Wrigley Building

The Wrigley Building is Chicago's white knight — a gleaming terra-cotta twin tower complex that anchors the Magnificent Mile at the Michigan Avenue Bridge and looks like someone dropped a Seville cathedral bell tower into the middle of a business district. Built between 1920 and 1924 for chewing gum magnate William Wrigley Jr., the building was designed by Graham, Anderson, Probst & White in a Spanish Renaissance Revival style that was deliberately theatrical.

The white terra-cotta exterior — over 250,000 individually glazed tiles in six different shades of white that get progressively lighter toward the top — was designed to catch the light and make the building visible from miles away. The effect works: on a sunny day, the Wrigley Building glows against the Chicago sky with a brightness that makes neighbouring buildings look dingy by comparison. At night, the building has been floodlit since 1921, making it one of the first buildings in the world to use architectural lighting as a design element.

The two towers — the south tower at 30 stories and the north tower at 21 — are connected by walkways at the third and fourteenth floors, creating a courtyard between them that opens onto the river. The building's location at the foot of the Magnificent Mile, directly across the bridge from the Loop, means it's been the first major landmark visitors see when crossing the river northward for over a century. It's the building that established the Michigan Avenue skyline.