Every major city has a defining contribution to the world. Paris has the boulevard. Rome has the piazza. Chicago has the skyscraper — and more specifically, it has the architectural movement that made the modern skyscraper possible. The Chicago School of Architecture wasn’t a formal institution or a manifesto signed by a group of architects in a room. It was something that emerged from necessity, disaster, and ambition in roughly equal measure, and it changed the built world permanently.
Michael Ferro, Chicago artist and curator, sees the Chicago School not as a chapter in an architecture textbook but as the foundation on which the city’s entire cultural identity rests. Understanding it doesn’t require a design degree. It requires knowing where to look and what you’re seeing when you do.
Why Chicago? Why Then?
The story starts with the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, which destroyed roughly three square miles of the city’s core and left tens of thousands of people without homes or businesses. The rebuilding effort that followed was one of the largest and most concentrated construction projects in American history — and it attracted architects who were willing to experiment.
At the same time, two technological developments made a new kind of building possible. The first was the Bessemer steel process, which made structural steel affordable and widely available. The second was the hydraulic elevator, which made tall buildings practical for the first time. Together, they created the conditions for the skyscraper — and Chicago’s architects were the ones who figured out what to do with those conditions.
The Key Figures
Three names define the Chicago School more than any others.
Louis Sullivan is often called the father of the skyscraper and the originator of the principle that would define modern architecture: form follows function. Sullivan believed a building’s exterior should express its structural logic rather than disguise it behind historical ornament. His Auditorium Building, completed in 1889 with his partner Dankmar Adler, remains one of the great achievements of American architecture — an opera house, hotel, and office building combined into a single structure with acoustics so precise they are still studied today. His Carson Pirie Scott building on State Street, with its intricate cast iron ornamentation at street level giving way to clean, grid-like upper floors, is a masterclass in the relationship between decoration and structure.
Dankmar Adler brought the engineering rigor that made Sullivan’s ideas buildable. Where Sullivan was the visionary, Adler was the problem-solver — the architect who figured out how to float large buildings on Chicago’s unstable clay soil using spread foundations, a technique that made dense urban development in the city possible.
Daniel Burnham operated at a different scale. Where Sullivan and Adler worked building by building, Burnham thought in terms of cities. His firm, originally Burnham and Root, produced some of Chicago’s most important early skyscrapers, including the Monadnock Building and the Reliance Building. But Burnham’s most lasting contribution was the 1909 Plan of Chicago, a comprehensive urban design blueprint that shaped the city’s lakefront, park system, and street network for generations. His directive — make no little plans — became one of the most quoted phrases in the history of urban design.
What the Chicago School Actually Built
The buildings produced by Chicago School architects between roughly 1880 and 1910 share a set of recognizable characteristics. They used steel frames rather than load-bearing masonry walls, which meant exterior walls could be thinner and windows could be larger. They emphasized verticality, expressing the height of the building rather than trying to disguise it. And they treated ornamentation as something that should serve the building’s structure rather than overwhelm it.
The results are still standing across the Loop. The Rookery Building at 209 S. LaSalle St. The Auditorium Theatre at 50 E. Congress Pkwy. The Monadnock Building at 53 W. Jackson Blvd., the tallest load-bearing masonry building ever constructed. These are not museum pieces — they are active, occupied buildings that happen to contain some of the most important architectural ideas of the last 150 years.
Why It Still Matters
The Chicago School didn’t just build Chicago. It established the vocabulary that architects around the world spent the 20th century working with, arguing against, and building upon. The glass curtain wall towers of Mies van der Rohe, who came to Chicago in 1938 and extended the city’s architectural tradition into the modern era, are direct descendants of what Sullivan, Adler, and Burnham figured out in the 1880s and 90s.
For Michael Ferro, the Chicago School is a reminder that the most consequential creative breakthroughs rarely happen in the most expected places. They happen where necessity meets talent and someone decides to try something that hasn’t been done before. In the 1880s, that place was Chicago.
The buildings are still here. Look up.
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