Merchandise Mart - Building

Building

The Merchandise Mart was designed by the Chicago architectural firm of Graham, Anderson, Probst and White to be a "city within a city". Second only to Holabird & Root in Chicago art deco architecture, the firm had a long-standing relationship with the Field family. Started in 1928, completed in 1931, and built in the same art deco style as the Chicago Board of Trade Building, its cost was reported as both $32 million and $38 million. The building was the largest in the world in terms of floorspace, but was surpassed by the Pentagon in 1943, and now stands thirty-sixth on the list of largest buildings in the world. Once the largest commercial space in the world, Dubai International Airport Terminal 3 is now recognized by Guinness World Records as holding the record.

Read more about this topic:  Merchandise Mart

Famous quotes containing the word building:

    And no less firmly do I hold that we shall one day recognize in Freud’s life-work the cornerstone for the building of a new anthropology and therewith of a new structure, to which many stones are being brought up today, which shall be the future dwelling of a wiser and freer humanity.
    Thomas Mann (1875–1955)

    Are we not madder than those first inhabitants of the plain of Sennar? We know that the distance separating the earth from the sky is infinite, and yet we do not stop building our tower.
    Denis Diderot (1713–1784)

    Nowadays almost all man’s improvements, so called, as the building of houses and the cutting down of the forest and of all large trees, simply deform the landscape, and make it more and more tame and cheap.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)