Icicles as long as a person hang from the ceilings, and columns wear thick coats of white frost. These rooms look like a glacier cave, but they were the inside of a ten-storey warehouse in Chicago’s Fulton Market district, frozen by nine decades of refrigeration. Photographer Gary Jensen documented the ice just before the building was thawed and turned into offices.
The Fulton Market Cold Storage building
The Fulton Market Cold Storage Company built its warehouse at 1000 W. Fulton, in the meatpacking district of Chicago’s West Loop, at the start of the 1920s. At the time it was promoted as “an example of the very highest development in cold storage warehouse design”. The building went up just as mechanical refrigeration was replacing natural ice, and its fast elevators and direct rail access helped convince sceptical food traders to use it.
For roughly ninety years the ten floors stayed below freezing. Over those decades ice built up on walls, pipes and ceilings until the interior was encrusted with it. The building ran at only a third of its capacity in its last five years. In July 2012 the company sold the building and moved to a modern, racked and bar-coded warehouse in suburban Lyons.
Gary Jensen’s photographs before the thaw
Before the heaters moved in, the project team hired Chicago photographer Gary Jensen of Gary Robert Photography to record the frozen rooms. His series, shared as Gary Jensen’s Frozen Scapes gallery was shared around the world after This is Colossal published it in January 2013.
The pictures work because the architecture never quite disappears. Straight columns, beams and doorways set the geometry, and the ice breaks it up with rounded drips, hanging fringes and frosted mounds that look almost geological.
Thawing a frozen warehouse
Developer Sterling Bay bought the building and set out to convert it into offices. Architects Perkins + Will handled the defrost, which crews carried out with propane heaters, and the process was recorded in an interior time-lapse uploaded by Rick Kintigh. The redevelopment, known as 1K Fulton, was designed with Hartshorne Plunkard Architecture as architect of record and covers 535,000 square feet across the ten-storey original and a six-storey annex.
In 2013 two big tenants signed leases. Google took about 200,000 square feet for its Chicago office of more than 500 employees, and the bicycle-component maker SRAM leased about 75,000 square feet for its global headquarters, where Perkins + Will designed a machine shop, workspace and an indoor cycling track.
More ice from Chicago and beyond
For ice made by nature, explore Mendenhall’s natural glacier interiors in Alaska; for ice shaped by human hands, see these deliberately carved ice artworks.
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