Sears, Roebuck and Company Building, Scheme with Paraboloid Roof, Aerial Perspective View

Japanese-born architect Richard Mine immigrated to the United States after World War I and completed a masters in architecture at the University of Illinois in 1921. Mine is best known for his gothic-inspired entry to the seminal 1922 competition for the design of the Chicago Tribune Tower, for which he received an honorable mention. He went on to work for a number of companies in the Chicago region such as such as General Motors, Kraft Foods, and the architecture firm Holabird, Root and Burgee. In this remarkable drawing of a design for a building for Sears, Roebuck and Company, Mine illustrates the great architectural interest in the 1950s and 60s for exploring the expressive qualities of concrete. Like similar shell structures by Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen, and Italian engineer Pier Luigi Nervi, this building’s roof is created with intersecting hyperbolic paraboloid geometries, a high-tech design that suggests an underlying interest in biomorphic form and structure.