The Chemical Building is a sixteen-story Chicago School skyscraper at the northeast corner of Eighth and Olive Streets, faced entirely in red brick and terra cotta. Its signature is the facade itself: the bay windows are folded into shallow trapezoids, so the wall zigzags the full height of the building and catches light on every angle. The upper floors gather beneath a deep red terra-cotta cornice of foliated ornament and small arched windows. At street level, the two-story base is wrapped in elaborate cast-metal ornament — griffins, shields, and scrollwork picked out in green — around the shopfronts and entrances.
The Chemical Building was completed in 1896 at 721 Olive Street, at the northeast corner of Eighth Street — a sixteen-story office skyscraper designed by the Chicago architect Henry Ives Cobb for the Chemical Building Company. A large addition, designed by the St. Louis firm Mauran, Russell & Garden, followed in 1902. Long one of downtown's best-known office buildings, it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. In recent decades it has passed through several owners and been foreclosed on more than once as plans to convert it into apartments stalled; it now stands largely vacant, awaiting renovation.
