Chicago is the city that American architecture built itself around. The Loop, the lakefront, the skyscrapers — these are not just buildings. They are arguments about what architecture can do, made in steel and glass and stone over more than a century.
The Chicago School of the 1880s and 1890s — Louis Sullivan, Daniel Burnham, John Root, William Le Baron Jenney — invented the modern skyscraper. They solved the problem of building tall by developing the steel frame, the curtain wall, and the elevator, and they did it in service of a genuine architectural vision: that the tall building should express its structure, that ornament should grow from construction, that form should follow function.
The Lakefront
Chicago's lakefront is one of the great achievements of American urban planning. Daniel Burnham's 1909 Plan of Chicago established the principle that the lakefront should remain public, and that principle has been maintained, more or less, ever since. The result is a continuous public park stretching for miles along the shore of Lake Michigan — a resource that is available to everyone, regardless of income.
The lakefront is the city's great democratic achievement. It belongs to everyone, and it always has.
The contrast with most American cities is stark. In most places, the waterfront has been privatized, developed, and made inaccessible to the public. Chicago's lakefront is a reminder that it did not have to be this way.
The Housing Projects
Chicago also built some of the worst public housing in American history. The Robert Taylor Homes, the Cabrini-Green, the Henry Horner Homes — these were not failures of architecture. They were failures of policy. The buildings were designed by serious architects who believed in the modernist project of improving the lives of the poor through good design. What they could not design around was the deliberate underfunding, the racial segregation, and the political indifference that condemned the projects from the beginning.