Home Insurance Building

Home Insurance Building [[Soundex Code

NE corner of LaSalle Street and Adams Street

Height (tip): 180.44 ft

Height (architectural): 180.44 ft

Height (roof): 180.44 ft

Floors (above ground): 12

Construction end: 1885

Destruction end: 1931

Architect: William LeBaron Jenney

This is generally regarded as the world's first skyscraper. It was the first tall building to be supported, both inside and outside, by a fireproof metal frame.

Although the Home Insurance Building made full use of steel framing technology, it was not a pure steel-framed structure since it rested partly on granite piers at the base and on a rear brick wall.

This was demolished to make way for the Field Building, now known as the LaSalle Bank Building.

Originally built in 1885 as a 10-story building, 138 feet high. In 1890, two more floors were built on top.

The Home Insurance Building was born out of the building frenzy that followed the Great Chicago Fire. The city, formerly made largely from wood, was being re-built in stone, iron, and a new material called steel. The building boom helped the economy flourish and structures in the city's central Loop district reached higher and higher to accommodate the demand for space.

But the problem that architects and engineers ran into was that as their buildings grew in height, they also became thicker, darker, and less attractive to prospective tenants. Taller buildings needed stronger walls. Walls were made stronger by making them thicker. That left less and less space for windows in an era before air conditioning, advanced ventilation, and anything more than basic electric lighting.

William LeBaron Jenney had the solution. He wasn't a developer or an architect, but an engineer. He figured out that if you built a skeleton of iron, you could have stability, rigidity, and height without the thickness of structural stone. In fact, the frame of the building would be so strong that it could support a stone skin.

The idea was revolutionary. So much so that city inspectors halted work on the building until they were convinced that the new technique was safe. More than safe, it provided the blueprint for hundreds of thousands of skyscrapers that would follow it. The construction industry of the time saw the potential and William LeBaron Jenney's tower, already being built with iron, was switched to steel after the sixth floor when a Pittsburgh mill offered some of the then-exotic new material to him.

Before the Home Insurance Building went up there were other attempts to use metal to carry the load of tall buildings. But these most often relied on cast iron which was brittle and worse -- would twist and warp in the heat of a fire. Wrought iron would have helped, and was used to hold up walls in some early proto-skyscrapers, but it was William LeBaron Jenney's design and his use of steel that held up not only the walls, but the floors and roof of the building making the metal truly the heart of the building, and the cladding secondary.

Though there have been many claims and counter-claims over the years, the matter was put to rest by the 1896 investigation of The Engineering Record. It declared that in spite of patents and innovations in Minnesota, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom that William LeBaron Jenney did in fact design and erect the world's first skyscraper.