Crane Company Building
- Architect
- Holabird & Root
- Year
- 1912
- Style
- Neoclassical
- City
- Chicago, IL
The Crane Company Building is a twelve-story steel-frame skyscraper built in 1912 at 836 S. Michigan Avenue for the Crane Company, then considered the United States' leading manufacturer of iron and brass plumbing and heating fixtures and a major employer in both the Chicago and national economies. Designed by Holabird & Roche in the Classical Revival style, it applies the tripartite base-shaft-cornice formula common to early Chicago skyscrapers to a manufacturer's headquarters.
the building
Base, shaft, and cap. The facade is organized in three sections: limestone-faced first and second floors with piers supporting a cornice, a shaft of red brick from the fourth through eleventh floors trimmed with terra cotta keystones and sills, and a terra cotta-clad twelfth floor topped by its own cornice.
Valves in the terra cotta. The twelfth-floor terra cotta panels are decorated with depictions of Crane Company valves — the plumbing and heating fixtures that built the company's fortune — worked directly into the building's ornament.
the style
Holabird & Roche used the Classical Revival vocabulary — limestone base, brick shaft, terra cotta crown — a formula 1900s Chicago architects often applied to steel-frame office towers to lend them a sense of classical order.
More on Neoclassicalsignificance
The Crane Company Building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
nearby
- Johnson Publishing Company Building
- Ludington Building
- Blackstone Hotel
- Dearborn Station
- Lakeside Press Building
- Pontiac Building