From skyline-defining icons to wonders of the world, the second period of the Chicago skyscraper transformed the way Chicagoans lived and worked. Thomas Leslie’s comprehensive look at the modern skyscraper era views the skyscraper idea, and the buildings themselves, within the broad expanse of city history. As construction emerged from the Great Depression, structural, mechanical, and cladding innovations evolved while continuing to influence designs. But the truly radical changes concerned the motivations that drove construction. While profit remained key in the Loop, developers elsewhere in Chicago worked with a Daley political regime that saw tall buildings as tools for a wholesale recasting of the city’s appearance, demography, and economy. Focusing on both the wider cityscape and specific buildings, Leslie reveals skyscrapers to be the physical results of negotiations between motivating and mechanical causes.

Illustrated with more than 140 photographs, Chicago Skyscrapers, 1934–1986 tells the fascinating stories of the people, ideas, negotiations, decision-making, compromises, and strategies that changed the history of architecture and one of its showcase cities.

Thomas Leslie is an architect, educator, and author. His books include Beauty's Rigor: Patterns of Production in the Work of Pier Luigi Nervi and Chicago Skyscrapers, 1871–1934.

Preface

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1. The Second Skyscraper City

Chapter 2. Technical Developments in the 1930s-1940s

Chapter 3. Demographics and Housing

Chapter 4. Prudential, Inland Steel, and the Rebirth of the Loop

Chapter 5. Daley’s City: Commercial Construction, 1955-1972

Chapter 6. High Rise Housing in the 1960s

Chapter 7. Skyscraper Urbanism

Chapter 8. Tubes and the High-Rise as Structural Art

Chapter 9. After Sears

Coda: Mies, Morality, and the Myth of the “Second Chicago School”

Notes

Bibliography

Index