The Home Insurance Building stood at the corner of LaSalle and Adams streets in Chicago, designed by the architect and engineer William Le Baron Jenney and completed in 1885 for the Home Insurance Company of New York. Its structural innovation was a skeleton frame of iron and steel columns and beams that carried the weight of the building's floors and much of its masonry facade, reducing the load borne by the exterior walls compared with traditional masonry construction and allowing greater height with thinner walls. Ten stories tall as built, with two additional stories added later, it is widely credited by architectural historians as the first tall building to rely on this kind of skeletal metal frame, a construction method that made the modern skyscraper possible. The building was demolished in 1931.
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