Reliance Building

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Reliance Building
(U.S. National Historic Landmark)
Reliance Building at 20 North State Street.
Location:	Chicago, Cook County, Illinois, USA
Coordinates:	41°52′58″N 87°37′40″W / 41.88278, -87.62778Coordinates: 41°52′58″N 87°37′40″W / 41.88278, -87.62778
Built/Founded:	1890 - 1895^[1]
Architect:	John Root, Charles A. Atwood^[1]
Architectural style(s):	Chicago School
Added to NRHP:	October 15, 1970^[2]
NRHP Reference#:	70000237

The Reliance Building is the first skyscraper to have large plate glass windows make up the majority of its surface area, foreshadowing a feature of skyscrapers that would become dominant in the 20th century. It is located at 20 North State Street, Chicago, Illinois, and as of 2006 houses the Hotel Burnham. The Reliance building joined the National Register of Historic Places in 1970 and on January 7, 1976, it was designated a National Historic Landmark.^[1]

1 Architecture
2 See also
3 References
4 External links

[edit] Architecture

Upper facade

The building was designed by Charles B. Atwood of Daniel H. Burnham's architectural firm, with E.C. Shankland as engineer. Its first four floors were erected in 1890. The addition of ten more floors in 1894–1895 completed the building and marked the "first comprehensive achievement"^[3] of the Chicago construction method. The building's plate glass windows are set within a tiled facade. Its steel-frame superstructure is built atop concrete caissons sunk as much as 125 feet beneath the footing.

The Reliance Building has been called "proto-Modernist" in its lack of the hierarchy found in Classical facades. Its stacks of projecting bay windows and terra cotta cladding create an effect of extraordinary lightness.^[4] It was a direct precursor of the all-glass Friedrichstrasse skyscraper proposed by Mies van der Rohe in 1921.^[5] Richardson's Marshall Field Warehouse, built only eight years earlier, seems in comparison to be heavy, ponderous, and of another era.^[6]

The preservation of this building was championed by the Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois.^[7]

[edit] See also

Chicago architecture

[edit] References

^ ^a ^b ^c Reliance Building, NHL Database, National Historic Landmarks Program. Retrieved 10 February 2007.
^ NRIS Database, National Register of Historic Places. Retrieved 9 February 2007.
^ Kenneth Frampton and Yukio Futagawa Modern Architecture 1851-1945 p. 63
^ Colquhoun, Alan (2002). Modern Architecture, pp. 38-39. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0192842269.
^ Kidder-Smith, G.E. (2001). Sourcebook of American Architecture, p. 297. Princeton Architectural Press. ISBN 1568982542.
^ Craven, Wayne (2003). American Art: History and Culture, p. 309. McGraw-Hill. ISBN 0071415246.
^ Granacki, Victoria (2006). About Us: Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois. Landmarks Illinois. Retrieved on 2007-05-04.

[edit] External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:

Reliance Building

Hotel Burnham

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