Chicago Mercantile Exchange Facade
Chicago, IL | 2009
This project was a necessity of The Chicago Mercantile Exchange finding its electronic trading had made the historically useful trading pits, located within black-box spaces, obsolete. Located on floors 4 and 8, in between the 40-story North and South high rise office towers, two trading floors were converted to flexible daylit office spaces. On both the Wacker Street and the Chicago River sides, the existing granite cladding was removed to make room for expansive sections of curtain wall span the width of the structural bays and a 30' floor height.
High-performance insulating glass was chosen to match the color, transparency, and reflectance of the existing glazing through a process of selection by use of full size mock-ups. The solution achieves an improved street level identity along the entire Wacker Drive block, and opens up views from the interior spaces to the River on the West side.
