominent horizontal marble slab forms a sort of cornice.