CHICAGO

SKYSCRAPERS
 SKYSCRAPERS
 A skyscraper is a continuously
habitable high-rise building that has
over 40 floors.
 Taller than approximately 150 m
(492 ft).
 Historically, the term first referred to
buildings with 10 to 20 floors in the
1880s. 
 For buildings above a height of 300 m
(984 ft), the term supertall
skyscrapers can be used, while
skyscrapers reaching beyond 600 m
(1,969 ft) are classified as megatall Burj Khalifa, world’s tallest
skyscrapers. skyscraper
829.8 metres (2,722 ft)
 SIGNIFICANCE OF ELEVATORS

Before high-rise skyscrapers

could become a reality, engineers
had to make them practical.

Once you get more than five or six

floors, stairs become a fairly
inconvenient technology.

Skyscrapers would never have

worked without the coincident
emergence of elevator technology.
 SIGNIFICANCE OF ELEVATORS
Ever since the first passenger
elevator was installed in New
York's Haughwout Department
Store in 1857, elevator shafts
have been a major part of
skyscraper design.

In most skyscrapers, the

elevator shafts make up the
building's central core.
Haughwout Department Store
 SIGNIFICANCE OF ELEVATORS
Chicago's John Hancock Center
use sky lobbies, where express
elevators take passengers to upper
floors which serve as the base for local
elevators. This allows architects and
engineers to place elevator shafts on Sky lobbies
top of each other, saving space.

Other buildings such as the Petronas

Towers use double-deck
elevators allowing more people to fit
in a single elevator and reaching two
floors at every stop. Double deck elevators
 CHICAGO AND SKYSCRAPERS

 The invention of the skyscraper in the late 1800s made

possible the concentration of business and services
that have in turn made Chicago the great metropolis of
the interior United States.

 Chicago has been the site of many of the skyscraper's

stylistic and technical advances.

The Great Chicago Fire was a conflagration that burned

in the American city of Chicago on October 8–10, 1871.
The fire killed approximately 300 people, destroyed
roughly 3.3 square miles (9 km22) of the city, and left more
than 100,000 residents homeless
 CHICAGO AND SKYSCRAPERS

 In the phenomenal growth years after the 1871

fire, an extraordinary pool of architectural talent
known as the First Chicago School advanced the
skyscraper form.

 Louis Sullivan was perhaps the city's most

philosophical architect. Realizing that the
skyscraper represented a new form of
architecture, he discarded historical precedent
and designed buildings that emphasized their
vertical nature. This new form of architecture, by
Jenney, Burnham, Sullivan, and others, became
known as the "Commercial Style," but it was
called the "Chicago School" by later historians. Louis Sullivan
 CHICAGO AND SKYSCRAPERS

 Early skyscrapers were clothed in historical styles, but

eventually the form's distinctive skeletal metal frame was
fully expressed, as in the Second Leiter Building (1891).

 Chicago is one of the two places in the US that had tallest

skyscrapers from the moment when the skyscrapers
appeared and is considered to be the birthplace of the
skyscraper because it was home of the Home Insurance
Building, completed in 1885, the world's first steel-framed
skyscraper.
 CHICAGO AND SKYSCRAPERS
The late 1920s saw a flurry of Palmolive

art deco towers such as the

Palmolive (1929) and Board of
Trade (1930) in the distinctive
telescoping setback Vertical
style.

Depression and war stopped

tall building construction until
the 1950s, when Mies van der
Rohe's 860 Lake Shore Drive
apartments (1951).
860 Lake Shore Drive
apartments
 CHICAGO AND SKYSCRAPERS
Inland Steel
 Amid a barrage of imitators, the elegant Building
stainless steel and green glass Inland
Steel Building (1958) and the rusty
Cor-Ten steel Daley Center (1965) stand
out as masterful variations on the
Miesian theme.
 The glass and steel box was also made LAKE POINT
TOWER
plastic by the sculptural Lake Point Tower
(1968), which was in fact based on a 1921
Mies design.

MIESIAN - Characteristic of the German-born

architect and designer Ludwig Mies van der Rohe or
his work.
 CHICAGO AND SKYSCRAPERS
 Since 1963, a "Second Chicago Ludwig Mies van
School" emerged from the work der Rohe
of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe at
the Illinois Institute of Technology in
Chicago.
 The ideas of structural
engineer Fazlur Khan were also
influential in this movement, in Fazlur Khan
particular his introduction of a new
structural system of framed tubes
in skyscraper design and construction.
The tube is a structural engineering system that is used
in high-rise buildings, enabling them to resist lateral
loads from wind, seismic pressures and so on. It acts like a
hollow cylinder, cantilevered perpendicular to the ground.
 CHICAGO AND SKYSCRAPERS
DeWitt-Chestnut
 The first building to apply the Apartment Building
tube-frame construction was
the DeWitt-Chestnut
Apartment Building which John Hancock Center
Khan designed and was
completed in Chicago by 1966.

 This laid the foundations for the

tube structures of many other
later skyscrapers, including his
own constructions of the John
Hancock Center and Willis
Tower in Chicago.
Trussed tube
 CHICAGO AND SKYSCRAPERS

Chicago continues to be a living museum of the

skyscraper, where the great architects of the world
show their work.

The 2010 Chicago skyline as seen from the Adler Planetarium.

 TALLEST BUILDINGS IN CHICAGO
PINNACLE HEIGHT – It height with includes radio masts and antennas
PINNACLE STD. PINNACLE STANDARD
RANK RANK NAME HEIGHT HEIGHT FLOORS YEAR
FT (M) FT (M)
1 1 WILLIS TOWER 1,730 (527) 1,451 (442) 108 1974
JOHN HANCOCK
2 4 1,500 (457) 1,127 (344) 100 1969
CENTER
TRUMP
INTERNATIONA 1,389
3 2 1,170 (357) 98 2009
L HOTEL AND (423)
TOWER
4 3 AON CENTER 1,136 (346) 1,136 (346) 83 1973
FRANKLIN
1,007
5 5 CENTER NORTH 887 (270) 61 1989
(307)
TOWER
TWO
6 6 PRUDENTIAL 995 (303) 995 (303) 64 1990
PLAZA
311 SOUTH
7 7 961 (293) 961 (293) 65 1990
WACKER DRIVE
ONE
8 42 PRUDENTIAL 912 (278) 601 (183) 41 1955
PLAZA
9 8 NEMA CHICAGO 896 (273) 896 (273) 76 2019
900 NORTH
10 9 871 (266) 871 (266) 66 1989
MICHIGAN
 Willis Tower
It is the tallest Chicago
skyscraper.
It was known as Sears Tower
and it was finished in 1974 with
height of 442m.
Tower holds offices and an
observation deck which makes it
one of the most popular tourist
destinations in Chicago with
over one million people visiting
each year.
 Trump International Hotel and Tower

It was finished in 2009 and is 423m

tall.

It is a skyscraper condo-hotel in

downtown Chicago named after
President Donald Trump.

After it was finished it became the

second-tallest building in the
Western Hemisphere.
 Aon Centre
 It was finished in 1973 and is
346m tall.
 It was known as the Standard Oil
Building for which headquarters
was built. Today it holds
headquarters of Aon's US
operations.
 When it was finished it was the
world's tallest building clad in
marble. It was sheathed entirely
with 43,000 slabs of Italian
Carrara marble.
 It is now 5th-tallest building in the
United States.
 John Hancock Centre
It was finished in 1969 and is
344m tall.
was the tallest building in the
world outside New York City
when it was finished.
It has offices, restaurants, and
around 700 condominiums.
Centre was named after John
Hancock Mutual Life Insurance
Company, a developer and
original tenant of the building.
 Franklin Centre North Tower
 It was finished in 1989 and is 307m tall.

 It was built to be the central region

headquarters of the American
Telephone & Telegraph Company and
called after that AT&T Corporate
Center.

 It was the tallest building constructed in

Chicago in the last quarter of the 20th
Century and today is the 11th tallest
building in the United States.
 Two Prudential Plaza
 It was finished in 1990 and is
303m tall.
 It was the world's tallest
reinforced concrete building at
the time of completion and the
tallest building constructed in
Chicago in the 1990s.
 Today it is the 13th-tallest
building in the United States
and holds mainly offices.
 It is connected to One
Prudential Plaza, its sister
building.
 311 South Wacker Drive
It was finished in 1990 before
Two Prudential Plaza and is
293m tall.
It is the 16th tallest building in
the United States. 
It is also famous for being the
tallest building in the world
known only by its street address.
It has offices and apartments.
When made was the tallest
reinforced concrete building in
the world.
 900 North Michigan
 It was finished in 1989 and is 265m
tall.
 It is today the eighth tallest building
in Chicago and the 25th tallest
building in the United States.
 It has 66 floors, tower is clad in
limestone and green glass and
contains a shopping mall, offices, a
parking garage and a medical clinic.
 It has four characteristic "lanterns"
atop the structure that are lit at
night.
MANEET & SANDHYA

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