Track 5 - TALL / Presentation 1

Chicago’s Rock, Indiana’s Stone: Naess & Murphy’s Prudential Building 

Thomas Leslie, FAIA

Morrill Professor in Architecture 

Iowa State University

tleslie@iastate.edu

The first skyscraper in downtown Chicago since 1934, and tallest building constructed in the United States since 1940, Chicago’s 600-foot tall Prudential Building was a sign of the city’s impending rebirth when it opened in 1955, but it was also an aesthetic and material artifact of the city’s past. Clad in vertical stripes of aluminum and glass windows between Indiana limestone panels, its style recalled that of Depression-era monuments such as the Field Building or the Merchandise Mart. Its interior boasted massive, open-plan floor plates, high-speed elevators, and the highest illumination standards of any office building in the country. Yet its hallmark was its 65-ton bas-relief sculpture of the Rock of Gibraltar—the Prudential Company’s logo—carved by hand over three years by sculptor Alfonso Ianelli, one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s collaborators on projects such as Midway Gardens, completed in 1914. 

The Prudential inspired both praise and condemnation from critics; conservatives such as Chesly Manly found its “clean vertical lines” of limestone to be “proof of beauty in a skyscraper, while Architectural Forum objected that it was “no design experiment,” and that its stone striping related more to New York’s 1932 Rockefeller Center than to some of the more interesting skyscraper architecture of the time. The building’s status as the most cautious of modernist statements was affirmed just three years after its opening, when SOM’s elegant Inland Steel Building was completed just a few blocks away. Hailed as the “first skyscraper in the Loop in twenty years,” the reception of this structure cast aside the real achievements of the Prudential, rewriting history to reflect the sense of rejuvenation the city’s architectural community felt within Inland’s steel and glass aesthetics. 

This paper examines the history of the Prudential Building, with special attention to the role played by limestone in the development of its cautiously progressive exterior cladding. 

Thomas Leslie, FAIA, teaches building history, technology, and design.  His books include Beauty's Rigor: Patterns of Production in the Work of Pier Luigi Nervi (Illinois, 2017), Chicago Skyscrapers, 1871-1934 (Illinois, 2013), and Louis I. Kahn: Building Art, Building Science (Braziller, 2005).  Leslie is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome and of the American Institute of Architects, and will be a Visiting Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for the 2022-2023 academic year.