Home Insurance Building
Overview
Chicago
Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...
, Illinois
Illinois
Illinois is the fifth-most populous state of the United States of America, and is often noted for being a microcosm of the entire country. With Chicago in the northeast, small industrial cities and great agricultural productivity in central and northern Illinois, and natural resources like coal,...
, USA and destroyed in 1931 to make way for the Field Building (now the LaSalle National Bank Building
LaSalle National Bank Building
LaSalle National Bank Building is an art deco office building at 135 South LaSalle Street in the Loop community area of Chicago, Illinois, USA....
). It was the first building to use structural steel
Structural steel
Structural steel is steel construction material, a profile, formed with a specific shape or cross section and certain standards of chemical composition and mechanical properties...
in its frame, but the majority of its structure was composed of cast
Cast iron
Cast iron is derived from pig iron, and while it usually refers to gray iron, it also identifies a large group of ferrous alloys which solidify with a eutectic. The color of a fractured surface can be used to identify an alloy. White cast iron is named after its white surface when fractured, due...
and wrought iron
Wrought iron
thumb|The [[Eiffel tower]] is constructed from [[puddle iron]], a form of wrought ironWrought iron is an iron alloy with a very low carbon...
. It is generally noted as the first tall building to be supported, both inside and outside, by a fireproof metal frame. Although the Ditherington Flax Mill
Ditherington Flax Mill
Ditherington Flax Mill , located in Ditherington, a suburb of Shrewsbury, England, is the oldest iron framed building in the world. As such, it is seen as the "grandfather of skyscrapers", despite being only as tall as a modern five-story building. Its importance was officially recognised in the...
, also a fireproof-metal-framed building, was built earlier, it was only five stories tall.
Due to the Chicago building's unique architecture and unique weight-bearing frame, it is considered to be the first skyscraper
Skyscraper
A skyscraper is a tall, continuously habitable building of many stories, often designed for office and commercial use. There is no official definition or height above which a building may be classified as a skyscraper...
in the world; however, it was never the tallest building in the world or Chicago.
