McCormick Place

“McCormick Place Convention Hall”

Chicago, Illinois (built 1968-1971)

Architects: C.F. Murphy Associates
Lead Designers: Gene Summers and Helmut Jahn
Landscape Design: Tom Beeby (Ron Krueck, Keith Olsen Sr., Lucinda Mellott and others)

Site: 51.5 Acres
Gross Floor Area: 2,100,000 square feet
Foundation: existing remains of burned prior 1960 building
Pavilion structure: four ranks of nine files of cruciform steel clad reinforced concrete columns, on 150 foot centers, providing fireproofing, two way truss roof form cantilevered 75 feet from outer row of columns, roof dimension is 600 feet by 1350 feet, an area of 19 acres. Original building had a structural bay module of 30 feet by 30 feet, meaning the adopted 150 foot centers for the upper level columns reused existing foundation elements. Truss depth is 15 feet; floor to bottom chord of trusses is 50 feet.

Space use:
Upper level: exhibition hall, theater
Lower level: reused meeting rooms, storage spaces, lower level of theater
Original Purpose - Convention Hall for the City of Chicago
Current use - still part of the much expanded convention center complex
Theater - at 4500 seats still one of the largest in Chicago
Garage - 2000 cars

Costs:
Budgeted: $72,000,000
Construction $85,000,000
Final: $97,000,000

“McCormick Place is a multi-level convention center building situated on a prominent lakefront site in Burnham Park on the near South Side of Chicago, Illinois. Designed in the International Style, it was built between 1968 and 1971. The building was designed by C.F. Murphy Associates, one of Chicago’s most significant post-World War II architectural firms. The building replaced an earlier McCormick Place building which was mostly lost to fire in 1967, and it reused foundations and portions of surviving structure in the rebuilding. This building was the sole convention center building in the current McCormick Center complex until the McCormick Center North building in 1986.

McCormick place is also at least locally significant and it most likely has significance statewide, nationally and internationally. At the time of its construction, the building was celebrated for its sleek international Style design and cutting edge engineering of its structure. It was meant to be a visual “landmark” in Burnham Park on the shore of Lake Michigan, just south of Soldier Field, the Field Museum and the other institutions of Chicago’s Museum Campus. McCormick Place’s brick-clad podium supports an upper-floor pavilion of steel and glass. It expresses the modern exploitation of steel and glass in a manner associated with the ideas and work of architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Mies van der Rohe served as the head of the architecture program at Illinois Institute of Technology throughout the post-World War II era, and his former students, including many working for C.F. Murphy Assoc. embraced the design concepts taught by Mies and incorporated them into many 1950s through the 1970s designs including McCormick Place. The building’s visually-prominent, truss-supported roof, with its visually powerful expression of structure, and the relatively small number of supporting columns created a sense of “universal space” inside the building at a scale unrivaled at the time. Such structural bravera placed McCormick Place squarely in the tradition of cutting edge structural innovation for which Chicago architecture has traditionally been known.

Gene Summers, the principal designer at C.F. Murphy first studied under Mies van der Rohe in the Master of Architecture program at IIT [MS 1951], then took position of increasing responsibility in Mies’s architectural office. He worked on buildings on the IIT campus, the Seagram Building in New York, the Federal Center in Chicago and the new National Gallery in Berlin. Shortly after he left Mies’s office, he hired a young exchange student at IIT, Helmut Jahn, and when the opportunity to become chief designer at C.F. Murphy emerged, Summers accepted and brought Jahn along with him. Their first major opportunity was the rebuilding of McCormick Place. Knowing Mies’s convention center projects, they urged that the new building be constructed west of Lake Shore Drive. Mies’s own interest in the pavilion found many expressions in his practice and his research at IIT. Long span structures were repeatedly studied in thesis projects at IIT from the 1950s until the present day. Unlike most architecture schools, where students explore the possibilities implicit in buildings recently completed, at IIT it was often the case that ideas explored in studios and in thesis projects would soon after be realized in completed buildings. The germ of the ideas for two of the alternatives for the rebuilt McCormick place may be seen in several thesis projects completed at IIT prior to their consideration by Summers and Jahn.”

Written by:
Kevin Harrington, Professor Emeritus IIT, for Request for Preliminary Determination of National Register Eligibility, 2016