Quote:
Originally Posted by ardecila
Longer than that... the quarter-block office towers from the 1910s and 1920s with light courts were seen as pretty chunky too
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Right, the relatively large block size of downtown Chicago has long led to pretty beefy buildings of all heights, but when I was talking about office "towers", I meant buildings over 500' tall (my apologies for not being more clear), and all of chicago's pre-war 500+ footers have some form of tapering massing as they rise.
The Prudential building was really the first "big" office tower in chicago (ie. >500') to completely embrace the MCM aesthetic of the big fat wide box-tower, a very basic and economical form repeated countless times (with different curtain wall dressing) over the past 7 decades.