Tallest load-bearing brick building

The tallest load-bearing brick building is the Monadnock Building (also known as the Monadnock Block), a 16-story early skyscraper located in Chicago, Illinois. Designed by famous Chicago architects Burnham & Root in 1892, the Monadnock building measures 65.5 m (214 ft 10 in), and was one of the last major skyscrapers to be built using load-bearing brick walls.

The Monadnock Building embodies a period of rapid technological change in structural engineering. Though from the outside, its vast load-bearing walls (which measure 1.8-m, or 6-ft, thick at the ground floor) suggest a fairly conservative design, the façade conceals a state-of-the-art support structure of steel pillars and beams which support much of the weight of the floors and stiffen the structure against wind loads. The brick walls were load-bearing (they carried their own weight as well as some of the weight of the floors) but the design as a whole was made possible by the internal steel structure.

Brick is still used as a facing material in many modern high-rise buildings, but these brick walls are wholly supported by the building's steel or reinforced concrete frame. They are no more structural than the glass panels that cover the outside of office blocks.

It is difficult to say what the tallest purely brick building was, as many of the buildings from this transitional period of early skyscraper design have now been demolished. The leading candidate is the New York Tribune building, which was located on Park Row in Manhattan. When it was completed on 10 April 1875, the building stood 260 ft (79 m) from the ground to the tip of its spire, 200 ft (61 m) to its highest accessible floor, and about 155 ft (47 m) to the roof of the main building. The basement and ground floor were constructed from granite blocks, but everything from there up was load-bearing brick.

The New York Tribune building was renovated between 1900 and 1905, doubling its height. However this extension used a steel frame. The building was demolished in 1966 as part of a program to widen the vehicle access ramps for the Brooklyn Bridge.