The Great Chicago Fire and the Rise of the Chicago School

The Great Chicago Fire burned through the city from 8 to 10 October 1871, destroying roughly 17,000 structures across about 3.3 square miles and leaving more than 100,000 residents homeless in one of the worst urban disasters of the nineteenth century. In its aftermath the city tightened building codes, and the ensuing reconstruction boom, undertaken by ambitious developers such as Potter Palmer, who rebuilt his hotel and marketed it as the world's first fireproof building, created ideal conditions for architectural experimentation. Out of this rebuilding effort emerged the Chicago School, a group of architects active from the late nineteenth into the early twentieth century, including William Le Baron Jenney, Louis Sullivan, Dankmar Adler, Daniel Burnham, John Root, William Holabird and Martin Roche, who pioneered steel frame skyscraper construction and the distinctive Chicago window, a wide central fixed pane flanked by narrower operable sashes. Because steel framing bore the building's weight, exterior walls no longer needed to be load bearing, freeing architects to build taller and admit far more light. Jenney's 1885 Home Insurance Building is frequently cited, though not without dispute, as the first skyscraper in the world. By the time of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, just twenty two years after the fire, Chicago had become an international showcase of modern architecture and engineering.