AIA Guide to Chicago

From the American Institute of Architects comes a definitive overview of the architectural landmarks of Chicago, the birthplace of modern architecture, offering a detailed description of more than one thousand diverse buildings, along with suggested walking or driving tours. Original.

History

Chicago Architecture Foundation

American Institute of Architects Chicago Chapter

Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois

Americas

Harcourt

The Chicago Bungalow is more than a housing style indigenous to the city. It epitomizes Chicago's work ethic and its rewards for successive waves of ethnic newcomers to the city since the early 20th century. In this book, the Chicago Architecture Foundation interprets both the design and the meaning of these homes, in keeping with CAF's mission to raise awareness of Chicago's architectural legacy.
After 1915, new neighborhoods appeared across the prairie. The Chicago-style bungalow came to both dominate and symbolize these areas. A one and one-half story single-family freestanding home, it included such conveniences as electricity, indoor plumbing, and central heat. Chicagoans built some 80,000 bungalows. Another 20,000 were built in suburban Cook County. Nearly every ethnic and racial group in the area has made its way at one time or another to the Bungalow Belt. Today the Bungalow Belt includes white ethnic, African American, Latino, and Asian families.

The Chicago Bungalow (IL) (GEN)

Arts & Photography

Photography & Video

Arcadia Publishing

Marshall Field built the largest department store in the world at the time, and his architect Daniel Burnham, following Field's dictum "dazzle the customer with opulence," created a store unmatched in elegance. 
Influenced by the Florentine palazzi of the Renaissance, Beaux-Arts monumentalism, and the Chicago School, the exterior of Marshal Field's radiated a luxury that only hinted at the elegance inside. An extravagantly beautiful Louis Tiffany tesserae dome poured light onto all who entered; a soaring balcony allowed women to see and be seen. Field's was as close to a temple of commerce as any building has ever come. 
Jay Pridmore is an architectural historian who has written widely about the people and ideas behind the building of Chicago. His 1993 book Chicago Architecture and Design, coauthored with George Larson, is one of the city's most popular books about local architecture.

Marshall Field's (A Building Book)

Jay Pridmore

Business & Money

Pomegranate

The Nation's Largest Retailer wanted the largest headquarters in the nation, and they got it -- in spades. Designed by Skidmore, Owings &amp; Merrill (SOM), the 110-story, anodized aluminum-clad Sears Tower occupies three acres in the West Loop. The bundled-tube construction allowed for more windows and more corner offices per square foot. The total area within the Tower is 4.4 million square feet; the Sky Deck on the 103rd floor offers tremendous views and welcomes more than 1 million visitors yearly.
When SOM realized that their design was only ten stories short of what was supposed to be the record-breaking height of the World Trade Center then under construction (1,368 feet), they broke the record, coming in at 1,454 feet. The move of Sears and Roebuck employees into the Tower was the biggest corporate move in American history. In the late 1980s Sears and Roebuck left the building, but it continues to thrive, a timeless monument to American ingenuity.

Sears Tower: A Building Book from the Chicago Architecture Foundation

Commissioned by Ferdinand Peck and produced by architects Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler--soon to be leaders of the Chicago School--in 1889, the Auditorium Building was a wondrous complex, housing a hotel, offices, stores, and a theater. Adler's engineering skills overcame the problem of a foundation that had to support an unevenly distributed weight; Sullivan designed the stunning theater, which was spanned by four elliptical arches studded with 3,500 incandescent electric lights and decorated with gold leaf. Adler created a hydraulic stage--with twenty-six lifts--and one of the first air-conditioning systems in a public building. 
Among the many design features in the interior of the Auditorium were murals, onyx, marble, open loggias, stained glass, filigreed vents, wainscoting, and bronze-plated posts. Scholars considered the Auditorium Building the most important single structure in Chicago.

The Auditorium Building: A Building Book from the Chicago Architecture Foundation, No. A687

Pridmore, Jay

Blessing, Hedrich

A huge complex spanning two city blocks, the Merchandise Mart is the largest wholesale design center in the world. The brainchild of James Simpson of Marshall Field &amp; Company, it was planned to house Field's huge wholesale division and prop up sagging sales. 
Executed by the architectural firm of Graham, Anderson, Probst and White--of Opera House and Field Museum fame--the Mart was the world's most complex mixed-use structure: a warehouse, a department store, and a commercial office tower. All this was presented in a successful blend of elements from the Chicago School, classicism, and Art Deco, built on former Chicago &amp; North Western Railway property and air space over the tracks. Unfortunately, Field's suffered from the Great Depression, and so the Mart stood almost empty during World War II. In 1946 Joseph P. Kennedy purchased the Merchandise Mart for $16 million (it had cost $32 million to build). Under Kennedy's managerial flair; the Mart thrived. Renovations between 1986 and 1991 injected new life into the building and today the Marchandise Mart is an enduring monument to the brash, inventive, and successful Chicago spirit.

The Merchandise Mart (Building Book s.)

Architecture

Chicago rebounded from its famous fire of 1871 with an onslaught of construction. In 1885 the city celebrated the completion of the first skyscraperthe nine-story Home Insurance Buildinginitiating a new era in architecture and marking Chicago as the worlds center of the skyscraper, a distinction that it holds to this day. Driven by the talents and vision of such trailblazing architects as Louis Sullivan, D.H. Burnham, and John Wellborn Root, and in succeeding decades by former Bauhaus director Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and the megafirm Skidmore, Owings &amp; Merrill (among others), Chicago has sustained its tradition of innovative engineering and dramatic design.

Postcard Bk-Chicago

Pomegranate Communications

Twenty assorted 5 x 7 in. blank notecards (5 each of 4 designs) with envelopes in a decorative box

Chicago: The River and Its Architecture, Collection One Notecards

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