Chicago Unpacked: The city that decided what architecture should look like
The most important buildings were designed by engineers responding to a real estate crisis caused by a fire. Chicago did not choose to shape the world’s cities. It had no choice.
Carol Ross has given the Chicago Architecture Center’s river tour approximately 2,000 times. She knows the exact moment when first-time visitors understand what they are looking at, usually somewhere between the Wrigley Building and the Tribune Tower, when the density of invention across a single riverbank becomes undeniable. “They think they’re looking at beautiful buildings,” she says. “Then they realize they’re looking at why every city looks the way it does.”
The Rookery. The Monadnock. The Home Insurance Building. The Auditorium. These are not famous buildings in the way the Eiffel Tower is famous, photographed, visited, admired. They are famous in the way that the invention of the printing press is famous: because everything that came after them is a consequence of them. Every glass tower in Dubai, every steel-framed office block in Mumbai, every curtain-walled skyscraper in Shanghai exists because of decisions made in Chicago between 1871 and 1910.
OCTOBER 8, 1871
The fire started in or near the O’Leary family barn on DeKoven Street, on the evening of October 8, 1871. By the time it burned out two days later, it had destroyed approximately 17,500 buildings across four square miles of the city’s core, killed an estimated 300 people, and left 100,000 — roughly a third of Chicago’s population without shelter. It was the largest urban disaster in American history to that point.
What happened next is the more interesting story. Within days of the fire, land prices in the burned district began to rise. Not tentatively but aggressively. Chicago in 1871 was already the fastest-growing city in the world: a railway hub connecting the agricultural interior of the continent to the eastern seaboard, its population doubling every decade. The land that had just been cleared was the most commercially valuable in the American interior. Every business person in the city understood that whoever rebuilt first, tallest, and most efficiently would claim the most valuable real estate on the continent. The fire was a catastrophe. It was also a starting gun.
This is the context in which Chicago’s architects received their commissions. Not: design something beautiful. Not: express something meaningful. But: put as many rentable square feet as possible on this plot of expensive downtown land as fast as you can, and make it fireproof this time because the insurance industry is watching.
WHAT THE ARCHITECTS BUILT
William Le Baron Jenney completed the Home Insurance Building in 1885. Ten stories, 138 feet, on the corner of LaSalle and Adams. It was not particularly beautiful. It was structurally radical: the first building in the world to use a steel cage as its primary load-bearing element, with the masonry walls serving as a non-structural cladding — a curtain hung from the frame rather than a wall holding up the building. The curtain wall. Every glass-and-steel tower built anywhere in the world since 1885 is a version of this decision.
What followed in the next twenty-five years is the most concentrated period of architectural invention in the history of any city. The Rookery (1888), designed by Burnham and Root: a ten-story building that solved the conflict between the fireproof exterior Chicago demanded and the light-filled interior that tenants required, by wrapping a cast-iron and glass atrium inside a masonry shell. Frank Lloyd Wright renovated the lobby in 1905, adding white marble and gold leaf and making it arguably the most beautiful interior in Chicago. The Monadnock (1891-1893), also Burnham and Root: sixteen stories of load-bearing brick, walls six feet thick at the base — the last major building in the world to use masonry as structure before steel made it obsolete. The Auditorium (1889), Adler and Sullivan: 63,000 square feet of performance space engineered for acoustic perfection, in a building that also contained 400 hotel rooms and 136 offices, because in Chicago even a theatre had to be commercially productive.
These buildings are not in museums. They are in use. The Rookery is a commercial office building. The Monadnock is a commercial office building. Chicago has not demolished its first generation of skyscrapers the way New York demolished Pennsylvania Station or the way most American cities cleared their downtown fabric during urban renewal. The buildings that defined what the world’s cities would look like are still performing the function they were built to perform. Carol Ross walks past them every Tuesday.
WHAT CHICAGO HAS BEEN BUILDING SINCE
Chicago did not stop in 1910. The question the Home Insurance Building first asked in 1885 — how tall, how light, how integrated with the city around it — has been answered continuously since. The Willis Tower (formerly Sears Tower), completed in 1973 by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, was the world’s tallest building for 25 years: nine bundled tubes of structural steel, each capable of being terminated at a different height, producing the distinctive stepped silhouette visible from thirty miles away. The Aqua Tower (2009), designed by Jeanne Gang, extends balconies of varying depths across its facade to create the fluid, undulating surface that gives it its name, and to reduce wind load at height through irregular surface geometry. The Vista Tower (2020), also designed by Jeanne Gang, uses three interlocking glass volumes to create a building that appears to change shape as you move around it.
The thread connecting all of these to William Le Baron Jenney is unbroken. Each is a steel-frame building with non-structural cladding. Each one is asking the same question: what else is possible within the system the fire made necessary? Chicago has been answering this question for 140 years with a consistency that no other city approaches, not because Chicago is more ambitious than other cities, but because it happened to be the place where the fundamental constraint was solved first, and the conversation never moved elsewhere.
WHAT THE CITY ASKS OF YOU
Take the Chicago Architecture Foundation river cruise, or walk the Riverwalk from Lake Shore Drive to the West Loop on your own. The river is the correct vantage point — the buildings rise from the water on both sides, and the 140 years of architectural conversation from the 1880s to the present is visible as a continuous argument rather than a collection of individual buildings. The cruise guides are good. If you go alone, look for the cornices.
Then go inside the Rookery Building at 209 S. LaSalle Street. The lobby is open to the public. Stand in it for ten minutes. The cast-iron atrium, the marble, the gold leaf, the glass ceiling, is what Burnham and Root were trying to do when they solved the fireproof-yet-beautiful problem: make a commercial office building feel like somewhere a person would want to be. It worked. It still works. Office workers eat their lunch in it. Go at noon.
Walk north to 30 W. Monroe and find the base of the Monadnock Building on the Dearborn Street side. Put your hand on the wall. The masonry is six feet thick at the base — you are touching the last wall of its kind, the final expression of a structural system that the building itself made obsolete; everything Chicago built after this used steel. The Monadnock is the last moment before the modern city began.
End at the Art Institute of Chicago, which holds an architectural fragments collection in its lower level — the carved stone and ornamental ironwork salvaged from demolished Chicago buildings, displayed as orphans after their buildings were torn down. The city that invented the modern building did not always keep them. Understanding what was lost, and what was kept, is understanding something about Chicago that the surviving buildings alone cannot tell you.
