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