“Skyscrapers and Their City: Reframing Chicago’s Postwar High-Rises”

It may be fair to ask, given the exhaustive treatment Chicago and its tall buildings have received from architectural and urban historians since the publication of Carl Condit’s The Rise of the Skyscraper (1952), what a new book on the subject might offer. Thomas Leslie’s Chicago Skyscrapers, 1934–1986: How Technology, Politics, Finance, and Race Reshaped the City makes a convincing case that there is yet more material to be explored and new angles from which to explore it. Leslie’s book, as the title suggests, examines high-rises in the Midwestern metropolis through a multifaceted lens from the Great Depression through the upheavals of the 1960s and ‘70s. This is, in many ways, a companion volume to Leslie’s Chicago Skyscrapers, 1871–1934, carrying that 2013 book’s chronology and methodology forward. Like the earlier volume, the book under review here continues to self-consciously position Leslie as a kind of critical descendant of Condit’s work, at once furthering the latter’s fascination with construction and technology while simultaneously arguing against Condit’s view of the city’s varied twentieth century architecture as a coherent “Second Chicago School.” (The first “Chicago School” has been used by Condit and others to describe a purported coherence across the work of Holabird and Root, Louis Sullivan, and others in the 1880s and ‘90s). Even if, at least for a time, the work of German émigré Ludwig Mies van der Rohe; the corporate firm Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill (SOM); and numerous others shared a seemingly uniform visual language of immaculately detailed steel-and-glass curtain walls, what matters more, for Leslie, is “see[ing] Chicago’s postwar skyscrapers as resultants (and sometimes instigators) of technological innovation, political machination, social engineering, financial manipulation, and the overlaps between these” (ix).

Chicago Skyscrapers, 1934–1986, is organized into nine chapters bracketed by a preface and coda. These chapters move more or less chronologically from the mid-1930s to the mid-1980s, introducing new dimensions and focusing on specific aspects of the larger story, often through detailed examinations of a dozen or more individual buildings. The first chapter lays the groundwork by highlighting the decades-long dearth of construction in the downtown Loop that followed the building of the Depression-era Field Building (Graham, Anderson, Probst, and White [GAP&W], 1929–34) and by discussing the changing professional landscape, with the evolution of older architectural offices under new leadership and, often, new names (GAP&W was the successor firm of Daniel H. Burnham’s turn-of-the-century practice), and the arrival of new figures like Mies who would transform the city’s building culture in the decades to come. Chapter two focuses on developments during the 1930s and ‘40s in several areas of building technology—air-conditioning, fluorescent lighting, insulated plate glass, and advancements in aluminum and steel production—which, among other things, enabled new forms of architectural expression and encouraged new attitudes toward interior comfort. These technologies became entangled in debates over proposed changes to the city’s building code—the taut, uninterrupted grids of metal and glass produced by Mies, SOM, and others were only made possible by a shift from prescriptive requirements for fireproof façade construction to performance-based fire-resistant standards—which allows Leslie to preview how deeply enmeshed Chicago’s postwar architecture would become in the city’s transformations and upheavals.

Leslie illustrates these entanglements most successfully in chapter three, which examines high-rise housing developments—both public projects for low-income, mostly Black Chicagoans and upmarket developments for mostly white professionals—from the 1940s and ‘50s. This chapter’s success lies in Leslie’s ability to weave together discussions of the broader urban context—in this case, focused primarily on the city’s stark racial and class divisions—with the details of individual architectural case studies. The chapter begins by recounting efforts to provide adequate housing for the tens of thousands of Black Southerners who arrived in Chicago as part of the Great Migration, more than tripling the city’s African American population in the first decades of the twentieth century. These new residents were almost exclusively confined to the Bronzeville neighborhood on the city’s Southside, which produced a thriving center of Black cultural and economic life as well as extreme overcrowding and deteriorating housing stock. Initially, the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) sought to disperse public housing via smaller scale, low-rise developments built on available land throughout the city. The Frances Cabrini Homes, designed by architect Henry Holsman in 1942, were an early, successful example, combining innovations in construction and materials with a variety of apartment types for individuals and families that, because of nondiscrimination requirements attached to the project’s federal funding, “developed a reputation for tenuous racial harmony” (40). Similar efforts elsewhere were met with indifference or intransigence from political leaders and resistance, sometimes violent, by white residents, which caused the CHA to turn to high-rises as a way to house more people in larger developments on cleared sites in or near existing Black neighborhoods. If the best of these, like the Dearborn Homes (1948–50) successfully demonstrated the potential of high-density public housing, they also helped to more firmly entrench the city’s starkly segregated housing landscape.

While Leslie returns to later experiments in public housing, most of the rest of chapter three is concerned with middle- and upper-class housing, and what makes these discussions so compelling are the ways the author connects what might otherwise seem like disparate examples. For example, while Mies van der Rohe and SOM figure prominently in this part of the story, equally important is Henry Holsman, whose firm Holsman, Holsman, Klekamp, and Taylor translated their prior experience with the CHA to develop novel approaches to the construction and financing of middle-class high-rise housing. Mies’s precisely detailed curtain walls may be the more visibly innovative aspects of projects like 860–880 Lake Shore Drive (1949–52), but the Holsman office’s pioneering use of cooperative financing made these types of developments possible in the first place. Which is to say, Leslie ensures readers understand that, even if the city’s housing developments, with few exceptions, reinforced existing class and race divisions, the expertise that created them could and did more easily move across those divides. He also shows that the technical ingenuity of lesser-known figures like Holsman played at least as important a role in remaking the city’s skyline as the esthetic sensibilities of a more celebrated figure like Mies. Leslie might have explored this further, especially considering the way other scholars have begun to treat the technical failings of Mies’s buildings—he insisted on single-layer, clear glass for the curtain walls at 860–880 Lakeshore Drive, which caused the interiors to cook in the summer sun—as opportunities to rethink more than just the quirks of one obsessive architect but rather the environmental legacy of mid-century modernism at large. ¹

The remaining chapters continue this approach through different episodes in Chicago’s mid-twentieth century history. Chapter four narrates the technological, financial, and regulatory changes that brought commercial development back to the Loop after decades of stagnation, using case studies like the Prudential Building (Naess and Murphy, 1951–55) and Inland Steel Building (SOM, 1955–58) to illustrate the innovative design solutions that emerged from and exploited those changes. Chapter five considers the impact of Mayor Richard J. Daley’s early years in office, the new political and building cultures that emerged under his administration, and the concentration of building activity in the Loop that resulted. Similar to chapter three, the sixth chapter traverses high-rise housing built for residents across the city’s socioeconomic spectrum and racial divides—from Bertrand Goldberg’s Marina City (1959–67) to Shaw, Metz and Associates' Robert Taylor Homes (1958–62)—to examine ways the greater emphasis on large-scale, high-density projects during the Daley years concentrated power and wealth in the hands of some (wealthy, white) residents, while depriving others (who were almost invariably poor and Black).

The design and construction of a new federal courthouse, office building, and post office (Mies van der Rohe et al., 1958–74) and a new city-county courthouse and office building (known as the Civic Center; C. F. Murphy et al., 1960–65) are the focus of chapter seven, which uses these and a few other case studies to examine the ways architects and engineers sought to resolve these projects' complex functional requirements while also providing the city with a civic identity at once modern and monumental. Chapter eight explores the “distinct, new species of skyscraper structure” (213), best exemplified by truly enormous examples like the John Hancock Center (SOM, 1965–69) and Sears Tower (SOM, 1969–74), that emerged out of structural experiments that treated a tower as a tube-like structural system (rather than a skeletal assemblage of columns and beams). The ninth and final chapter considers how new materials and esthetic sensibilities produced an eclectic collection of late-twentieth century office and apartment towers culminating in the polarizing State of Illinois Center (Murphy/Jahn, 1979–85).

Leslie’s attention to detail in each of these chapters and the numerous case studies that fill them is one of the book’s real strengths. It allows him to discuss the minutiae of structural systems and curtain walls in ways that remain, throughout the book, accessible and engaging to anyone with a basic knowledge of how buildings are designed and assembled. It also devotes substantial attention to the actual construction of these skyscrapers instead of more familiar historical narratives that focus exclusively on architects' creative achievements. The book does suffer, however, from this same attention to detail. Or, to put that a bit differently, Leslie’s attempt to present a larger, multifaceted narrative of urban change is muddled by that narrative’s unvaried structure. Most chapters, especially in the book’s latter half, provide a brief contextual framing before examining up to twenty case studies. Because these case studies make up the bulk of the later chapters, it is difficult to keep the larger changes that were reshaping the city and impacting the design and construction of those individual buildings in focus. Readers are told, for instance, of Mayor Daley’s heavy-handed influence on the city’s skyline over two decades in office, but his appearances in the narrative are more like brief cameos. In a different sense, Leslie references the protests, violence, and unrest that shook cities like Chicago in 1968 but only hints at their connections to or influence on architectural and urban developments. Put differently, these broader contextual concerns could have been more fully integrated into and informed the contours of the narrative, instead of simply bracketing an otherwise uniform approach to the architectural case studies, which might have created a more varied, responsive, and context-specific approach to chapter structures. ² While urban and planning historians may wish for fuller treatment of the broader context from which Chicago’s post-World War II skyscrapers rose, architectural and construction historians will find in Chicago Skyscrapers, 1934–1986, an invaluable resource for better understanding how technological, political, financial, and social issues were interwoven with these tall buildings.

ORCID iD

Joseph M. Watson https://orcid.org/0009-0008-3988-2529