RELIANCE BUILDING ARCHITECTURE: ATWOOD, BURNHAM, AND THE FIRST GLASS SKYSCRAPER

The Reliance Building at the corner of State and Washington Streets in Chicago's Loop is one of the most prophetic buildings ever constructed — a 14-storey tower of white terracotta and plate glass completed in 1895 that anticipated the glass-curtain-wall skyscrapers of the mid-20th century by more than fifty years. Its steel skeleton carries all the structural load; the exterior walls are a thin membrane of glazed white terracotta panels and enormous plate-glass windows, with the glass making up more than 85 percent of the façade surface. It is the first skyscraper ever built with large plate glass windows covering the majority of its surface area.

The building was designed by Charles B. Atwood for D.H. Burnham & Company, on a structural base begun by John Wellborn Root in 1890 before his death in 1891. It was erected under extraordinary circumstances — with the upper floors of the previous building literally suspended on jackscrews while new foundations were built beneath them — and completed in a fifteen-day burst of steel erection in the summer of 1895. When it opened, doctors and dentists moved in specifically for the light: the building's vast windows gave medical practitioners the daylight they needed for examinations, and the gleaming white terracotta signalled an image of hygiene and modernity that no competitor could match.

Mies van der Rohe's visionary 1921 proposal for an all-glass Friedrichstrasse skyscraper in Berlin — the image that launched modern architectural theory — is widely regarded as the Reliance Building's direct descendant. Mies knew the building. He had seen what glass could do.

The Reliance is a National Historic Landmark, a Chicago Landmark, and listed on the National Register of Historic Places. After decades of decline and near-demolition, it was restored in the late 1990s and today operates as the Staypineapple Hotel — its lobby, elevator hall, original mahogany doors, and mosaic floors intact.

  • Written by Gavin Paisley, director & model-maker at Chisel & Mouse based in West Sussex, England.
  • Last updated: 25-Mar-2026.

Photograph by J. Crocker, licensed via Wikimedia Commons.

Reliance Building facade architectural scale model

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What is the Reliance Building?

The Reliance Building was commissioned by William Ellery Hale, founder of the Hale Elevator Company and a Chicago real estate developer with a particular interest in the new technology his firm was helping to make possible. In 1880, Hale had purchased a small lot at the southwest corner of State and Washington Streets — one of the most commercially active intersections in Chicago — containing the four-storey First National Bank Building. By the late 1880s he wanted a modern 14-storey skyscraper in its place. The problem was the existing tenants.

The upper-floor tenants' leases did not expire until May 1894. Rather than wait, Hale and his engineers devised a solution of breathtaking boldness: they would raise the upper floors of the existing building on jackscrews — literally lifting the second, third, and fourth storeys into the air — demolish the basement and first floor beneath them, and build the new foundations and ground floor while the tenants continued doing business above. The sensation, as one commentator noted, of doing business above an open excavation must have been considerable. The operation was completed successfully in 1890, and the new ground floor was promptly leased to Carson, Pirie, Scott & Company, the department store, as a dry-goods outlet.

At this point, John Wellborn Root had designed the granite base and first floor. Then Root died in January 1891, and Burnham — simultaneously organising the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 — turned to his new chief designer, Charles Bowler Atwood, to complete the building. By 1894, when the upper-floor leases finally expired, the economic climate had changed and Hale revised the brief. Atwood designed a tower to compete with the just-completed Columbus Memorial Building directly across the street — and what he produced changed architecture.

Photograph by a US government employee, in the public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Facts panel

Fourteen-storey steel-framed office skyscraper at the southwest corner of State and Washington Streets, the Loop, Chicago, Illinois. Designed 1890–95, opened March 1895.

  • Architects: John Wellborn Root (basement and first floor, 1890); Charles B. Atwood (upper thirteen floors, 1894–95); both for D.H. Burnham & Company
  • Structural engineer: Edward C. Shankland
  • Client: William Ellery Hale
  • Construction begins: 1890 (jackscrews and new foundations)
  • Upper floors begun: 1894 (after leases expired)
  • Steel framing of top ten floors: Completed in fifteen days, 16 July – 1 August 1895
  • Opened: March 1895
  • Address: 1 W. Washington Street / 32 N. State Street, Loop, Chicago, IL 60602
  • Height: 14 stories
  • Structure: Steel skeleton frame; moment-resisting connections throughout the perimeter; one-third the weight of an equivalent stone structure
  • Exterior: White glazed terracotta panels with French Gothic-inspired tracery (upper floors); brown Scotch granite with cast-iron Gothic ornament (base, Root's design); plate glass windows covering over 85% of the upper façade
  • Key firsts: First skyscraper with large plate glass windows covering the majority of its surface area; first office building clad in white glazed terracotta; among the first skyscrapers to offer electricity and telephone service in all offices
  • Designations: National Register of Historic Places (1970); National Historic Landmark (7 January 1976); Chicago Landmark; part of the Loop Retail Historic District
  • Notable tenants: Carson, Pirie, Scott & Co. (ground floor, 1890s); doctors and dentists (upper floors); Al Capone's dentist
  • Restoration: City of Chicago purchased building 1994 for $1.3 million; exterior restoration 1994–95; interior conversion 1999 ($27.5 million total); National Trust for Historic Preservation Honor Award (2001)
  • Current use: Staypineapple, An Iconic Hotel, The Loop (122 rooms); Atwood Café (ground floor, named for the building's designer)
  • Current status (March 2026): Active hotel; building fully operational; original architectural features substantially intact

Architects: Root and Atwood

John Wellborn Root (1850–1891) designed the building's brown granite base — solid, weighty, and articulated with cast-iron Gothic ornament — before his death from pneumonia in January 1891 at the age of 41. The base reflects his intention for the ground floor to be occupied by a department store: large openings, generous glazing, a sense of transparency at street level. The brown granite grounds the building with appropriate weight, while the Gothic filigree of the ironwork connects it to the soaring vertical tradition Root was exploring in his final years.

Charles Bowler Atwood (1849–1895) was a Boston-trained architect whom Daniel Burnham recruited to D.H. Burnham & Company after Root's death. Atwood had designed the fine arts building — the only permanent structure — for the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, and had developed through that work an extraordinary facility with white glazed terracotta, a material he used to give the Exposition's classical buildings their characteristic shimmering brilliance. When he applied the same material to the Reliance's upper thirteen floors, the result was something entirely new: a skyscraper skin that appeared almost dematerialised, a cage of white light and glass in place of the masonry mass that had defined tall buildings until that moment.

Atwood died in December 1895, just months after the Reliance opened — one of the more poignant coincidences in American architectural history, given how fully the building expressed his abilities at their peak.

For Burnham's full career — the partnership with Root, the World's Columbian Exposition, the Monadnock, the Flatiron, and the Plan of Chicago — see our dedicated Daniel Burnham architect guide.

Architectural character: the proto-curtain wall

The Reliance's upper façade is one of the most radical surfaces produced in the 19th century. To stand in front of it on State Street is to look at something that should not have existed for another fifty years.

The steel frame carries all the load. Each storey's terracotta and glass infill is an individual unit, supported by a shelf projecting from the steel structure at each floor level — exactly the principle of the curtain wall that would define the glass skyscrapers of the 1950s and 60s. The walls bear no weight. They keep out the weather. That is all they are asked to do.

Within this structural logic, Atwood specified the largest plate glass then commercially available — six-foot-square lights flanked by operable double-hung windows in projecting bay oriels — producing a façade that is more than 85 percent glass. The terracotta panels between and around the windows are white and glazed, ornamented with French Gothic-inspired tracery: clusters of delicate colonnettes at the corners, intricate round motifs derived from medieval cathedral decoration, a filigree of white against the transparent surface behind. The Gothic ornament is not historicist nostalgia — it is a solution to the problem of how to articulate a surface that has no structural role to perform. Atwood used it to give the cage of glass its vertical emphasis and its decorative identity without in any way compromising the transparency of the whole.

The effect, as the Chicago Architecture Center has described it, is one of extraordinary lightness — a building whose glazed terracotta and copious fenestration give "a strong grid pattern with broad ribbons of glass windows" that transforms the dense masonry streetscape of the Loop into something entirely other. The building is, in a phrase that circulated at the time, self-cleaning: the glazed terracotta was believed to shed Chicago's coal-smoke pollution in the rain. That belief proved optimistic, but the aspiration itself — a building that repels urban grime — is a modernist idea presented in 1895.

The building for doctors and light

The Reliance's original tenants tell their own story. The building was designed specifically to attract medical and dental practitioners — professionals who needed more natural light than any other office workers of the era, for whom the ability to see clearly during examinations was not an amenity but a professional necessity. The building's enormous windows were not primarily an aesthetic gesture: they were a practical response to a specific brief.

The white terracotta reinforced the medical character. It projected an image of hygiene — of cleanliness, whiteness, and modernity — that made it the appropriate address for doctors who needed to reassure nervous patients. The building was not so much a symbol of commercial aspiration as of professional confidence.

Al Capone's dentist was among the building's most famous tenants — a detail that lends the Reliance's gleaming hygienic façade a pleasingly ironic edge.

Photograph by Mildredsam, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Decline, rescue, and the Staypineapple

The Reliance's post-war history follows a familiar Chicago pattern. The Great Depression reduced occupancy, and the building began its long decline from the 1940s onwards. By 1993 it had just six tenants. The white terracotta, never quite as self-cleaning as advertised, had turned grey-black with accumulated soot. Plate glass had been replaced with plywood. The Gothic filigree was obscured. The building that had announced a new era in architecture was being used to sell lingerie from its ground floor, its significance almost entirely forgotten.

The Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois championed its preservation. In 1994, the City of Chicago purchased the building for $1.3 million — a remarkable price for a National Historic Landmark — and funded the exterior restoration: all windows replaced, damaged terracotta panels repaired or renewed, the white glazed surface restored to something approaching Atwood's original vision. The building was then sold to a private developer, who undertook a $27.5 million conversion of the interior as the Hotel Burnham — the name paying tribute to the firm's principal.

Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley received the National Trust for Historic Preservation Honor Award in 2001 for the city's role in the building's rescue. In 2016 the hotel was acquired by Pineapple Hospitality and became the Staypineapple, An Iconic Hotel, The Loop — 122 rooms, with original mahogany doors repurposed as room entrances, mosaic floors restored, and the ground-floor restaurant named the Atwood Café in honour of the building's chief designer.

The lobby is open to visitors. Walking through it — the wrought-iron detailing, the marble wainscoting, the restored elevator hall — is a direct encounter with the building Root and Atwood made.

The Reliance and Mies van der Rohe

The connection between the Reliance Building and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's visionary 1921 proposal for an all-glass skyscraper on the Friedrichstrasse in Berlin — the image that effectively launched modern architectural theory — has been noted by several historians. Mies's proposal, a faceted glass tower whose entire surface was transparent, was considered unbuildable fantasy when he drew it. The Reliance, completed twenty-six years earlier, demonstrated that it was not.

Mies arrived in Chicago in 1938, became director of the architecture programme at the Illinois Institute of Technology, and spent the rest of his career there. He knew the Reliance. His glass towers of the 1950s — most notably 860–880 Lake Shore Drive (1951) — realised at full scale what the Reliance had first attempted in 1895.

The connection is not merely technological. The Reliance's combination of structural transparency, ornamental restraint, and the primacy of light over mass is a recognisably modernist sensibility, expressed in the stylistic language of the 1890s. It was, as Britannica put it, "a slim glass and steel tower that presaged Modernist skyscrapers."

Photograph by Micael Camozzi, in the public domain.

The model-maker's lens

We modelled the Reliance Building because it is the most visually arresting of the three Burnham buildings in the collection — the one that looks most radically unlike its moment in history, and the one that rewards the closest looking.

  • Focus — the upper façade as Atwood designed it: the white terracotta grid with its Gothic tracery, the vast plate glass bays, the projecting oriel windows that give the surface its depth and shadow
  • Detail — the Gothic colonnettes at the corners, the intricate round motifs in the terracotta panels; at model scale these become the texture that makes the surface shimmer rather than read as a flat plane
  • How it reads at small scale — very well, because the building's character is in the relationship between the white terracotta grid and the large transparent openings — a relationship of solid and void that is immediately legible at any scale
  • How to display — the building rewards being positioned where light can strike the façade at an angle, casting the projecting bay windows and terracotta ornament into relief; straight-on, the grid of the curtain wall is most clearly read; from a slight angle, the depth of the oriels becomes apparent

There is something almost paradoxical about modelling a building whose entire point is transparency — a building that sought to dematerialise the wall. The model holds what the building aspired to: not the glass itself, but the idea of a surface so light, so white, so articulated, that it barely seems to be there at all.

View the Reliance Building architectural model

Frequently asked questions about the Reliance Building

Who designed the Reliance Building?

The basement and first floor were designed by John Wellborn Root of Burnham & Root in 1890. The upper thirteen floors were designed by Charles B. Atwood of D.H. Burnham & Company in 1894–95, following Root's death in January 1891. Structural engineering was by Edward C. Shankland.

Where is the Reliance Building?

At the southwest corner of State and Washington Streets in Chicago's Loop — address listed as both 1 W. Washington Street and 32 N. State Street.

Why were the upper floors of the Reliance Building built years after the lower floors?

The existing tenants on the upper floors of the previous building refused to leave until their leases expired in 1894. Rather than wait, the contractor raised the upper floors on jackscrews while new foundations were built beneath them. Construction of the upper thirteen floors only began when the leases finally expired.

What makes the Reliance Building architecturally significant?

It is the first skyscraper to have large plate glass windows covering the majority of its surface area — over 85 percent glass — making it the direct ancestor of the glass-curtain-wall skyscrapers of the 20th century. It was also the first office building clad in white glazed terracotta.

What is the Reliance Building used for today?

Since 1999 it has operated as a hotel, currently the Staypineapple, An Iconic Hotel, The Loop (formerly the Hotel Burnham), with 122 rooms. The ground-floor restaurant is the Atwood Café, named after the building's chief designer.

What are the Reliance Building's landmark designations?

National Register of Historic Places (1970), National Historic Landmark (1976), Chicago Landmark, and part of the Loop Retail Historic District.

What other buildings did Burnham design?

The Chisel & Mouse collection includes three Burnham buildings: the Reliance (1895), the Monadnock Building (1891–93), and the Flatiron Building (1902). See our Daniel Burnham architect guide for the full story.

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