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city) and his very personal ornamentation that interprets Nature in ways distinctly American – evoking the literary stylings of Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman in built form.

The Auditorium’s tower topped the skyline when it was first completed, a fact now obscured by the almost gaudy heights of the average building in Chicago’s Loop, its central business district. But don’t let the soaring skyline fool you; Chicago isn’t an obvious place to build tall. Unlike in New York, where the bedrock is often just under the sidewalk and requires heavy-duty blasting to create a basement, the foundations of Chicago’s 20th- and 21st-century towers descend as much as 120 feet to find solid footing under the swampy ground. The celebrated engineering expertise of Chicago’s architects and builders developed through the erection of ever taller buildings in these unfriendly conditions.

That expertise still reigns at the highest levels: many of the super-tall towers now under construction in the Middle East and Asia were designed in the offices of Chicago’s architecture firms.

Chicago designers were the first to develop the curtain wall, in which a slim masonry or glass façade is suspended from a lightweight structural metal frame. The curtain wall made the modern skyscraper possible by obviating the need for the thicker masonry walls that would be necessary to support ever taller traditionally-designed buildings.

An early example of a curtain wall is The Rookery (1888), at the corner of Adams and LaSalle, by Daniel Burnham, an almost unstoppable force Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68  |  Page 69  |  Page 70  |  Page 71  |  Page 72  |  Page 73  |  Page 74  |  Page 75  |  Page 76  |  Page 77  |  Page 78  |  Page 79  |  Page 80  |  Page 81  |  Page 82  |  Page 83  |  Page 84  |  Page 85  |  Page 86  |  Page 87  |  Page 88  |  Page 89  |  Page 90  |  Page 91  |  Page 92  |  Page 93  |  Page 94  |  Page 95  |  Page 96  |  Page 97  |  Page 98  |  Page 99  |  Page 100  |  Page 101  |  Page 102  |  Page 103  |  Page 104  |  Page 105  |  Page 106  |  Page 107  |  Page 108  |  Page 109  |  Page 110  |  Page 111  |  Page 112  |  Page 113  |  Page 114  |  Page 115  |  Page 116  |  Page 117  |  Page 118  |  Page 119  |  Page 120  |  Page 121  |  Page 122  |  Page 123  |  Page 124  |  Page 125
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