Nowness - Illinois Institute of Technology

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September 1893. First Ferris Wheel Ride.
As host of the World’s Columbian Exposition,
Chicago faced the challenge of surpassing
the structural marvel of the recently-constructed
Eiffel Tower. George W. Ferris, a
bridge engineer, considered the problem at
length: to simply build another tower would
be to forego innovation. Ferris’s insight was
to realize that the steel frame held potential
beyond static building. He created a dynamic
“machine for looking” that carried as many as
2,160 passengers in modified Pullman train
cars to a height of 264 feet, from which they
could view the expanding metropolis below.
December 1899. The Chicago Frame: Louis
Sullivan’s Schlesinger & Mayer Department
Store. Better known as Carson Pirie Scott &
Co., this building is a high point of the so-called
Chicago School. Architects like Sullivan grappled
with the aesthetic problems presented by
the three-dimensionally gridded steel structure—the
“Chicago Frame”—a structure that
exploded the entire architectural tradition of
load-bearing stone. Freed by the new structural
system, both elevations and plans became
open and non-hierarchical. With their large
expanses of glass, the buildings of this period
ushered in the era of the modern skyscraper.
3 October 1897. Opening of the Union Loop
“L”. As the commercial city’s density generated
unprecedented bustle and gridlock at
street level, new technologies were deployed
to alleviate congestion without sacrificing
the benefits of proximity. As Chicago’s
downtown buildings went skyward, its transit
infrastructure soon followed. Built through
the controversial dealings of Charles Yerkes,
Chicago’s reviled “Cable Czar,” the elevated
“Loop” train lent its name to the city’s central
business district. Today the electric cars still
emit a rumbling roar as they pass overhead.
Chicago’s unusual geological situation, it
was possible through massive infrastructural
work to do the impossible and reverse the
river’s flow away from the lake. The highly
contested project secured clean water for
generations of future Chicagoans, but only by
redirecting the negative impact of the city’s
success onto others.
1909. Traffic on Dearborn and Randolph.
Chicago has always been a logistics center.
Historically overlaid networks of water, rail,
highway, and air travel make today’s city a
major node in the vast systems of global
commerce. More than natural forces, the
flow of goods and people have shaped the
metropolis’s architecture and landscape. At
the turn of the twentieth century the city of
trade turned hypertrophic: life in Chicago’s
center reached an unprecedented, even
notorious, density. Later decades, however,
would demonstrate that urban development
is not unidirectional, but involves cycles of
densification and disaggregation, of ebb and
flow, over the life of the city.
1909. Plan of Chicago. Co-authored by
Daniel Burnham and Edward Bennett, the
Plan of Chicago challenged the non-hierarchical
grid on which the city had grown,
proposing instead a Baroque composition of
plazas, avenues, and parks arranged symmetrically
around an artificial harbor and
civic center. Though many elements were
never realized, the plan articulated far-reaching
goals that guided Chicago’s development
throughout the twentieth century: the preservation
of the lakefront for public use, the
expansion of parks and forest preserves, and
the creation of cultural centers. The Plan
demonstrates that the importance of utopian
visions rests not in the details of their execution
but in their power to direct the course of
metropolitan development.
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17 January 1900. Reversing the River. The
city thrummed with work and life, and the
Chicago River ran through it all, transporting
livestock, grain, and lumber, but also
dumping waste into Lake Michigan, the
city’s supply of fresh water. Outbreaks of
typhoid became increasingly common as the
industrial city sickened itself. Yet, technology
also provided a solution (of sorts): given
14 February 1929. St. Valentine’s Day
Massacre. Prohibition brought celebrity,
riches, and violence to Chicago gangland
bosses like Al Capone and Bugs Moran,
whose rival factions controlled the city’s
booze traffic, brothels, and casinos. With its
conspiracy theories, complicit cops, and suspects
who went uncharged, the St. Valentine’s
Chicago
Chicago