The Home Insurance Building is an example…

The Home Insurance Building is an example of the Chicago School in architecture.

The building leads to the future in the skyscrapers.

Due to the Chicago building's unique architecture and unique weight-bearing frame, it is considered the first skyscraper in the world however, it is never the tallest building in the world or Chicago.

It has ten stories and rises to a height of forty-two meters (one hundred and thirty-eight feet).

The building weighs only one-third as much as a stone building would have; city officials were so concerned that they had halted construction while they investigated its safety.

The building's architect, William LeBaron Jenney, was born in Fairhaven, Massachusetts on September 25, 1832, son of William Proctor Jenney and Eliza LeBaron Gibbs.

Jenney began his formal education at Phillips Academy, Andover, in 1846, and at the Lawrence Scientific school at Harvard in 1853, but transferred to l'École Centrale des Arts et Manufactures in Paris to get an education in engineering and architecture.

He had graduated in 1856, one year after his classmate, Gustave Eiffel, the designer of the Eiffel Tower.

In 1861, he had returned to the U.S. to join the Union Army as an engineer in the Civil War, designing fortifications for Generals Sherman and Grant.

By the end of the war, he had become a major, and was Engineer-in-Charge at Nashville's Union headquarters.

After the war, in 1867, Jenney had moved to Chicago, Illinois and had begun his own architectural office, which specializes in commercial buildings and urban planning.

During the late 1870s, he had commuted weekly to Ann Arbor, Michigan to start and teach in the architecture program at the University of Michigan.

In later years, future leaders of the Chicago School like Louis Sullivan, Daniel Burnham, William Holabird, and Martin Roche, performed their architectural apprenticeships on Jenney's staff.

On May 8, 1867, Jenney and Elizabeth "Lizzie" Hannah Cobb, from Cleveland, Ohio were married.

They have two children named Max and Francis.

According to popular story, one day Jenney came home early and surprised his wife who was reading.

She put her book down on top of a bird cage and ran to meet him.

He strode across the room, lifted the book and dropped it back on the bird cage two or three times.

Then, he exclaimed: "It works! It works! Don’t you see? If this little cage can hold this heavy book, why can’t an iron or steel cage be the framework for a whole building?"

Jenney applied his new idea to the construction of the Home Insurance Building, which is erected from 1884 to 1885 at the corner of LaSalle and Monroe Streets in Chicago.

It is the first building to use structural steel in its frame, but the majority of its structure is composed of cast and wrought iron.

It is generally noted as the first tall building to be supported, both inside and outside, by a fireproof metal frame.

Although the Ditherington Flax Mill, also a fireproof-metal-framed building, had been built earlier, it is only five stories tall.