Home Insurance Building, Chicago

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A ten-storey office building at the corner of LaSalle and Adams Streets in Chicago, designed by William Le Baron Jenney and completed in 1885, with two further storeys added about 1890. It is conventionally called the first skyscraper because its floor and wall loads were carried on a metal skeleton of columns and beams rather than on load-bearing masonry. The claim is genuinely contested, and the reasons are worth knowing: the frame combined cast-iron columns with wrought-iron beams, with Bessemer steel beams used only in the upper storeys; the masonry piers were not entirely relieved of load; and rival claims exist for earlier partial iron framing. When the building was demolished in 1931 its structure was examined, and that examination is the source of much of what is known about how it was actually built. It is a rare case where a demolition produced the evidence for a historical claim about a building.