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Architecture

Architecture in Chicago

Chicago rebuilt itself after the fire by working out the steel frame, and it has been arguing about what to hang on that frame ever since. Structure here is something to show rather than cover.

• Modern Wing, Art Institute of Chicago

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  Completed 2009

  Renzo Piano

  An addition to the Art Institute facing Millennium Park. Renzo Piano floated a white aluminium sunscreen above the whole roof, tuned so the top galleries take north light without direct sun. A steel bridge crosses Monroe Street to the park, which turns the museum's back into a second front. The galleries below are plain rooms, and the roof does the work.

• Aqua Tower

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  Completed 2009

  Studio Gang

  A residential and hotel tower beside Lakeshore East. Jeanne Gang varied the shape of every concrete balcony slab, so the stack reads as a rippling surface instead of a pile of identical floors. The contours follow views, sun and wind rather than a pattern. A tower of ordinary plans becomes topography through the one element that was going to be there anyway.

• John Hancock Center

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  Completed 1969

  Skidmore, Owings & Merrill

  A mixed-use tower on North Michigan Avenue. Fazlur Rahman Khan and Bruce Graham braced it with an exterior diagonal frame, so the tapering shaft carries wind through its skin rather than through a core alone. The X braces are left exposed, and the black anodised aluminium makes them the elevation. Stacking apartments above offices was unusual, and the structure is what made the height affordable.

• Crown Hall

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  Completed 1956

  Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

  The architecture school at Illinois Institute of Technology. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe hung the roof from four steel plate girders sitting above it, which leaves the main floor as one room with no interior columns. Partitions stop short of the ceiling so the volume stays legible from any corner. It is his universal space built at teaching scale, where what happens inside can change without the building changing.

• Robie House

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  Completed 1910

  Frank Lloyd Wright

  A house in Hyde Park built for a bicycle manufacturer. Frank Lloyd Wright pushed the roofs so far past the walls that the eaves shade the glass with no visible support at the corners. The plan runs as two long volumes sliding past each other around a central chimney. It is the clearest built statement of the Prairie house before Wright left for Europe.