Chicago may have shaped the modern skyscraper back in the 1890s, but with a new wave of 21st-century structures currently going up, the city is anything but done building

IT’S A TOUGH call designing new architecture for a city that’s essentially a living architectural museum,” says Richard Tomlinson. But when it’s the managing partner of the architecture firm charged with realising Donald Trump’s strident vision of a “mega-tower for the future” in Chicago who’s admitting that his work is difficult, you know that he’ll rise to the challenge. Presumably it was no easy task pleasing the infamous property mogul either – after all, it took Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM) a remarkable 50 redesigns before Chicago’s Trump International Hotel and Tower got under way. In its final incarnation, following in the long tradition of Chicago engineering firsts, the project’s broad, reinforced, concrete frame allows for uniquely unobstructed reaches of curved glass (and spectacular views from its hotel rooms and condos), with staggered heights designed to sympathetically reference its neighbours, the Wrigley Building, Jewelers’ Building and Tribune Tower.

And yet, groundbreaking as it may be, Trump’s is only one of several extravagant and super-tall tower projects due to be pitched high into the sky over Chicago in the next couple of years. Also making its mark at the shores of Lake Michigan is the Chicago Spire, the first Chicago project of iconoclastic, Valencian architect Santiago Calatrava, due for completion in 2009. The 150-storey condo and hotel tower is typical of Calatrava’s designs. The Spire is revolutionary – both geometric and organic, twisting upwards like a mammoth white drill bit. Or, as the New York Times more poetically put it: “a blade of grass or perhaps a tall twisting tree.”

Similarly startling to the eye, the Aqua Tower (completion 2009) bears closer resemblance to a quirky civic sculpture than a condominium building. Located in the Loop, Chicago’s financial centre, the 82-storey high-rise will be covered by undulating balconies evoking rippling water – dubbed “sensuous” architecture by the promotional blurb. It will also be the tallest building in the world to be designed by a woman, Chicago’s own Jeanne Gang.

Also under way in the Loop is the redevelopment of 108 North State Street, which will breathe new life into a block that has been vacant since the late 1980s. It’s hoped that the Mills Corporation’s angular retail-residential complex will form the anchor for a buzzing new entertainment district – a casino development is already planned nearby.

As with many of the city’s new buildings, Chicago’s forward-thinking mayor, Richard M Daley, has been involved in the more civic aspects of the 108 North State Street plan. His contribution has been a transit hub with an express airport train and a facility that will allow passengers to check their luggage onto their flight before boarding the train.

In fact, many of the new projects under way in Chicago are coloured by the vision of its highly respected mayor. “Daley has issued a challenge to the city’s architects, engineers and planners,” explains Tomlinson. “He wants to make Chicago the most environmentally-friendly city in the world.”

The city’s showcase green development of the future is the Skidmore, Owings and Merrill project. On an unloved brownfield site, the 700-acre site numbers amongst its innovations recycled paving materials (with a lifespan several times that of concrete), wind power, geothermal cooling and natural drainage to replace piped drainage systems, with an overall aim of total sustainability.

The new Chicago architecture may be more modest than the waves of architecture in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but it’s undeniably in the same spirit. “Chicago has always been known as a place where you could innovate,” says Tomlinson. “Part of this is down to history – the rebuilding of Chicago after the Great Fire of 1871 provided work for a generation’s most talented architects. But much is down to an absence of permission requirements. Unlike in London, Manhattan, Boston or San Francisco, for example, architects are given carte blanche to realise their most groundbreaking ideas.”

The Great Chicago Fire, famously sparked by one Mrs O’Leary’s oil lamp, razed much of old Chicago’s wooden tenement buildings and barns. O’Leary was run out of town – but perhaps she should have been thanked. For a largescale, city rebuilding project, the timing could not have been better. As the centre of a growing nation’s lumber, grain corn and iron industries and the hub of its rail network, Chicago’s economy was booming. The architects of what later became known as the Chicago School – led by Daniel Burnham – created a new vocabulary for this newly confident city. Its talents converged with late 19th-century technical developments – the invention of the elevator, steel-frame construction (rather than cast iron, allowing for much greater height) and, from the 1890s, the use of large areas of plate glass. The skyscraper was born.

The Chicago School’s gleaming high-rises were tailed by the Prairie School of Frank Lloyd Wright. Chiefly suburban (Chicago’s Oak Park is a paean to the style), its extended low buildings, shallow, sloping roofs, suppressed chimneys, overhangs and unfinished materials would come to define 20th-century American domestic architectural trends.

Then, in the late 1930s, a movement arrived that was to become globally symbolic of American commercial architecture. The Bauhaus school was one of the most important undercurrents in Modernism long before its arrival in Chicago. The last of its architect-directors was the influential Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who reluctantly emigrated to Chicago in 1937, pushed out of Germany by the twin forces of the Great Depression and an increasingly powerful Nazi government. Mies Van der Rohe’s design principles immediately struck a harmonious note with the progressive American sub-culture.

His gift to the city was the unmistakable ‘glass box’, or ‘skin and bones’ architecture: industrial steel and plate glass, a minimal framework of structural order balanced against an implied freedom of open space – austere yet elegant. You’ll see strong examples of his work in the towering IBM Plaza (now named for its address at 330 North Wabash), in the Illinois Institute of Technology (where Mies van der Rohe held a professorship) and in the muscular glass and steel apartment buildings of Lake Shore Drive Apartments (1951).

In the 1960s and 1970s this simplicity of style continued to dominate, seeking bigger and bolder expressions, culminating in SOM’s Sears Tower (1970), a skyscraper so huge – 1,450ft (442m) tall, 110 floors and a daytime population of 16,000 – that it boasted its own postcode.

For Ralph Johnson, of Chicago architecture firm Perkins + Will, the city’s rich architectural legacy informs the confidence of its new wave of 21st-century design. “There’s a keen awareness of architecture and arts’ history amongst the general public in Chicago, and this sets the bar very high.” Tomlinson agrees: “The volume of construction here is not what you would find in Shanghai, Dubai or Beijing right now, but what we’re designing is innovative and assumes an important place on the world architectural stage. Much of this is down to the openended ambition of Chicago and Chicagoans.”

So next time you’re in the city, however distracting the surface tumult of street life, with its sizzle of Chicago hotdogs and breakneck chatter, stop for a moment and look up. Chicago has, after all, always reached for the stars.

High Times

Look for the brightest stars on Chicago’s skyline….
1890
Jewelers’ Building, 35 East Wacker Drive
The dramatic exterior of this Chicago gem with stylised floral adornment is a good extant example of Chicago’s post-fire rebuild. It was also nigh terrifyingly hightech in its era, when elevators spirited jewellers’ cars up to the 22nd Floor.

1925
Tribune Tower, 435 North Michigan Avenue
Commissioned by way of an international design competition to befit “the world’s best newspaper”, the Tribune Tower is two-parts classic 20th-century skyscraper, to one-part 13thcentury Gothic pomp.

1964
Marina City, 300 North State Street
Known locally as ‘Corn Cob Towers’, Marina City did away with Chicago’s Neo-Classical waterfront design traditions. The twin towers are built to appear like stacked conical shells: “Nature does not know a right angle,” said architect Bertrand Goldberg.

1983
333 West Wacker Drive
This sweeping arc of shimmering blue-green glass caught the local imagination. Watch the setting sun bathe it in a fiery display.

Chicago Architecture Foundation runs a variety of architecture tours, including a riverboat cruise. Visit www.architecture.org for further details.