Trump International Hotel and Tower

The Trump International Hotel and Tower is a Contemporary skyscraper designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, with Adrian Smith as lead architect, and built between 2005 and 2009, for a reported $847 million dollars, in Chicago, IL.

Its precise street address is 401 N. Wabash Ave., Chicago, IL. You can also find it on the map here.

When Donald Trump first announced the construction of his tower in Chicago, he claimed it would become the tallest building in the world, with 150 floors. However that all changed after the 9-11 attacks on the World Trade Center in NYC. After the attacks there as generalized fear towards high-rises, and for a few years the aim to build higher and higher was refrained.

Nevertheless, the Trump Tower is not low by any means. When it was completed in 2009 it claimed the title of second tallest building in the US, only second to the Willis Tower, also located in the city of Chicago.

Another fact that film fans might find interesting is that the the final fight between Batman and the Jocker in the film The Dark Night was shot in the Summer of 2007 at the very top of the tower, as it was still undergoing construction.

At the time of its completion in 2009 the Trump International Hotel and Tower incorporated solutions that were quite advanced at the time, these included the use of water from the Chicago River for cooling purposes. The cooling system returns the used water back to the river, avoiding the expensive pump system traditionally employed by these skyscrapers, which typically expels water vapor from the rooftop.

Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, with Adrian Smith as the lead architect, 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 Trump International Hotel and Tower a reality:

• William F. Baker in charge of Structural Engineering
• Bovis Lend Lease as the Main Contractor
• Curtain Wall Design and Consulting, Inc., and Permasteelisa Group in charge of Facade Consultancy
• KONE as the company in charge of the elevators system
• Donald Trump as the Main Developer
• WMA Consulting Engineers Ltd in charge of MEP Engineering
• McGinley Desing in charge of Landscape Architecture
• PMG Arquitectos in charge of Interior Design

The Trump International Hotel and Tower can be categorized as a Contemporary building.

By today's standards the Trump International Hotel and Tower could probably be classified as a "high-tech" building. Only time will tell if this substyle will grow and stick onto the history books, or if perhaps it will become a substyle of a larger style. Only time will tell. Until then, we believe it's best to refer to the Trump International Hotel and Tower as a contemporary building.

The Trump International Hotel and Tower uses a frame structure made of reinforced concrete 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.

To enable the Trump Tower to withstand the strong wind loads in Chicago, SOM employed a structural system commonly referred to as "bundled tube construction." The building features a central core of concrete with concrete arms (stabilizers) extending along several key floors The stabilizers link the central core to an outer ring of structural columns. This method, also utilized in the Burj Khalifa, the world's tallest building, designed by the same team of architects and engineers at SOM, allows for both design flexibility and structural strength.

From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features a continuous blue-tinted glass curtain wall. Each module of the curtain wall is divided into a large pane of glass, a small spandrel also made of the same glass, and a thin section paneled in light grey, which marks the level of the floor slabs that hide behind the curtain wall.

From ground to tip, the tower is divided into 4 sections, each of them with a smaller footprint than the one below. The change of one section to another is not only marked by the corresponding setback of the facade, but also by a continuous ribbon of metallic grids that interrupt the continuity of the curtain wall. These are the technical floors, and the metallic grids allow for the machinery inside to refrigerate and ventilate properly.