Chicago's Second Birth

The Great Chicago Fire of 1871 burned for two days and destroyed a third of the city. Within 20 years, the rubble had been replaced by the world's first skyscrapers — the Rookery in 1888, the Monadnock in 1891, the Reliance in 1895. The disaster, by forcing the complete reinvention of an entire city center in a single generation, accidentally created modern architecture. Every skyscraper on earth today is a direct descendant of what was built in these 16 blocks of the Loop between 1871 and 1900.

The Rookery Building holds a detail most visitors miss: in 1905, a young Frank Lloyd Wright was commissioned to renovate the light court of a building completed 17 years before he became famous. He added white marble and ornamental ironwork in his emerging Prairie style — which means the Rookery contains, in the same atrium, both the 19th-century industrial aesthetic of Burnham and Root and the 20th-century organic vision of Wright. Stand in the center and you're standing in both architectural centuries simultaneously.

Buckingham Fountain — modeled on the Latona Fountain at Versailles — was built three times larger than its source. The French original is elegant. The Chicago version is operatic. It feels like the city couldn't help itself.