Steel was first used as a complete building frame in 1889, when the Rand McNally Building rose ten stories in Chicago. But the path from raw industrial material to the backbone of modern construction stretched across several decades, beginning with breakthroughs in steelmaking during the 1850s and accelerating through the skyscraper boom of the early 1900s.
How Mass-Produced Steel Became Possible
Before steel could go into buildings, someone had to figure out how to make it cheaply and in large quantities. That someone was Henry Bessemer, who patented a forced-air process in 1855 that allowed steel to be produced on a commercial scale for the first time. The process had early chemical problems, but by 1859, after the addition of a manganese-rich form of pig iron to remove excess oxygen, Bessemer’s Sheffield operations were fully commercial. A competing method, the open-hearth furnace, emerged in the 1860s and eventually overtook the Bessemer process, but together these two techniques made steel abundant enough to consider for construction.
Before this era, buildings relied on cast iron and wrought iron for their structural elements. Iron had clear limits: cast iron was strong under compression but brittle, while wrought iron was more flexible but weaker. Steel combined the best properties of both, offering superior strength, flexibility, and resistance to fracture. The challenge was simply cost. Through the 1860s and 1870s, steel was still expensive enough that it went primarily into rails, bridges, and machinery rather than building frames.
The First All-Steel Building: 1889
It took 30 years after the invention of the Bessemer process for the world’s first all-steel framed building to appear. The Rand McNally Building, designed by architects Burnham and Root with structural engineers Wade and Purdy, was completed in 1889 in Chicago. The ten-story structure housed a printing and publishing company and contained more than 3,700 tons of steel. It stood until 1911, when it was demolished.
Chicago was the natural birthplace for steel-framed construction. The city was rebuilding aggressively after the Great Fire of 1871, land prices in the commercial district were high, and architects were under pressure to build taller on small footprints. Earlier Chicago buildings had used iron frames or combinations of iron and masonry, but the Rand McNally Building proved that a structure could stand entirely on a skeleton of steel columns and beams, with the exterior walls serving only as a skin rather than bearing any load. This was the conceptual leap that made true skyscrapers possible.
Steel Skyscrapers Take Over
Once the all-steel frame was proven, adoption moved quickly. Through the 1890s, steel-framed buildings rose across Chicago and New York. The shift was dramatic: within a single decade, steel replaced iron as the default structural material for tall commercial buildings. By the early 1900s, standardized specifications began to formalize the industry. ASTM International, the organization that still sets material standards today, released its first standard (for steel rails) in 1901 and quickly expanded into structural applications.
Standardization mattered because it let architects and engineers specify steel with confidence, knowing that material from different mills would perform consistently. This removed a major barrier to using steel in buildings where failure could be catastrophic. Insurance companies and city building codes followed, increasingly requiring or favoring steel-framed construction for tall buildings.
The Skyscraper Boom of the 1920s and 1930s
Steel-framed construction hit its most iconic stride in the late 1920s and early 1930s, when New York’s skyline transformed almost overnight. The Empire State Building, completed in 1931, used 60,000 tons of steel. A crew of 3,000 workers finished the entire structure in just one year and 45 days, including Sundays and holidays. That speed was only possible because the steel frame could be erected floor by floor in a repeatable sequence, with each level providing the platform for the next.
The Chrysler Building (1930) and Rockefeller Center (completed in stages through the 1930s) were part of the same wave. These projects demonstrated that steel wasn’t just strong enough for tall buildings; it was fast and economical enough to make them profitable. The ability to prefabricate steel beams and columns off-site, then bolt or rivet them together on location, gave steel a construction speed advantage that concrete couldn’t match at the time.
Steel in Modern Construction
After World War II, steel construction expanded beyond skyscrapers into factories, warehouses, stadiums, airports, and residential high-rises. Welding largely replaced riveting, making connections stronger and faster to complete. New steel alloys offered better resistance to corrosion and fire, addressing two of the material’s traditional weaknesses.
Today, structural steel remains one of the two dominant framing systems for large buildings, alongside reinforced concrete. Most supertall skyscrapers use a combination of both, with steel providing the skeleton and concrete adding mass and stiffness. The basic principle, though, hasn’t changed since Chicago in 1889: a steel frame carries the building’s weight, freeing the walls to be made of glass, stone, or any other material the architect chooses. That single idea reshaped cities around the world and made the modern skyline possible.