Railway Exchange Building, Office building at Michigan Avenue, Chicago, United States
The Railway Exchange Building is a 17-story office building at 224 South Michigan Avenue in Chicago, clad in white glazed terracotta over a steel frame. The facade is organized into projecting bays and large windows that run almost the full height of the tower, giving it a clear vertical rhythm.
D.H. Burnham & Company completed the building in 1904, originally as a headquarters for several railroad companies that had offices downtown. Burnham himself later used a rooftop studio there while working on projects that would shape the city's development.
The building sits along a stretch of Michigan Avenue sometimes called the "street wall" of Chicago, where the continuous line of early 20th-century facades still faces Grant Park across the road. Walking past it, you can clearly see how the white terracotta skin and the rhythm of large windows shaped the look of the whole block.
The building is in the heart of downtown Chicago, directly across from Grant Park, and is easy to reach by public transit or on foot from nearby attractions. The lobby is accessible to visitors, but the upper floors are used for offices and classrooms, so the exterior and entrance area are the main things to see.
A rooftop studio was added to the building specifically for Daniel Burnham and Edward Bennett to work on the 1909 Plan of Chicago, one of the earliest comprehensive city planning documents in the United States. Ideas developed in that room still shape the layout of the lakefront and public spaces visitors walk through today.
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