Reliance Building Architectural Model

This architectural object is inspired by the Reliance Building at the corner of State and Washington Streets in Chicago's Loop — a 14-storey tower of white glazed terracotta and plate glass completed in 1895 that invented the curtain wall fifty years before the rest of architecture caught up. Designed by Charles B. Atwood for D.H. Burnham & Company, on a base begun by John Wellborn Root, its façade is more than 85 percent glass — the first skyscraper ever built with large plate glass windows covering the majority of its surface area.

Britannica called it "a slim glass and steel tower that presaged Modernist skyscrapers." Mies van der Rohe drew his visionary all-glass Friedrichstrasse proposal in 1921 — the image that launched modern architectural theory — and is widely regarded as having drawn on the Reliance directly. The building was ahead of its time by half a century, and it has been a National Historic Landmark since 1976. Today it operates as the Staypineapple Hotel, its original mahogany doors, mosaic floors, and ornate elevator lobby largely intact.

Read the full Reliance Building architecture guide

 

The first glass skyscraper, distilled into form

 

Built for elevator entrepreneur William Hale under extraordinary circumstances — the upper floors of the previous building were literally suspended on jackscrews while new foundations were built beneath them — the Reliance was completed in a fifteen-day burst of steel erection in the summer of 1895. What Charles Atwood clad that steel frame with changed architecture: white glazed terracotta panels ornamented with French Gothic tracery, vast six-foot-square panes of plate glass, and projecting oriel windows that gave the façade extraordinary depth. The walls bear no structural load. They are a curtain of glass and white ceramic stretched over a steel cage — exactly the principle that Mies, Le Corbusier, and the entire International Style would spend the 20th century refining.

This architectural model focuses on the elements that define the building's identity:

• the white terracotta grid with its French Gothic-inspired tracery — colonnettes, intricate round motifs, the filigree of white against transparent glass
• the vast plate glass bays that make up over 85 percent of the upper façade
• the projecting oriel windows that give the curtain wall its depth and shadow

Reduced to object form, these elements allow the architectural logic of the Reliance — a building that sought to make the wall disappear — to be understood with particular clarity.

 

Why the Reliance Building works as an architectural model

 

The building translates powerfully into object form because its architecture is governed by:

• the relationship between the white terracotta grid and the large transparent openings — a dialogue of solid and void that reads at any scale
• the Gothic ornament giving the surface texture, shadow, and vertical emphasis without adding visual weight
• the projecting oriels creating depth across what might otherwise be a flat curtain
• an overall effect of lightness and luminosity that is immediately readable as something different from the masonry towers around it

At model scale, the Reliance reads as one of the most elegant façade compositions of the 19th century — or the 20th, for that matter. The quality that made it radical on State Street in 1895 is the same quality that makes it striking from across a room today.

Rather than functioning as a literal miniature, this object captures the architectural character of the Reliance Building.

 

Craft, materials, and finish

 

Each Reliance Building object is crafted with particular attention to the white terracotta grid and the interplay between the solid panels and the large glazed openings. The finish is pale and luminous — close to the white of Atwood's original glazed terracotta — allowing a raking light to bring out the Gothic ornament in the terracotta panels and the projection of the oriel bays, much as sunlight catches the real building on State Street.

The result is an object that sits naturally within:

• architectural and design studios
• curated interiors
• bookshelves and workspaces

It appeals to architects, historians of the Chicago School, lovers of the International Style who want to understand its origins — and anyone who has stood in front of this building and realised they are looking at a 19th-century building that looks like it was designed yesterday.

 

An object shaped by a leap into the future

 

The Reliance was not supposed to exist yet. In 1895, skyscrapers were still clad in stone and brick — materials associated with solidity, weight, and the reassurance of permanence. Atwood stripped all of that away and replaced it with glass and white ceramic. The building's structural engineer designed moment-resisting steel connections throughout the perimeter frame to handle the wind loads that a stone-clad building would never have had to worry about. The building was, in every sense, ahead of what the technology was supposed to be capable of.

What resulted was a skyscraper that looked like it belonged to a different century — which, in architectural terms, it did. The curtain wall didn't become standard practice until the 1950s. The Reliance got there in 1895.

As an object, that leap becomes something you can hold: a study in how far ahead of its time a single building can be.

 

Product details

 

• Subject: Reliance Building, 1 W. Washington Street / 32 N. State Street, Chicago, IL 60602
• Architects: John Wellborn Root (base, 1890); Charles B. Atwood (upper floors, 1894–95); both for D.H. Burnham & Company
• Structural engineer: Edward C. Shankland
• Architectural style: Chicago School / proto-curtain wall
• Completed: 1895
• Designations: National Historic Landmark (1976); National Register of Historic Places (1970); Chicago Landmark; Loop Retail Historic District
• Designed and made by: Chisel & Mouse

 

Learn more about the Reliance Building

 

For the full story — the jackscrews, the doctors and dentists, the Gothic terracotta that was supposed to be self-cleaning, the decades of decline, and the restoration that gave Chicago one of its finest historic hotels — see our in-depth architecture guide:

Reliance Building Architecture: Atwood, Burnham, and the First Glass Skyscraper