The first skyscraper

The Home Insurance Building in Chicago is given a load-bearing frame of iron and steel, so that the walls do not have to carry the load. With the lift, it becomes possible to build tall.

The frame freed the façade and made the skyscraper the building type of the 20th century.

The Great Chicago Fire of 1871 devastated the city centre, and rebuilding was rapid and intense. Chicago was the railway hub and commercial centre of the Midwest, and land prices in the business district rose so steeply that it paid to build upwards. Two inventions made this possible. One was the safety lift, which Elisha Otis demonstrated in New York in the 1850s and which was then developed further. The other was cheaper iron and steel. Tall buildings with load-bearing masonry needed walls that became very thick at the bottom, which took up floor space and light. The solution was to let a frame carry the weight of the building, while the wall only had to keep out the weather.

The Home Insurance Building was designed by William Le Baron Jenney, an engineer who had trained in Paris and served in the Civil War. The building was completed in 1885 with ten storeys, and two more were later added. The frame consisted of cast-iron columns and beams of iron and, on the upper floors, of steel. The façades were still of stone and brick, and parts of them also bore loads, so historians have long debated whether the building really was the first skyscraper. It was also fireproofed with brick and clay around the steel. The building was demolished as early as 1931, but it is still regarded as a decisive step towards the pure steel frame.

Several of those who would develop the so-called Chicago School worked in Jenney’s office, and firms such as Burnham & Root and Holabird & Roche built ever taller buildings with large windows. Louis Sullivan gave the skyscraper an architectural language, with a clear base, a shaft of identical storeys and a crowning top, and he coined the motto that form follows function. New York soon took the lead with towers such as the Woolworth Building and the Empire State Building. In Sweden the American high-rises were both a model and a cautionary tale. The Kungstornen on Kungsgatan in Stockholm, completed in the mid-1920s, were an early Swedish experiment with American-style tower blocks in the city.