List of tallest buildings in Chicago
is the third-largest city in the United States, with a metropolitan area of over 9 million people. It is home to over 1,250 completed high-rises,137 of which stand taller than as of 2026. The birthplace of the skyscraper, Chicago has always played a prominent role in their development, and its skyline spans the full history of skyscraper construction. The tallest building in the city is the 110-story Willis Tower, which rises in the Chicago Loop and was completed in 1974. Of the fifteen tallest buildings in the United States, five are in Chicago. Chicago's skyline is the second largest in the United States, in North America, and in the Western Hemisphere, after New York City.
The Home Insurance Building, completed in 1885, is regarded as the world's first skyscraper. This building used the steel-frame method, innovated in Chicago; it was originally built with 10 stories, and later expanded to 12, to a height of, an enormous height for the 19th century. Being the inventor of the skyscraper, Chicago went through a series of early high-rise construction booms that lasted from the 1880s to the mid-1930s, during which nine of the city's 100 tallest buildings were completed. Chicago and New York City were the only cities in the world with large, high-rise skylines during the first half of the 20th century. Chicago then went through an even larger building boom that lasted from the early 1960s to the early 1990s, in which many notable commercial skyscrapers were built, such as the city's fourth-tallest building, the Aon Center, its fifth tallest, 875 North Michigan Avenue, and Willis Tower, which was the tallest building in the world upon its completion until 1993, and the tallest in the United States until 2013. For most of the 20th century until the 1990s, Chicago had the second largest skyline in the world.
A third boom began in the 2000s, which saw the completion of the city's second tallest building, the Trump International Hotel & Tower, and its third tallest, St Regis Chicago, the tallest structure designed by a woman. Chicago leads the nation in the twenty tallest women-designed towers in the world, thanks to contributions by Jeanne Gang and Natalie de Blois. The skyline has expanded into the South Loop with skyscrapers such as NEMA Chicago and One Museum Park, as well as westwards into the West Loop and Fulton Market areas. Wolf Point is home to a number of new developments such as Salesforce Tower Chicago. Other notable new skyscrapers include 110 North Wacker, One Chicago Square, and 1000M. The tallest building under construction is 400 Lake Shore, built on the site of the cancelled Chicago Spire project; it scheduled to be completed by 2027.
The tallest buildings in Chicago are concentrated in the downtown areas of the Loop, Streeterville, River North, the South Loop, and the West Loop. Other high-rises extend north along the waterfront into North Side districts such as the Gold Coast, Lincoln Park, Lakeview, Uptown and Edgewater, bounded by Lake Michigan to the east. Some high-rises also extend south from downtown along the waterfront to South Side districts such as Kenwood, Hyde Park, and South Shore, ultimately forming a contiguous area of high-rises that is among the largest in the United States. Chicago's skyline is a cultural icon of the city, and has appeared in a variety of films and popular media.
History
First skyscrapers
Towards the second half of the 19th century, Chicago grew to become the second-largest city in the United States as a railroad and trading hub. After the Great Chicago Fire destroyed most of the wooden structures in the city in 1871, Chicago was rebuilt on large plots of land in a grid network and followed new city ordinances that prohibited wooden construction. These factors encouraged the construction of taller buildings in Chicago. New technologies such as the development of the elevator and in heating, lighting, and ventilation made taller buildings more viable.The first skyscraper in the world is considered to be the 10-story Home Insurance Building, built in 1885, due to its use of structural steel in a metal frame design. The building was designed by William Le Baron Jenney, who had been trained as an engineer in France and was a leading architect in Chicago. The design was innovative, incorporating structural steel into the building's internal metal frame alongside the traditional wrought iron. This frame took the weight of the floors of the building, and in addition, helped to support the weight of the external walls, proving an important step towards creating the genuine non-structural curtain walls that became a feature of later skyscrapers.These innovations caught on quickly in Chicago, as the city's earliest high-rises followed suit. Among the world's first high-rise boom occurred in Chicago from 1888 onwards, and by 1893, Chicago had built 12 skyscrapers between 16 and 20 stories tall, tightly clustered in the center of the financial district. These include the Tacoma Building, The Rookery, Monadnock Building, and the Rand McNally Building, which was the world's first all-steel framed skyscraper. Structural engineers specializing in the steel frame design began to establish practices in Chicago.
One of the tallest buildings completed during this boom was the Masonic Temple, built by the Freemasons at a time when they were a fast-growing community in the city. The Freemasons competed with a local rival, the Odd Fellows, who intended to build a much higher skyscraper, tall, that would have been the tallest building in the world, which was never built. Until the turn of the 20th century, Chicago led New York City in high-rise construction. It was not until 1895 when New York City would surpass Chicago in the height of its high-rises, with the American Surety Building. In 1892, owing to the oversupply of office space, Chicago limited the construction of high-rises to under 150 feet. By the 1890s, a distinct architectural style emerged from Chicago, named the Chicago school. This style involved placing rich, ornate designs on the outside of skyscrapers at the ground level and simpler, plainer ornamentation on the upper levels, with strong vertical lines.
1900s–1930s
Chicago's construction boom continued into the early 20th century, up until the mid-1910s when World War I began. The city's elevated train network opened by 1910, making it easier for more workers to come downtown. By the end of the 1910s, Chicago had the second largest number of headquarters in the United States. Local architectural firms such as Daniel H. Burnham and then Graham, Anderson, Probst & White continued to design skyscrapers in the Chicago style popularized in the previous decade. The Masonic Temple Building was overtake in height by the Montgomery Ward Building in 1899. The building served as the headquarters for Montgomery Ward, the United States' oldest mail order firm.Following a pause in development during World War I, a larger construction boom took place in the 1920s until the early 1930s. Limited wartime construction created supply shortages in the city, and rent levels rose in response by around 100 percent between 1919 and 1924. This level of potential profits encouraged an explosion of new building projects in the city. The 1892 height limit was relaxed in 1920 to 260 feet, and in 1923, Chicago passed its first comprehensive zoning ordinance, permitting taller towers, but with more controls on overall volumes.
One of the first new skyscrapers of this boom was the Wrigley Building, briefly Chicago's tallest building from 1922 to 1924. It was the first major office building north of the Chicago River. The Wrigley Building was surpassed by the Chicago Temple Building in 1924. Besides as an office, the Temple Building was also used as the congregation of the First United Methodist Church of Chicago. The Morrison Hotel became the tallest hotel building in the world when it was built in 1925. The tower is an expansion to the existing Morrison's hotel, and it was the first building outside of New York City to have over 40 stories. Significant additions include the Pittsfield Building, the Carbide & Carbon Building, and the Palmolive Building, all incorporating architectural features of the Art Deco style. Another mixed-use building was the Civic Opera Building, which in addition to office space, housed a 3,563-seat opera house, which serves as the permanent home of the Lyric Opera of Chicago.
While shorter than the aforementioned buildings, the Tribune Tower is one of this period's most famous skyscrapers. The tower emerged from a design competition held by the Tribune Company in 1922 to celebrate its 75th anniversary. The Tribune newspaper, one of the largest in the world at the time, used the competition to build a loyal following amongst its readership and generate free publicity. The final design was decided by competition panel mainly made up of the company's appointees, who chose John Howells and Raymond Hood's design. The resulting tower was a conservative Gothic design; controversy about the decision broke out almost immediately. Architect Louis Sullivan criticized the chosen design as being derivative of the Woolworth Tower. Regardless of its critics, the Tribune received as many as 20,000 visitors to its observation gallery when it opened in 1925. The unbuilt second-place entry in the competition, a more simplified stepped-back design by Eliel Saarinen, also proved highly influential.
In 1930, the Chicago Board of Trade Building was completed, replacing an earlier high-rise designed by William W. Boyington as the site for the Chicago Board of Trade. The skyscraper is known for its Art Deco architecture, sculptures, large-scale stone carving, and its large trading floors. The CBOT has operated in the building continuously since. In the same year, a notable high-rise, was opened; with 4 million square feet of floor space, the 25-story Merchandise Mart, wider than it was tall, was the largest building in the world by volume. Due to the Great Depression, the skyscraper boom came to an end in the early 1930s. The Home Insurance Building was demolished in 1931 to make way for the Field Building, which was completed in 1934; the Field Building is the last major building to be added before a hiatus in skyscraper construction over the next twenty years.