The Wrigley Building: The Making of an Icon

Chicago’s tallest skyscraper when it opened in 1921, the Wrigley Building could be called the Midwest's Woolworth Building. The gleaming white terra-cotta tower at the head of Michigan Avenue marked a move that opened the northward extension of the commercial concentration of the Loop. To celebrate the publication of the handsome new monograph The Wrigley Building: The Making of an Icon, the Museum convened a two-session program that featured a presentation by the book's authors and a symposium of scholars that placed the building in context and contrast to the contemporary towers of New York.

In the opening session, principal author Robert Sharoff, the Chicago historian Tim Samuelson, and the photographer William Zbaren offered an overview of the book's ambitious scope, which brings together archival sources and stunning new photography to document a century’s worth of architectural, social, and business history. They highlighted the intertwined stories of William Wrigley Jr., the larger-than-life founder of the chewing gum empire, and the relatively unknown architect Charles Gerhard Beersman, as well as evoked the interior life of the tower as a hub for everything from modernist art and jazz to groundbreaking advertising and broadcast media.

After a break, the second session featured a panel with skyscraper historians Gail Fenske and Thomas Leslie, as well as artist and publisher Don LePan. They responded to the authors and engaged in a playfully serious discussion of the "Chicago-ness" of Wrigley and the "New York-ness" of Woolworth as city-signature terra cotta towers.

ROBERT SHAROFF
Robert Sharoff is a Chicago-based writer on arts and culture. A frequent collaborator with William Zbaren, their books include American City: Detroit Architecture (Wayne State University Press, 2005) and Last is More: Mies, IBM, and the Transformation of Chicago (Images Publishing Group, 2014). Having worked as a journalist for many years, Sharoff portrays his subjects with unflagging insight and digs deep to uncover the correct facts. He is a prolific writer for the New York Times, Chicago Magazine, and the Washington Post.

TIM SAMUELSON
Tim Samuelson is Chicago's first and only cultural historian. For nearly 20 years he acted as spokesman, consultant, historian, and storyteller for various groups in Chicago and beyond while also building a vast collection of Chicago's architecture artifacts, pictorial history, and ephemera. Before the Cultural Center, Samuelson worked at the Chicago History Museum and served on the Commission on Chicago Landmarks. Today, he is retired, but retains an emeritus position at the Cultural Center. In 2015, Landmarks Illinois names Tim himself a "Legendary Landmark."

WILLIAM ZBAREN
William Zbaren is an award-winning architectural photographer whose work has been featured in the New York Times, Architectural Record, the Wall Street Journal, and other publications. He is a frequent collaborator with Robert Sharoff; their books include American City: St. Louis Architecture, Three Centuries of Classic Design (Images Publishing Group, 2011) and John Vinci: Life and Landmarks (Northwestern University Press, 2017). Zbaren has been praised for his ability to convey a sense of impact and to direct one's eyes to often overlooked qualities in buildings. Mr. Zbaren is also a professor of architectural photography at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago.

GAIL FENSKE
Gail Fenske is author of The Skyscraper and the City: The Woolworth Building and the Making of Modern New York (University of Chicago Press, 2008). She is professor of architecture in the School of Architecture, Art & Historic Preservation at Roger Williams University, and has taught as a visiting professor at Cornell, Wellesley, and MIT. She is also a licensed architect and has practiced architecture in Boston and New York. She holds a Ph.D. in the history, theory, and criticism of architecture from MIT.

THOMAS LESLIE
Thomas Leslie is Professor of Architecture at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign where he researches the integration of building sciences and arts, both historically and in contemporary practice. He is the author of Chicago Skyscrapers, 1871-1934 and its sequel Chicago Skyscrapers, 1934-1986 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2013 and 2023). He is also the author of Beauty's Rigor: Patterns of Production in the Work of Pier Luigi Nervi (University of Illinois Press, 2017).

DON LEPAN
Don LePan is the founder and CEO of Broadview Press, a leading academic book publisher in North America. He is the Managing Editor of The Broadview Anthology of British Literature (Broadview, 2006) and the author of Animals: A Novel (Véhicule Press, 2009) and Lucy and Bonbon: A Novel (MiroLand, 2022). LePan is also a painter and the author of the forthcoming The Skyscraper and the City (late 2025) which brings together thirty years of his watercolor depictions of cities and buildings.