Lee Bey: The Urban Observer

(photos by Lee Bey) 

I'm convinced Chicago does not like the Aon Building. Probably never has.

Completed in 1973, this tall, granite-clad box east of Michigan Avenue on Randolph never really earned a place among the city’s most-loved skyscrapers, despite it being (for now, at least) Chicago's second tallest building and the third-tallest in the U.S. With its near-white color and vertical sweep of deep-set windows, the former Standard Oil headquarters looked more like a fluted column; an intentional deviation from the dark, steel-and-glass modernism expressed in the work Mies van der Rohe, C.F. Murphy & Associates and Skidmore Owings & Merrill. 

(Above: A view of the second floor lobby as the elevator doors close) 

“Architects, like women, are susceptible; what is currently fashionable influences them,” the building's architect Edward Durrell Stone told the Chicago Tribune during the building’s construction. “And what has been currently fashionable is the glass box.”

(Above: My office is on the 22nd floor of the Aon Tower. The views are striking.) 

Stone clad the 80-story tower with 14 million pounds of marble from the mountains above Carrara, Italy---the quarries where Michelangelo himself selected marble four centuries earlier. Within a decade the marble panels were in danger of falling off so the tower was re-clad in granite at a cost of $60 million, half the building’s original $120 million construction price. Still, Aon Center boasts a number of great features including virtually column-free floors and a bi-level plaza.