Thursday, January 9, 2020

The Home Insurance Building

The construction of tall towers could provide much needed density to help reduce housing costs and inequality in cities such as New York and San Francisco. The Home Insurance Building, Chicago’s tallest structure, was built in 1927. It was constructed in 1901 and served as the location for the first two floors of the New York Public Library. It was demolished for the construction of the Field Building, also known as the LaSalle Bank Building. The Home Insurance Building was an important part of Chicago history.

home life insurance building opens in chicago 1884

Steel-girder construction was first used in Chicago in 1896, when William Le Baron Jenney built a ten-story Home Insurance Company Building. The building was designed in 1884 by Jenney for the Home Insurance Company. But one thing stands out, and that is the honesty of the American materials and workmanship that went into this pioneer structure. Henry Penn, Chicago representative of the American Institute of Steel Construction, asserts that he found no deterioration in the metal work he has examined. It has been reported that deterioration was found In metal exposed to the air In the elevator shaft.

When Was The Home Insurance Building Built

He was told to provide the maximum number of small offices above the second floor. He saw at a glance that neither brick nor stone would carry the load per unit of section. Architects often had built iron columns into masonry piers where the load was exceptionally great, and Mr. Jenney had done the same thing in the Fletcher & Sharo building at Indianapolis. The material solution of the problem was to make this construction general, and inclose an iron column within each of the small masonry piers, thus satisfying the three requirements—small piers, strong and fireproof.

They are representative men in the architectural profession, and it will be hard to choose, and when it is done it will be because of the fancy of the committee for some one design rather than because of any weakness in the others. L. B. Jenney, and that architect has, upon the orders of the company, let the cut stone and other contracts; but while this architect’s designs are highly meritorious,and would give to the company a magnificent structure, no design has as yet been accepted. To transport people within the building, skyscraper needed elevators.

The Home Life Insurance Building: A Landmark Of Ingenuity

The plumbing of this building has been referred to already in our columns, but the work just finished on the eighth floor deserves specification, and in the building throughout no expenses nor pains have been spared to have the plumbing as good as any office building in the country. On the floor named—in one chamber and everything in marble—are twenty closets, five compartments, three wash basins, and a slop-sink which is one of the finest put up in Chicago, being all marble in panel work. In the hallway of each floor there is a beautiful drinking fountain. Mr. Edward Baggot, whose work it is, likewise furnished one of the floors with gas fixtures at Fifth avenue and Madison street.

With normal winds, a 1,000-foot building could sway several inches on a given day. On days with winds of 50 miles per hour, this tower can reach heights of six feet. This structure’s height can increase to two feet in the rare case of high winds of 100 miles per hour. Skyscrapers can have a life span of more than 100 years and up to 150 years as long as the structural design and construction quality meet national and international standards.

building construction

June 5, 1644, the court records show, “he was fined for strikig Thomas Dunham 3s 4d.” At the same time Dunham, for challenging Jenney to fight him and coming to his bed to do it, was fined 10s. Six years ago he was chosen to represent America before the world’s congress of architects at Madrid, and because it was in Spain he sat down and learned to write and speak in Spanish before starting. You can see that the Home Insurance Center was the beginning of a new era- The skyscrapers. The material on this site can not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with prior written permission of Answers.

home life insurance building opens in chicago 1884

Chicago is the home of the world’s first skyscraper, and the Home Insurance building, recently demolished to make way for the huge forty-three story Field Building, has been awarded the honor of being the first structure ever to use the skeleton type of construction. A whole window bay taken from between the third and fourth floors Is to be installed In the architectural section of the Rosenwald Museuni of Science and Industry. The architec- tural section of tlie museum will dem- the art of building from the (lawn of civilization to the present time and the Home Insurance bay, measuring 16xl6 feet, will be installed Jn the department showing the birth and growth of the skyscraper.

The next year, it was overtaken by the 26-story New York World Building. Fueled by an intense demand for office space in downtown areas, the skyscraper transformed the appearance of American cities.Brick could not bear the weight of buildings higher than five or six stories. But beginning in Chicago in 1884, steel frame construction allowed architects to design buildings of unprecedented height.

home life insurance building opens in chicago 1884

Aon, a giant insurance and brokerage company that adopted its name in 1987, resulted from the merger of Combined Insurance Corporation, founded by Chicagoan W. Clement Stone in 1919, and the Ryan Insurance Group, founded by Patrick G. Ryan in 1964. The Manhattan Building, which is located at 553 West 57th Street, is not only the tallest skyscraper in the world, but it is also the first to install elevators. It was the world’s first structure to have an electric elevator, which was run by an assistant superintendent. The Manhattan Building, which is the world’s oldest surviving skyscraper, was built entirely with a skeleton supporting structure, making it the only one of its kind. Except for the most extreme skyscrapers, all are made up of a skeletal structure as well as a skin that surrounds it.

As the city looked to rebuild, architects pondered what the next generation of urban structures looked like. With commerce and industry downtown exploding exponentially, these structures had to accommodate more residential space and more office space — leading to verticality as a solution. And with the Great Fire as their lesson, architects also knew these structures had to be much more durable than those that had been so easily destroyed. The Merchandise Mart, which spans two city blocks along the Chicago River, is 25 stories tall, has 4200,000 square feet of floor space, and was the largest building in the world when it opened in 1930.

After a few years Allstate switched from mail to the more traditional agent sales and acquired a life insurance branch, but auto insurance remained its specialty. In 1939 Allstate was the first company to tailor its rates to the characteristics of automobiles and their owners, such as make, mileage, and age. And, as with fire insurance companies in the previous century, Allstate's strategists realized their best chance for steady profits lay in improving safety.

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