Inland Steel
Skidmore, Owings & Merrill; Netsch, Walter Andrew; Graham, Bruce
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Date
1957Description
The north elevation, looking south, showing service tower behind at left; Its principal designers were Bruce Graham and Walter Netsch of the Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. "Like Mies' Federal Center, Inland Steel is a powerful design that owes much of its success to the attention it pays to the street level. It retains an inviting and passable street corner, and is beautiful materially, with polished steel and translucent green glass gleaming in the Chicago sunlight. Inland Steel is the proud claimant to a series of firsts: the first skyscraper to be built with external supports and a flat, unadorned, thin steel-and-glass curtain wall (this allows for column-free office space, a strategy later used in the John Hancock building); the first major structure to be built on steel pilings instead of concrete (they extend 85 feet deep through mud and clay to bedrock); the first building with an attached structure for service and mechanical systems (which has since been outzoned, since people in the building have to cover too far a distance to get to the stairway in case of emergency); the first major high-rise with indoor, underground parking; and the first downtown project for the then-emerging firm of SOM and principal Bruce Graham." Source: Galinsky [website]; http://www.galinsky.com/ (accessed 12/2/2007)
Type of Work
office building; skyscraperSubject
architectural exteriors, business, commerce and trade, engineering and industry, manufacturing, International Style (modern European architecture style), Modernist
Rights
Rights Statement
Licensed for educational and research use by the MIT community only