The Civic Opera Building is a 45-story office tower (plus two 22-story wings) located at 20 North

Wacker Drive Wacker Drive is a major multilevel street in Chicago, Illinois, running along the south side of the main branch and the east side of the south branch of the Chicago River in the Loop.Hayner, Don and Tom McNamee, ''Streetwise Chicago'', "Wacker D ...

Chicago (''City in a Garden''); I Will , image_map = , map_caption = Interactive Map of Chicago , coordinates = , coordinates_footnotes = , subdivision_type = Country , subdivision_name ...

. The building opened November 4, 1929, and has an

Art Deco Art Deco, short for the French ''Arts Décoratifs'', and sometimes just called Deco, is a style of visual arts, architecture, and product design, that first appeared in France in the 1910s (just before World War I), and flourished in the Unite ...

interior. It contains a 3,563-seat

opera house An opera house is a theatre building used for performances of opera. It usually includes a stage, an orchestra pit, audience seating, and backstage facilities for costumes and building sets. While some venues are constructed specifically for o ...

, the

Civic Opera House The Civic Opera House, also called Lyric Opera House is an opera house located at 20 North Wacker Drive in Chicago. The Civic's main performance space, named for Ardis Krainik, seats 3,563, making it the second-largest opera auditorium in North ...

, which is the second-largest opera auditorium in

North America North America is a continent in the Northern Hemisphere and almost entirely within the Western Hemisphere. It is bordered to the north by the Arctic Ocean, to the east by the Atlantic Ocean, to the southeast by South America and the Car ...

. Today, the opera house is the permanent home of the Lyric Opera of Chicago and current home of the

Joffrey Ballet The Joffrey Ballet is one of the premier dance companies and training institutions in the world today. Located in Chicago, Illinois, the Joffrey regularly performs classical and contemporary ballets during its annual performance season at Lyric O ...

Samuel Insull Samuel Insull (November 11, 1859 – July 16, 1938) was a British-born American business magnate. He was an innovator and investor based in Chicago who greatly contributed to create an integrated electrical infrastructure in the United States ...

envisioned and hired the design team for building a new opera house to serve as the home for the Chicago Civic Opera, as the company was called. The building is shaped like a huge chair, sometimes referred to as "Insull's Throne." Insull directed the chair should face west to signify turning his back on New York. Insull had left a vice presidency at General Electric in New York in 1892, after he was not named its president. Subsequently, he moved to Chicago and became president of Chicago Edison (

Commonwealth Edison Commonwealth Edison, commonly known by syllabic abbreviation as ComEd, is the largest electric utility in Illinois, and the in Chicago and much of Northern Illinois. Its service territory stretches roughly from Iroquois County on the south to ...

). Insull selected the architecture firm Graham, Anderson, Probst & White who were responsible for several other buildings in the downtown Chicago Loop. As they did on other occasions, the architects commissioned

Henry Hering Henry Hering (February 15, 1874 – January 15, 1949) was an American sculptor. Early career He was a student of Augustus Saint-Gaudens at Cooper Union and of Philip Martiny at the Art Students League of New York. He then went to Paris where ...

to produce architectural sculpture for the building. Mary Garden of the Chicago Civic Opera announced on July 15, 1929, that the opera's inaugural season would include the commissioned work of Hamilton Forrest entitled Camille. During the 1950s and 1960s the building was identified by a large "Kemper Insurance" sign, although it was not that company's headquarters. In 1993, the Lyric Opera of Chicago purchased the opera house facilities in the building it had rented for 64 years. In 2012, Tishman Speyer Properties L.P. sold the office tower portion of the building for $125.8 million to an affiliate of Nanuet, N.Y.-based Berkley Properties LLC.

Tenants

* Cassiday Schade * National Automatic Merchandising Association * Himes Consulting Group * TechNexus Venture Collaborative
12five Capital, LLC
* Hybris *

Surplus Record Machinery & Equipment Directory Surplus Record is the leading independent business directory of surplus, new, and used machine tools, machinery, and industrial equipment in the United States. It was founded in 1924 by Thomas P. Scanlan. The monthly directory, which is hundreds ...

* Clarity Consulting * Perficient Consulting * Natural Resources Defense Councilhttps://www.nrdc.org/our-offices (accessed 24 September 2022)

References

Notes Sources *Chappell, Sally Kitt, ''Transforming Tradition: Architecture and Planning of Graham, Anderson, Probst and White, 1912–1936'', Chicago, Il: University of Chicago Press, 1992 *Kvaran, Einar Einarsson, ''Architectural Sculpture in America'', unpublished manuscript

External links

"The Magic Wand of the Opera" ''Popular Mechanics'', February 1930, pp 202-205
technical details of the 1929 advances Civic Opera House over other opera houses of that era - i.e. curtains, back-drops, movable stages, lighting, etc
Lyric Opera website
{{Chicago skyscrapers Central Chicago Skyscraper office buildings in Chicago 1929 establishments in Illinois Office buildings completed in 1929 Art Deco architecture in Illinois