Travel & Living Magazine

PREVIOUS PAGE The reflective sculpture by Anish Kapoor is called "Cloud Gate" but is affectionately known as "The Bean" in Millenium Park in Chicago. ABOVE A boat tour exploring the architecture along the Chicago River in Chicago. RIGHT The Navy Pier and the skyline of Chicago. "MAKE NO LITTLE PLANS." The advice was from an architect named Daniel Burnham, who helped change the face of a city known for making nothing but the biggest plans. Look around Chicago, more than a century after Burnham's heyday, and you'll see a place where little plans, or little anything, have seldom had a place in the civic scheme. In his famous 1916 poem Chicago, American poet Carl Sandburg called it the 'city of the big shoulders', 'Tool Maker', 'Stacker of Wheat', 'Player with Railroads' and the 'Nation's Freight Handler'. Hardly more than a fur-trading post when New York was already two centuries old, Chicago had a lot of catching up to do, and it wasn't about to do it in small increments. From a population numbering in the scant hundreds in the 1830s, Chicago played upon its location at the centre of Great Lakes navigation – and at the Midwestern crossroads of the nation's burgeoning railways – to become a metropolis of 300,000 by 1870, a year before fire swept the city and destroyed more than 13,000 buildings. But the ashes had barely cooled when those tool makers and freight handlers, and other big-shouldered innovators in industries ranging from meatpacking to mail-order retail, set the city on its modern path. That path led upward. The skyscraper wasn't conceived in New York – it was a Chicago invention, put into practice by that same Daniel Burnham and his partner, John Wellborn Root. At eleven stories, their 1888 Rookery Building was the first important structure to use steel framing and elevators, finally making it possible to lease business space high above city streets. As stolid and squat as the neo-Romanesque Rookery might look today, it heralded the technology that made possible Chicago skyscrapers like the John Hancock Center, the world's highest residential structure, and the Willis (formerly Sears) Tower, the tallest building in the US. Chicago also nurtured creative geniuses who revolutionised their professions. For a 1905 interior facelift, the Rookery's owners turned to a young architect named Frank Lloyd Wright, who developed the 'Prairie Style' in his suburban Oak Park studio. Oak Park still boasts the largest number of surviving Wright houses in the US, although the 74 travel&living www.travelandliving.com.au

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