Two Prudential Plaza

The Two Prudential Plaza is a Postmodernist skyscraper designed by Loebl, Schlossman & Hackl, with Stephen T. Wrights as lead architect, and built between 1988 and 1990 in Chicago, IL.

Two Prudential Plaza is not the only name you might know this building by though. The building is, or has also been known as 2Pru.

Its precise street address is 180 North Stetson Avenue, Chicago, IL. You can also find it on the map here.

In 1995 the Two Prudential Plaza was awarded with the Best Structure Award.

At the lobby level the building connects with the adjacent 41-story One Prudential Plaza, which was completed in 1955.

Loebl, Schlossman & Hackl, with Stephen T. Wrights 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 Two Prudential Plaza a reality:

• CBM Engineers in charge of Structural Engineering
• Turner Construction Company as the Main Contractor
• Enclos Corp. in charge of Facade Consultancy
• The Prudential Property as the Main Developer
• Environmental Systems Design, Inc. in charge of MEP Engineering

The Two Prudential Plaza can be categorized as a Postmodernist building.

The Two Prudential Plaza was completed in 1990. By 1990 the Postmodernism movement was experiencing a transition. Critics argued that Postmodernism, initially a rebellious and innovative style, had become formulaic and commercialized, and so the trend started moving away from blending historical styles, irony, and playful ornamentation, and begun to give way to emerging architectural trends concerned with more present matters such as technology, ecology or sustainability.

The Two Prudential Plaza uses a framed tube-in-tube structure , with reinforced concrete columns and beams.

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 combination of granite and glass, with limestone pilasters and metalwork detailing.

The distinctive silhouette of the building comes from the chevron-shaped setbacks stacked on the north and south sides, and the sharp pyramidal peak with a 24m spire that crown the building.