John Johnson Publishing Company

In May 1972, prominent Chicagoans gathered to dedicate the new headquarters of the Johnson Publishing Company—the first downtown Chicago high-rise commissioned by a Black-owned corporation and designed by a Black architect.

After occupying several different locations, Johnson Publishing Company—the parent corporation for both Ebony and Jet magazines—eventually found its home at 820 S. Michigan, where it stayed until 2010. It was designed by John Warren Moutoussamy, who studied at the Illinois Institute of Technology under Mies van der Rohe. During his career, Moutoussamy was deeply involved in the planning of his alma mater’s modernist campus and in the mid-1960 he joined the architecture firm Dubin, Dubin and Black as the first Black person to be named partner at a large Chicago architecture firm. 

While Chicago’s downtown was being rebuilt with glass and steel office towers in the late 1960s, John H. Johnson did not want “one of those ‘shirt front’ glass and steel buildings” and asked Moutoussamy to design a unique and modern building that conveyed Johnson Publishing Company’s exemplary success and distinguished style. The result is a building which has an openly expressed structure, open floor plans, and an absence of ornament—all traditional hallmarks of the International style. However, the building is unusual in its separation of the columns, horizontal spans, and windows into three separate planes, which breaks from the International Style, which usually treats the front façade as a flat plane.  

Standing at 11 stories with 110,000 square feet of office space, the building cost $8 million. Wide expanses of recessed windows extend across the full 40-foot wide façade, with the windows on the 10th and 11th floor recessed even further back to create outdoor terraces for executive offices and the employee dining room. The façade was originally clad in walnut travertine, but similar to the Aon Building, the travertine was too porous to withstand Chicago winters and was replaced in 2005 with granite of an almost identical color.