Everett McKinley Dirksen United States Courthouse
The Everett McKinley Dirksen United States Courthouse, also known as the Dirksen Federal Building, is a tall, modernist office and court building in Chicago’s Loop, at 219 South Dearborn Street. It was designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and completed in 1964. The building is about 384 feet tall and has around 30 floors, with a total space of about 1.4 million square feet.
Inside, it houses federal courts and offices, including the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, the United States Bankruptcy Court, the United States Marshals Service, the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, and many other federal agencies and offices.
The courthouse is named after longtime Illinois Senator Everett Dirksen, who died in 1969. The adjacent Kluczynski Federal Building was named in 1975 after Congressman John C. Kluczynski.
The Dirksen Building is part of the Chicago Federal Center, a complex built to consolidate many federal agencies in one place. The project was led by Mies van der Rohe, with help from several architectural firms. The complex features a simple steel-and-glass design, black-painted I-beam mullions, bronze-tinted glass, and a central glass-enclosed great hall that runs through the center of the site.
A notable artwork is Alexander Calder’s Flamingo, a 53-foot-tall red sculpture installed in the plaza in 1974. The Federal Center also includes the Kluczynski Building and the Loop Station Post Office, with the Metcalfe Federal Building located across Jackson Boulevard.
The site used to house the Beaux-Arts U.S. Post Office and Courthouse (1898–1905), famous for the 1931 Al Capone tax evasion trial. The new complex replaced older buildings and became a landmark example of mid‑century modern architecture in Chicago.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 20:44 (CET).