History

The transformation of East Wacker Drive from an industrial riverfront into a unified commercial boulevard began with the 1909 Burnham Plan of Chicago, which called for a double-decked boulevard on the south bank of the Chicago River. By the mid-1920s, the building industry had responded with a series of towers whose setback facades were designed to be seen collectively as a river panorama rather than as isolated structures. The Mather Tower, commissioned in 1925 and completed in 1928, was one of several buildings developed in direct response to this urban design ambition.

The Gothic vocabulary chosen by architect Herbert Hugh Riddle was not an anomaly: the 1920s saw parallel impulses toward Gothic ornament (the Tribune Tower competition of 1922, won by the Gothic Revival design of Howells and Hood) and toward the stripped Deco geometry that would dominate the following decade. The Mather Tower occupies a position between these poles, using Gothic formal elements — buttresses, lancets, a pinnacled finial — as ornamental framing for a structural logic that is entirely of its era. The building reads differently at different scales: from the river, a Gothic spire; from the street, a textured terracotta curtain wall; from close range, an intricate program of carved stone and cast ornament.

The building served office tenants through the mid-twentieth century and underwent updates as the East Wacker corridor redeveloped around it. Its NRHP listing recognized the building’s architectural significance within the broader context of interwar Chicago commercial architecture. Today the Mather Tower operates as a mixed-use property, its Gothic silhouette a distinctive presence on the river skyline.