Home Insurance Building

The Home Insurance Building was a skyscraper in Chicago, United States, designed by William Le Baron Jenney in 1884, for the Home Insurance Company in New York. Completed a year later, the building is generally noted as the first tall building to be supported both inside and outside by a fireproof structural steel and metal frame, which included reinforced concrete.

The building opened in 1885 and was demolished 46 years later in 1931.

History

The building was completed in 1885 in Chicago, Illinois, and was the first tall building to use structural steel in its frame, but the majority of its structure was composed of cast and wrought iron. While the Ditherington Flax Mill was an earlier fireproof-metal-framed building and is sometimes considered to be the first skyscraper, it was only five stories tall.

Because of the building's unique architecture and weight-bearing frame, it is considered the one of the world's first skyscrapers. It had 10 stories and rose to a height of 138 ft (42.1 m) In 1891, two floors were added.

The architect was William Le Baron Jenney. The building weighed only one-third as much as a masonry building would have; city officials were so concerned, they halted construction while they investigated its safety. The Home Insurance Building is an example of the Chicago School of Architecture. The building set precedents in skyscraper construction. Minneapolis architect Leroy Buffington patented the concept of the skeletal-frame tall building in 1888 and proposed "a 28-story 'stratosphere-scraper'—a notion mocked by the architectural press of the time as impractical and ludicrous." His proposal nonetheless attracted the attention of the national architectural and building communities to the possibilities of iron skeletal framing, "which in primitive form had been around for decades."

Location

The Field Building, now known as the Private Bank Building, built in 1931, stands on the site. In 1932, owners placed a plaque in the southwest section of the lobby reading:

“ This section of the Field Building is erected on the site of the Home Insurance Building, which structure, designed and built in eighteen hundred and eighty four by the late William Le Baron Jenney, was the first high building to utilize as the basic principle of its design the method known as skeleton construction and, being a primal influence in the acceptance of this principle was the true father of the skyscraper, 1932. ”

Text imported from Wikipedia article "Home Insurance Building" and modified on July 22, 2019 according to the CC-BY-SA 4.0 International license.