More than any other American city, Chicago takes great pride in its contributions past and present to contemporary architecture. Chicago is home to masterful works from Daniel Hudson Burnham, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis Henry Sullivan, Helmut Jahn, William Le Baron Jenney, and, of course, Holabird & Root, fathers of the modern skyscraper.

In 1930, an awards jury called Holabird & Root's Palmolive Building "a distinguished contribution" to American architecture, noting that "this building of towering and original mass gives beautiful expression to the commercial spirit at its best." The building's integrity and reputation remain intact to this day, as Robert Bruegmann, professor of architectural history at the University of Illinois at Chicago, remarked in 2003, "the Palmolive Building is the perfect distillation of the stripped-down, stepped-back architectural style that was popular all over the country in the 1920s."

From the two story base ornamented with fluted cast-iron colonettes, the limestone and terra cotta façade darts firmly toward the heavens with linear, hard edges only to fall gracefully inward again and again, with recessed bays and setbacks on its way to a 38th story plateau, topped with the majestic beacon tower.

Once hailed as the embodiment of America's booming business sector, this vintage building's emphatically vertical style is now equally appropriate for its new purpose, as a home full of character for those who lead a life of privilege.