30 W. Monroe St., Chicago, Illinois. County/parish: Cook.
Added to the National Register of Historic Places February 18, 2009. NRIS 09000024.
1 contributing building.
The Inland Steel Building is a 332-foot-tall (101 m) skyscraper at 30 West Monroe Street in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Constructed from 1956 to 1958, the building was designed by Bruce Graham and Walter Netsch of the architectural firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) in the International Style. It was originally the headquarters of the Inland Steel Company and was one of the first skyscrapers to be built in the Chicago Loop since World War II. The Inland Steel Building is designated a Chicago Landmark and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Inland Steel decided to develop the building because of space constraints in its previous headquarters, the First National Bank Building. In August 1954, Inland Steel announced plans to lease a site at Monroe and Dearborn streets from the Chicago Board of Education. SOM prepared plans for the site, which were announced in March 1955, and work began in January 1956. The building was nearly fully leased before it opened on February 3, 1958. Inland Steel owned the building until the late 1980s and eventually came to occupy two-thirds of the space. After a Japanese firm briefly owned the building, JPS Interests acquired it in 1989 and conducted renovations. Following another change of ownership, a syndicate that included the architect Frank Gehry bought the building in 2005 and resold it in 2007 to Capital Properties, which conducted another renovation. The New York Life Insurance Company seized ownership in 2025.
The Inland Steel Building consists of two distinct masses: a 19-story main structure at the corner of Monroe and Dearborn, and a 25-story mechanical tower to the east. The main building's facade consists of a curtain wall with green-tinted glass and stainless steel spandrel panels, columns, and mullions. The facade's columns carry the building's entire weight, allowing the majority of the spaces inside to be designed without any interior columns. The first two stories are recessed from ground level, while the upper stories were largely designed as offices with a modular floor grid and movable partitions. SOM also built a dining suite on the 13th floor and an executive suite on the 19th floor. The mechanical tower contains all the stairs, elevators, and utility ducts. Over the years, the building has received praise for its design and materials, and its architecture, while not widely copied, has influenced the design of other buildings.
(read more...)National Park Service documentation: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/28892420