Guaranty Building

Adler and Sullivan built the Guaranty within two years of the Wainwright Building and used it to correct the earlier building's one compromise: every pier here, structural or not, is sheathed in the same ornamented red terracotta and rises the same unbroken height, so the tower reads as a single vertical fact rather than a masonry base with steel hidden above it. Sullivan's ornament, cast from his own drawings and glazed a deep oxblood, covers nearly every exterior surface in botanical relief, densest at the cornice, where a band of oculus windows marks the top-floor mechanical space Adler had insisted on for the building's own ventilation. Hascal Taylor died before signing the contract, and the Guaranty Construction Company that built it in his place gave the building its name; Prudential Insurance later owned it and lent it a second one. A 1974 fire and decades of deferred repair left the terracotta cracked and missing in places before Cannon Design's restoration, backed by federal preservation tax credits, replaced the damaged units in the early 1980s and returned the building to full occupancy.