Anderson Probst & White, the successor firm to Burnham. Its tower is based on the La Giralda campanile at Seville’s Cathedral. To the east, New York-based John Mead Howells and Raymond Hood employed Gothic forms to win the 1922 international competition for the Chicago Tribune’s headquarters. The Roaring Twenties ended with the dark days of the Great Depression, but Chicago’s architecture had reached its eclectic height, with the firm of Holabird & Root designing such storied Art Deco towers as the Palmolive Building and the Chicago Board of Trade almost concurrently with Wrigley and Tribune.
A distinctly narrower interpretation of architecture would arrive in the form of German émigré Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Mies was internationally acclaimed for his Barcelona Pavilion of 1929, his pioneering glass tower studies and as the last director (1930–33) of the famed Bauhaus. He moved to Chicago in 1937 to direct the architecture program at the Armour Institute (now the Illinois Institute of Technology, or IIT). With construction at a virtual standstill due first to the economy and then to World War II, Mies not only revamped the architecture curriculum at IIT during these years, he developed an architectural language of glass and steel based on materials readily available in Chicago. Nineteen of his building designs populate IIT’s campus and his long span gem, Crown Hall, still houses the architecture school in the “largest one-room schoolhouse.” He trained a generation of architects ready to deliver once the war ended. Mies’ apartment buildings at 860-880 Lake Shore Drive (later joined by another pair at 900-910) set the aesthetic norm for mid-century modern architecture. IIT’s graduates came to dominate the staff at such large Chicago firms as Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and C.F. Murphy, which garnered the best commissions, both public and private, during this era.

Fifty miles west of Chicago is Mies’s jewel of a home for Dr. Edith Farnsworth (1951). This stark glass and metal pavilion is raised above the flood plain adjacent to the Fox River. While client and architect eventually sued one another in a particularly distasteful display of professional misunderstanding, the house itself is one of the purest expressions of modernist design.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Chicago architecture was on steroids. Civic complexes like the Richard Daley Center and the Federal Center rose in the heart of the Loop while the Mies-inspired long spans of Gene Summers’ McCormick Place along the lakefront all rose in the company of the three highest structures, all topping 1,000 feet: the John Hancock Center, Standard Oil of Indiana (now Aon Center) and the Sears Tower, the world’s tallest building until 1968 (still Chicago’s tallest). SOM’s Trump International Hotel & Tower will top out later this year at 1,361 feet, just 89 feet less than Sears. And foundation work began last year for Santiago Calatrava’s Chicago Spire. Its tapered and twisting shaft – located just north of the Chicago River at the lakefront – will reach 2,000 feet and will keep North America’s tallest building in Chicago.

But while the top of Chicago’s skyline is changing now for the first time in four decades, design developments in the 1980s had a profound influence on the city’s profile. In the years after Daniel Burnham helped bring the best-known East Coast architects to design the most important buildings at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago had become quite insular. Although its own architects built widely across the country and around the world, important commissions in Chicago were kept strictly within the family – for better or worse. That changed in 1983, with the completion of a streamlined, green-glass office building at the northwest corner of the Loop – 333 Wacker — by the young New York partnership of Kohn Pedersen Fox.

What started as a trickle of outside talent has become a deluge in the last decade: Rem Koolhaas’s McCormick Tribune Campus Center (2003) at IIT, Frank Gehry’s Pritzker Pavilion (2004) in Millennium Park, Renzo 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