Skyscraper

The story of the first great skyscraper, and the transformation of the modern city.

Chicago's beautiful Reliance Building, sixteen storeys tall, was designed in 1890 by John Root and completed in 1895 by Charles B. Atwood. In its construction – metal frame, large areas of plate glass, fire-proof brick and terracotta cladding – it pioneers all the key elements of twentieth-century high-rise architecture, and many of the tenets of Modernism. Cruickshank reflects on the extraordinary architectural, artistic and engineering world of the 1890s and its great figures such as Daniel H. Burnham, Louis Sullivan and William Le Baron Jenney. He looks forward to the Reliance building's immediate progeny, such as the 1902 Flatiron Building in New York and to the hubristic high-rise architecture of the twenty-first century.

This is also the story of Gilded Age Chicago, which was burned to the ground in 1871. The city – corrupt, violent and fabulously wealthy – was ready to try anything, even revolutionary forms of architecture.

About the Author

Dan Cruickshank is a writer and architectural historian who has made numerous history and culture programmes for the BBC including ‘Britain's Best Buildings’, ‘Around the World in Eighty Treasures’; ‘Adventures in Architecture’; ‘Under Fire: Culture and Conflict in Afghanistan and Iraq’; ‘Britain's Palaces’ and ‘The Country House Revealed’. He is the author of ‘Life in the Georgian City’; ‘The Secret History of Georgian London’; and ‘Bridges: Heroic Designs that Changed the World’.

He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects, was an editor on the Architects’ Journal and The Architectural Review, was visiting Professor of Architecture at the University of Sheffield, has served on the executive committee of the Georgian Group and on the Architecture Panel of the National Trust, is a founding Trustee of the Spitalfields Historic Buildings Trust, of SAVE Britain’s Heritage and of the campaign to rebuild the Euston Arch.