Built for the Keith, Gage and Ascher millinery firms in 1899 by Holabird & Roche, this trio exemplifies the typical Chicago school facades that use a brick curtain wall to express the skeletal steel frame. In traditional construction, the walls suppo..

Appearing almost two-dimensional, this unique concrete structure (1975, Harry Weese & Assocs.) resembles an old IBM punch card. The triangular layout affords an easily patrolled plan for the cells holding prisoners awaiting trial in the nearby Federa..

This 10-story structure symbolizes the transition of South Michigan Avenue from a commercial and residential street to an artistic and cultural center. The "Studebaker" name inscribed above the first floor indicates its original use as a wa..

This elegant high rise must have been an apparition when it opened, its shining stainless-steel facade surrounded by masonry buildings that were dark with soot. Bruce Graham designed a unique structural cage that supports the building outside of the ..

Hammond, Beeby & Babka won a competition to design Chicago's new library, a grandly scaled 1991 design that announces its public function with classical arcaded facades, ornamental garlands and an overachieving roofline of green metal and glass with ..

This stretch of late-19C and early-20C structures experienced a colorful history. First used by printing and other book-related industries, the buildings were eventually abandoned and some stood empty for years. In the late 1970s, architects Larry Bo..

Formerly Marshall Field & Company, doyenne of Chicago retailing, this grand old department store occupies an entire block at the north end of fabled State Street. It was completed in stages between 1892 and 1914 by D.H. Burnham & Co. for Marshall Fie..

This pretty garden is a pleasant place for a stroll. Wooden boardwalks and a watery pool called the Seam bisect the planted spaces.

Designed in 1891 by Holabird & Roche, the Pontiac is the firm's earliest surviving skyscraper. Brick sheathing covers a skeleton frame, and bays flow, rather than project, from the surface.

The Board of Trade was founded in 1848 to regulate trade of the Midwest's bountiful agricultural commodities. This outstanding Art Deco skyscraper (1930, Holabird & Root) testifies to that abundance, anchoring the south end of the LaSalle Street fina..

This Art Deco skyscraper (1929, Burnham Bros.), inspired by Raymond Hood's American Radiator Building in New York, is faced with dark green terra-cotta accented with gold-leaf ornament, especially on the stepped-back tower. A two-story lobby features..

This slice of Chicago's lakefront has been home to the city's well-to-do for over a century. While all but a few of the mansions that once lined Lake Shore Drive have been demolished, you can still step back a century with a walk along State Parkway ..

Loop skyscrapers rise to the north beyond the square tower of downtown's oldest surviving train station. Designed by Cyrus L.W. Eidlitz in the Romanesque Revival style, the 1885 building features red brick and stone with nicely detailed cornices and ..

From the river's edge rise the twin "corncob" towers of Bertrand Goldberg's experimental urban community. Revolutionary when conceived in 1959, the complex, which includes apartments as well as entertainment and services, was an attempt to ..

The opening of the Michigan Avenue Bridge joined the north and south sides of the city in 1920, igniting an incredible building boom that spawned most of the original landmarks on the avenue.

Reminiscent of New York's GE Building at Rockefeller Center, this 38-story Art Deco office tower (1989, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill), topped by a 130ft steel spire, rises in a series of setbacks that strengthen its vertical progression. Limestone cons..

The gold-leaf dome atop this 41-story building was a popular design among the Shriners, a Masonic fraternity, for whom the building was constructed as an athletic club in 1929. Step through its heavy bronze doors into a quasi-Eastern fantasia of desi..

Built originally as the Pugh Terminal Warehouse in 1905, North Pier Chicago was artfully rehabilitated in 1990 by Booth/Hansen & Assocs. to house office space on the upper floors and a 170,000sq ft retail and entertainment center on the lower. Under ..

From the outside, this Victorian-style cathedral appears typical of the Chicago churches built of local limestone around the time of the Great Fire. The original structure of 1857 was destroyed in the blaze; only the 1867 bell tower remains standing,..

In the market for windows? Filling a series of galleries along the lower-level terraces of Festival Hall, this unique museum showcases more than 100 stained-glass windows from 1897 to the present, all works of art in themselves. Their creators includ..