Chicago Skyscrapers, 1871-1934

Chicago’s postwar skyscrapers are iconic; the tapering form of the John Hancock Building and the record-breaking height of the Sears Tower re-established the city’s reputation for technologically sophisticated high-rises that expressed their structural principles architecturally. These downtown monuments, however, stood alongside hundreds of other, less well-known towers that also applied advanced structural, environmental, and construction techniques to residential programs, many of which were elements of the city’s disastrous public housing initiatives. Other apartments and, later, condominium towers concentrated wealth nearer to the city’s core and along its lakefront, hardening patterns of economic and racial segregation that formed Chicago’s most toxic social legacy. These commercial and residential towers were linked by a single urban strategy initiated by a new mayor, Richard J. Daley. Daley saw the Loop as a political and economic organism that needed to be fortified by government and commercial investment while being nourished by an extensive network of housing for its professional and executive classes. The “Central Area Plan,” developed in 1957, provided a blueprint for the synergetic development of the Loop and its surrounding neighborhoods—at the expense of the city’s “Black Belt,” which suffered unsustainable densities and profound disinvestment. The city’s skyscrapers thus were not only barometers of Chicago’s growth, but also instruments of its reshaping along economic, social, and racial lines.