Skyscrapers, Flag

Chicago is where the skyscraper was invented. After the Great Fire of 1871 cleared the center of the city, architects working here in the 1880s developed the steel-frame high-rise — a building hung on a metal skeleton rather than held up by its own walls — and the form spread from here to the rest of the world. To stand at the base of the downtown towers and look straight up is to stand inside the thing Chicago gave the modern city.

Photographed June 2024, looking up. A flag holds the lower edge of the frame — a small human-scaled marker against the sheer glass climbing out of the bottom of the picture. In black and white the towers become a single rising face of light and line.