Skyscrapers, Three Towers

The density of downtown Chicago is the direct inheritance of the steel frame invented here in the 1880s — once a building could be hung on a skeleton instead of resting on its walls, the city could build tall and build close, and the Loop filled in with towers standing shoulder to shoulder.

Photographed June 2024, looking up. The frame is packed wall to wall — three distinct clusters of buildings leaning back toward a common vanishing point overhead, the wide lens tipping them all inward. In black and white it reads as sheer mass: the whole weight of the city pressing up into the sky.