- Publishers Noted: in which our publisher reviews the building of another publisher
I grew up in Kansas City with strong Chicago ties. My mother comes from Chicago, my parents met and married in Chicago, and we would visit my grandparents there a few times a year. Chicago was the Loop, Marshall Fields, the Bean, the bandshell in Millennium Park, and especially the towers, resplendent against Lake Michigan.
One of the most impressive was the Standard Oil Building—now called the Aon Center—a collaboration between Edward Durell Stone & Associates and Perkins&Will that was completed in 1973. Unlike the stepped Sears and the sloped Hancock, it jumps straight up, its thin stone pinstripes yielding not an inch from base to hat as it rises from the north end of Millennium Park. My dad told me that after its original Carrara marble started popping off they had to reclad the entire thing. Somehow this story only made the tower still more impressive—Big Oil built this 1,136-foot-tall cliff and clad it in stone, and then they did it again.
I never …
