Chicago’s ten-storey Home Insurance Building, completed in 1884, carried its floors on a skeleton of iron and Bessemer steel rather than on its own masonry walls. It is often called the world’s first skyscraper.
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Why the frame mattered
Until the middle of the 19th century, homes and offices rarely rose above five storeys. People could not be expected to walk any higher, let alone carry goods up.
William Le Baron Jenney designed the Home Insurance Building on the corner of LaSalle and Adams Street. A skeleton of vertical columns and horizontal beams supported it. At 138 feet, the finished building weighed about a third of a solid brick or stone building of the same size.
Jenney himself called it the first tall fireproof building put up in the West. City officials worried at first that a building both so tall and so light might not be safe.
The engineering press of the day doubted steel-framed buildings would ever rise past 25 storeys.
The fire that cleared the ground
The Home Insurance Building rose from a city rebuilding itself. The Great Chicago Fire of October 8, 1871, had burned a four-mile corridor through the young city, killed 300 people and destroyed 17,500 buildings. The rebuilding brought two new tools together: Elisha Otis’s safety elevator, first demonstrated in 1854, and the Bessemer process, which had made high-quality steel cheap enough to use in quantity since 1856.
An older claim from England
The Home Insurance Building’s title rests on steel, not on iron framing alone. The Ditherington Flax Mill in Shrewsbury, England, was built in 1797 and engineered by Charles Bage. It used an iron frame 87 years earlier and is often credited as the first building of its kind to do so. The Home Insurance Building’s distinction is narrower and later: the first tall building in the United States to carry its structure on a steel skeleton, not the first framed building anywhere.
What became of it
Chicago’s own success eventually caught up with Jenney’s building. It stood for less than fifty years before the city demolished it in 1931 to make way for the 54-storey Art Deco Field Building. By then the skyline it had started held towers many times its height, built on the same principle Jenney had proved. Let the frame carry the weight, and the walls can be almost anything the architect wants.
