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YOU CAN LEARN as much about American architecture in a couple of afternoons in Chicago as you could learn anywhere else in two weeks, maybe a month. Walk around downtown, crane your neck on every other corner, and you can't help seeing a complete history of the skyscraper--from the 16-story Monadnock Building, whose load-bearing brick walls are more than a century old, to the Sears Tower, its heights likely as not wrapped in clouds. Or drive to Prairie Avenue to see Henry Hobson Richardson's subtle Glessner House; head to Oak Park to tour Frank Lloyd Wright's earliest commissions; stop by the University of Chicago to admire the residence Wright built for Frederick and Lora Robie after perfecting his famous Prairie Style. In a few hours you've covered half a semester's work in any undergraduate architecture course.
No city has been more important to the evolution of American architecture than Chicago. Here Daniel Burnham oversaw the creation of a plaster-covered "white city" for the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, reinvigorating American classicism and spawning the City Beautiful movement that inspired urban planners everywhere. Here Ludwig Mies van der Rohe settled after leaving Nazi Germany, becoming head of the architecture school at the Illinois Institute of Technology and creating buildings whose compelling starkness was everywhere imitated, though rarely matched.
Best of all, here an architect's influence on contemporaries and successors is easy to see in an afternoon. A walk or a drive can show you how Richardson's buildings served as lessons for Louis Sullivan, how Sullivan's advances taught Wright, and so forth. Be warned, though: Chicago has so many good buildings that it would take an encyclopedia to do them all justice. What follows is a tour that hopes to be instructive, but makes no claim of being comprehensive.
START AT THE INTERSECTION of Prairie Avenue and 18th Street. The granite fortress on the southwest corner is Glessner House, one of Richardson's last designs--it was completed in 1887, shortly after his death. You can easily recognize the heavy arches and overscaled stonework out of which he created his much-imitated style. But you can also see--by comparing Glessner House with its contemporary across the street--the impressive confidence with which Richardson designed. While other architects were gluing ornate gables,...