CHICAGO ARCHITECTURE MODELS

If you want to understand how the modern city came to look the way it does, Chicago is where you start. After the Great Fire of 1871 levelled most of the city, architects descended on a blank canvas with new materials, new structural ambitions and no obligation to the past. What emerged was the Chicago School — the invention of the steel-framed skyscraper, and with it, the template for every tall building that followed.

Our Chicago collection goes to the heart of that story. The Monadnock Building (1891) and the Reliance Building (1890), both by Daniel Burnham, represent the Chicago School at its most pioneering — the Monadnock the last and tallest of the load-bearing masonry towers, the Reliance the first to show what steel and terracotta could do. The Fisher Apartments, a quietly refined Art Deco block in the Gold Coast district, shows Chicago's architectural ambition persisting into the 1930s.

And then there is the Farnsworth House - Mies van der Rohe's 1951 glass and steel pavilion on the Fox River is one of the most radical domestic buildings ever built — a single room suspended above a floodplain, stripped of everything unnecessary.

The Chicago Cityscape map, centred on the Loop, captures the density and the grid that makes Chicago's downtown unlike any other.