USA – ILLLINOIS

ILLINOIS WEST/SOUTH (Springfield, Rockford, Peoria, Normal)
World Heritage Sites
Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site is the site of a pre-Columbian Native American city (which existed circa 1050–1350 CE) directly across the Mississippi River from modern St. Louis, Missouri. The park covers 2,200 acres and about 80 mounds, but the ancient city was much larger. At its apex around 1100 CE, Cahokia covered about 6 square miles (16 km²) and included about 120 artificial earthen mounds in various sizes, shapes, and functions. In population, it may have briefly exceeded contemporaneous London.
Cahokia was the largest and most influential urban settlement of the Mississippian culture, which developed advanced societies across much of what is now the central and southeastern United States, beginning more than 1,000 years before European contact. Today, Cahokia Mounds is considered the largest and most complex archaeological site north of the great pre-Columbian cities in Mexico.
It is one of the 24 UNESCO World Heritage Sites within the United States.

Peoria (pop 115,000)
The largest city on the Illinois River was established in 1691 by the French explorer Henri de Tonti. Originally known as Fort Clark, it was renamed after the Peoria tribe, a member of the Illinois Confederation.
A major port on the Illinois River, Peoria is a trading and shipping center for a large agricultural area that produces maize, soybeans, and livestock. Although the economy is well diversified, the city’s traditional manufacturing industries remain essential, producing earthmoving equipment, metal products, lawn-care equipment, labels, steel towers, farm equipment, building materials, steel, wire, and chemicals. Until 2018, Peoria was the global and national headquarters for heavy equipment and engine manufacturer Caterpillar Inc., but then it relocated its headquarters to Deerfield, Illinois.

Springfield (pop 116,000) is the capital of Illinois. Present-day Springfield was settled by European Americans in the late 1810s, when Illinois became a state. The most famous historic resident was Abraham Lincoln, who lived in Springfield from 1837 until 1861, when he went to the White House as President. Major tourist attractions include multiple sites connected with Lincoln, including his presidential library and museum, his home, and his tomb at Oak Ridge Cemetery.
The city lies in a valley and plain near the Sangamon River. Lake Springfield, a large artificial lake owned by the City Water, Light & Power company (CWLP), supplies the city with recreation and drinking water.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

ILLINOIS NORTHEAST (Chicago, Naperville, Aurora)

CHICAGO (pop 2,705,994, metropolitan 10 million)
The third-most-populous city in the United States is located on the shores of freshwater Lake Michigan and incorporated as a city in 1837 near a portage between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River watershed. It grew rapidly in the mid-19th century. After the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, which destroyed several square miles and left more than 100,000 homeless, the city made a concerted effort to rebuild. The construction boom accelerated population growth throughout the following decades, and by 1900, less than 30 years after the Great Fire, Chicago was the fifth-largest city in the world. Chicago noted contributions to urban planning and zoning standards, including new construction styles (including the Chicago School of architecture), the development of the City Beautiful Movement, and the steel-framed skyscraper.
Chicago is an international hub for finance, culture, commerce, industry, education, technology, telecommunications, and transportation. It is the site of the creation of the first standardized futures contracts, issued by the Chicago Board of Trade, which today is the largest and most diverse derivatives market in the world, generating 20% of all volume in commodities and financial futures alone. Depending on the particular year, the city’s O’Hare International Airport is routinely ranked as the world’s fifth or sixth busiest airport. The region also has the most significant number of federal highways and is the nation’s railroad hub. The Chicago area has one of the world’s highest gross domestic products (GDPs), generating $689 billion in 2018. In addition, the city has one of the world’s most diversified and balanced economies, with no single industry employing more than 14% of the workforce. Chicago is home to several Fortune 500 companies, including Allstate, Boeing, Caterpillar, Exelon, Kraft Heinz, McDonald’s, Mondelez International, Sears, United Airlines Holdings, and Walgreens.
Chicago’s 58 million domestic and international visitors in 2018 made it the second most visited city in the nation, after New York City’s 65 million visitors.
Landmarks in the city include Millennium Park, Navy Pier, the Magnificent Mile, the Art Institute of Chicago, Museum Campus, the Willis (Sears) Tower, Grant Park, the Museum of Science and Industry, and Lincoln Park Zoo. Chicago’s culture includes the visual arts, literature, film, theatre, comedy (especially improvisational comedy), food, music, jazz, blues, soul, hip-hop, gospel, and electronic dance music, including house music. Of the area’s many colleges and universities, the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, and the University of Illinois at Chicago are classified as “highest research” doctoral universities. Chicago has professional sports teams in each major professional league, including two Major League Baseball teams.

EARLY CHICAGO SKYSCRAPERS. Tentative WHS: This is a serial proposal of 9 primarily commercial buildings in Chicago’s central business district, the “Loop.”  The buildings, built over about 20 years starting in the 1880s, exemplify the first generation of “skyscrapers.”The form’s emergence in significant numbers in Chicago in the late 19th and early 20th century was spurred by a fortuitous convergence of new materials and technologies, rapid urban growth, and the opportunity to rebuild Chicago’s downtown following the Great Fire of 1871.
As land values increased in downtown Chicago in the 1870s and 1880s, natural and artificial barriers discouraged the outward spread of the city’s downtown and encouraged greater density. An escalation in land prices forced lot owners to maximize available space. The city’s swampy land base created challenges for building designers, as these buildings created a tremendous weight load on their foundation.
At the same time, the abundant construction in Chicago in the wake of the Great Fire of 1871 had attracted many architects and engineers to the city. New compositional forms were accepted and established since the new commercial building types had no aesthetic antecedents.  The success and practicality of such buildings led to the metropolises of the 20th century with vertical downtowns. The form and style that emerged in these buildings was known initially as the Commercial Style and later as the Chicago Style, or the Chicago School of Architecture.
Making use of new technologies of the time, particularly internal metal structural systems instead of load-bearing masonry walls, they were able to rise to heights of near 20 stories with large plate-glass windows, the first elevators (lifts) to reach the high floors, electric lights to make interior spaces usable, plumbing and heating. Replacing brick and stone structures with iron and steel posed new problems, especially fire resistance and wind bracing.  These were solved with brilliant engineering solutions such as the rigid frame, cutting-edge construction techniques such as riveted connections, innovations in foundations, and terra cotta fireproofing. These factors made tall buildings both practical and possible.
The architects active in designing these buildings, including Louis H. Sullivan, William Le Baron Jenney, John Wellborn Root, Charles Atwood and Martin Roche, simultaneously developed a new aesthetic for the building exteriors suited to this new form, consisting of a vertical, tripartite form derived from classical columns and expressing the internal structure and functions of the buildings. The buildings are:
Auditorium Building. (1889) Unless you purchase a ticket to a performance, you will be hard-pressed to enjoy or fully appreciate this nomination component. A young apprentice (Frank Lloyd Wright) played an essential role in shaping the beautiful interior of the theatre.
Second Leiter Building                            
Marquette Building. (1895) This is a must-see component. The front entrance is adorned with scenes of Chicago’s History. The History of Chicago and the Great Lakes region is even more richly decorated in the lobby, which is open to the public.
Rookery Building (1886-1888). This 12-story building measures 181 feet, making it one of the oldest high-rise buildings in the city. This structure is the gem of the ensemble and is noteworthy for its exterior and magnificent interior lobby. The latter was redesigned by a rising star, Frank Lloyd Wright, who was in his late 30s in 1905.
Monadnock Building. (1893) – 197 ft. The Monadnock Building is known for the distinctive architectural split between its north and south halves. The north half, completed in 1891, was built with traditional thick brick walls to support its 16-story height. The south half, completed two years later, is supported by a steel skeleton frame and topped by an ornate copper cornice.
Old Colony Building                                  
Fisher Building                                       
Schlesinger & Mayer Building [later Carson Pirie Scott & Co. department store]
Ludington Building         

The following eight buildings are in the NM “Modern Architecture Buildings” series. 
875 North Michigan Avenue, formerly the John Hancock Center, is a 100-story, 1,128-foot supertall skyscraper in the Magnificent Mile district. When it topped out in 1968, it was the second-tallest building in the world and the tallest outside New York City. It is currently the fourth-tallest building in Chicago and the ninth-tallest in the United States, after One World Trade Center, the Willis Tower, 432 Park Avenue, the Trump Tower Chicago, the Empire State Building, the Bank of America Tower, 30 Hudson Yards and the Aon Center. The top of its antenna masts stands at 1,500 feet (457 m). The building has several offices, restaurants, and about 700 condominiums. It also contains the third-highest residence in the world, after the Burj Khalifa in Dubai and the Trump Tower in Chicago.
From the 95th-floor restaurant, diners can see Chicago and Lake Michigan. The observatory (360 Chicago) competes with the Willis Tower’s Skydeck, which has a 360° view of the city, up to four states, and a distance of over 80 miles (130 km). The 44th-floor sky lobby features America’s highest indoor swimming pool.

Harold Washington Library is the central library for the Chicago Public Library System. Upon its completion in 1991, the new mayor, Richard M. Daley, named the building in honour of the now-deceased former mayor Harold Washington. Since then, the library has appeared in the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s most significant public library building.
The bottom portion of the exterior is made of large granite blocks, and most of the exterior is red brick. Both draw on the Beaux-Art style. The pediments and most of the west side facing Plymouth Court are glass, steel, and aluminum, with ornamentation hearkening to the Mannerist style.
In 1993, the roof was ornamented with seven large, painted aluminum acroteria with owl figures (a symbol of knowledge) and seed pods (representing the natural bounty of the Midwest). On the north, east, and south sides of the building are five-story-tall arched windows. Between the windows are rope friezes.
All public doors lead to the two-story lobby. The second floor houses a children’s library, and the ninth floor holds the Winter Garden, which may serve as a reading room or be rented for social functions.

Marina City is a mixed-use residential-commercial building complex that opened between 1963 and 1967 and occupies almost an entire city block on State Street on the north bank of the Chicago River directly across from the Loop. The complex consists of two 587-foot (179 m), 65-story apartment towers, opened in 1963, which include physical plant penthouses. It also consists of a 10-story office building (now a hotel) opened in 1964, and a saddle-shaped auditorium building originally used as a cinema. When finished, the two towers were the tallest residential buildings, the tallest reinforced concrete structures in the world, and the first building in the United States to be constructed with the Linden climbing tower cranes.. The complex was built as a “city within a city”, featuring numerous on-site facilities including a theatre, gym, swimming pool, ice rink, bowling alley, stores, restaurants, and a marina.
As the first post-war urban high-rise residential complex in the United States, it is widely credited with beginning the residential renaissance of American inner cities.
The two towers contain identical floor plans. The bottom 19 floors form an exposed spiral parking ramp. The 20th floor includes a laundry room and gym with panoramic views of the Loop, while floors 21 through 60 contain apartments (450 per tower). A 360-degree open-air roof deck lies on the 61st and top story.
Marina City apartments are unusual because they contain almost no interior right angles. On each residential floor, a circular hallway surrounds the elevator core with 16 sector-shaped units arrayed around the hallway. Bathrooms and kitchens are located towards the inside of the building, while living areas occupy the outermost regions. Every unit terminates in a 175-square-foot semi-circular balcony, separated from living areas by a floor-to-ceiling window wall. The apartments are also unusual because they function solely on electricity and are not provided with hot water, air conditioning, or heat from a central source. They are noted for the high speed of their elevators, taking 33 seconds.

Onterie Center is a sixty-story, award-winning high-rise in downtown Chicago and takes its name from a conflation of “Ontario” and “Erie”, the streets at its two entrances. Construction was completed in 1986. The building is two towers: a 60-story Main Tower and an 11-story Auxiliary Tower. At 570 feet (174 m), the Main Tower is among the 50 tallest buildings in Chicago. In the diagonal brace structure, the X formations on the exterior are concrete infill panels that form a truss tube. There are no steel beams behind them. Onterie Center is the first concrete high-rise in the world to use diagonal shearwalls at the building perimeter, using fewer columns and allowing for a distinct unit layout.
In addition to its 594 apartments, the complex includes office space, ground-floor retail space, a health club facility with an indoor swimming pool, and a 363-space, above-grade parking garage.

S R Crown Hall. The home of the College of Architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, it is widely regarded as one of Mies van der Rohe’s masterpieces. Crown Hall, completed in 1956, is one of the most architecturally significant buildings of the 20th-century Modernist movement. Its suspended roof without interior columns created openness, creating a universal space that could be endlessly adapted to new uses.
The building houses IIT’s architecture school, city planning, and design department. The two-level building is configured as a pure rectangular form, 220 ft. by 120 ft. by 18 ft. tall. The substructure is reinforced concrete and is independent of the superstructure. The enclosed space is column-free with four six-foot columns. Steel plate girders are welded to eight H-columns that suspend the roof in a single plane to form a primary structure.
Tribune Tower is a neo-Gothic, 462-foot-tall skyscraper built between 1923 and 1925. The tower was the home of the Chicago Tribune, Tribune Media, and Tribune Publishing. WGN Radio (720 kHz) originated broadcasts from the building until moving to 303 Wacker Drive in 2018. It is listed as a Chicago Landmark and is a contributing property to the Michigan–Wacker Historic District. In early 2018, work began on converting the entire office building into condominiums, which is expected to be completed by 2020.
It was the first important so-called “American Perpendicular Style,” with ornate buttresses surrounding the tower’s peak, which are especially visible when the tower is lit at night. Near the main entrance, the tower features carved images of Robin Hood (Hood) and a howling dog (Howells) to commemorate the architects. The top of the tower is without a spire but with a crown-shaped top.
Trump International Hotel and Tower is a skyscraper condo-hotel in downtown Chicago. The 98-story structure is 1,388 feet (423.2 m) high, including its spire, its roof topping out at 1,171 feet (357 m). It is next to the main branch of the Chicago River, with a view of the entry to Lake Michigan beyond a series of bridges over the river. The building received publicity when the winner of the first season of The Apprentice reality television show, Bill Rancic, chose to manage the tower’s construction over managing a new Trump National Golf Course and resort in Los Angeles.
When completed in 2009, it became the second-tallest building in the US, surpassing the city’s John Hancock Center with the highest residence (apartment or condo) worldwide. It briefly held this title until the completion of the Burj Khalifa.
The 339-room hotel has Sixteen, one of five restaurants in Chicago with at least a Michelin Guide two-star rating. The spa is one of six with at least a four-star Forbes rating in the Chicago area in 2015.

Willis Tower (Sears Tower was its name for 36 years) is a 110-story, 1,450-foot (442.1 m) skyscraper in Chicago. At completion in 1973, it surpassed the World Trade Center in New York City to become the tallest building in the world, a title that it held for nearly 25 years; it was also the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere for 41 years, until the new One World Trade Center surpassed it in 2014. While it held the title of “Tallest Office Building” until 2014, it lost the title of “Tallest Man-Made Structure” after only 3 years. The CN Tower in Toronto, a communications tower, took over the title in 1976. It is currently the third-tallest building in the United States and the Western hemisphere – and the 23rd-tallest worldwide. More than one million people visit its observation deck each year, the highest in the United States, making it one of Chicago’s most popular tourist destinations.
As of April 2018, the building’s largest tenant is United Airlines, occupying around 20 floors.

The following five hotels are in the NM “Hospitality Legends” series. 
The Drake, a Hilton Hotel, is a luxury, full-service downtown hotel overlooking Lake Michigan. It was founded in 1920, designed in the Italian Renaissance style, and soon became one of Chicago’s landmark hotels. It has 535 bedrooms (including 74 suites), a six-room Presidential Suite, several restaurants, two large ballrooms, the “Palm Court” (a club-like, secluded lobby), and Club International (a members-only club introduced in the 1940s). It is known for the contribution that its silhouette and sign on the lake (Oak Street) façade make to the Gold Coast skyline.
Hilton Chicago is a luxury hotel that is a Chicago landmark that overlooks Grant Park, Lake Michigan, and the Museum Campus. It is the third-largest hotel in Chicago regarding guest rooms; however, it has the largest total meeting and event space of any Chicago hotel.^[3] Every sitting president of the United States has been housed in the hotel before leaving office since its opening in 1927.
Designed in the Beaux-Arts architecture style, it originally featured 3,000 guest rooms and cost approximately $30 million. However, it went bankrupt in the Great Depression. In 1942, the U.S. Army used it as barracks and classrooms for 10,000 air cadets, who utilized the Grand Ballroom as their mess hall.
Conrad Hilton purchased the hotel in 1945. During the 1968 Democratic National Convention, the streets outside the Conrad Hilton Hotel were the scene of a police riot as antiwar demonstrators, being beaten and arrested, began to chant “The whole world is watching”. IIIn 1984, the hotel closed for over a year for the most expensive renovation ever undertaken, at $185 million. The hotel’s 3,000 guest rooms were rebuilt into 1,544 larger and more elegant rooms. In 2012, the hotel started re-invention with a $150 million renovation. The Hilton Chicago is home to Chicago’s most extensive and most expensive hotel room, which formerly served as the Tower Ballroom. The Conrad Hilton Suite is a 5,000-square-foot (460 m²) suite encompassing two floors, T3 and T4, and costs more than $7,000 per night. Refurbished in 2013, the suite includes 16-foot lakeview windows, a baby grand piano, a billiard table, three balconies, three bedrooms on the lower level – each with multiple flat screen televisions, and a helipad. It has hosted famous guests such as Tony Blair, Jay Blunk, Frank Sinatra, John Travolta and Hu Jintao.
Hotel London House Chicago.
InterContinental Chicago Magnificent Mile Hotel. The hotel currently occupies two multi-story buildings. The historic tower, or “South Tower,” is a 471-foot (144 m), 42-story building completed in 1929, originally as the home of the Medinah Athletic Club. The new tower, or “North Tower,” is a 295-foot (90 m), 26-story addition completed in 1961.
The Medinah Athletic Club had 1,000 members, all of whom had to be Shriners. It had 440 guest rooms, and its facilities were made available for the exclusive use of the club’s members and guests. On the eighth floor, its Indiana limestone facade was decorated by three large relief carvings in ancient Assyrian style. Each frieze depicted a different scene in the order of constructing a building, with Contribution on the south wall, Wisdom represented on the west wall and Consecration on the north. Extending the Moorish imagery, the building is topped by a gold-painted dome. There was a miniature golf course on the twenty-third floor, complete with water hazards and a wandering brook; also a shooting range, billiards hall, running track, gymnasium, archery range, bowling alley, two-story boxing arena, and a junior Olympic size swimming pool – all this in addition to the ballrooms, meeting rooms, and 440 guest rooms.
The club filed for bankruptcy in 1934, was sold and converted to a 650-room hotel and has had many owners since.
Palmer House Hilton Hotel. The Palmer House was the city’s first hotel with elevators and the first hotel with electric light bulbs and telephones in the guest rooms. It has also been dubbed the longest continuously operating hotel in North America.
The first (known as “The Palmer”) was built as a wedding present from Potter Palmer to his bride Bertha Honoré in 1871, but burned down just 13 days later on October 9, 1871, in the Great Chicago Fire. Palmer immediately constructed one of the fanciest hotels worldwide in post-fire Chicago, completing it in 1875. The second Palmer House Hotel was seven stories tall and had oversized rooms, luxurious decor, and sumptuous meals served in grand style. The floor of its barber shop was tiled, and silver dollars were embedded in a diamond pattern. Constructed mainly of iron and brick, the hotel was widely advertised as “The World’s Only Fireproof Hotel.”
The third Palmer House was a 25-story hotel rebuilt on the same site and completed in 1925. It had 1,639 guest rooms, making it the second-largest hotel in the city after the Hyatt Regency Chicago.

St. Mary of the Angels Church was built in the Polish Cathedral style in 1899 and has been acclaimed as one of the finest specimens of Roman Renaissance architecture in the United States. The imposing brick edifice with its twin bell towers and magnificent dome was constructed for $400,000. In 1948, the interior was decorated with ornate designs and paintings—the blue “Guiding Light,” visible in the cupola for a significant distance.

Baha’i House of Worship, Wilmette. It is the second Baháʼí House of Worship ever constructed, the oldest surviving, and one of eight continental temples, built to represent all of North America. The temple was designed by French-Canadian architect Louis Bourgeois (1856-1930) to convey the Baháʼí principle of the unity of religion. Begun in the early 1920s, it was delayed through the Great Depression and World War II and completed in 1953.
Baháʼí Houses of Worship are intended to include several social, humanitarian, and educational institutions clustered around the temple, although none have been built to such an extent. The temples are not intended as a local meeting place, but are open to the public and used as a devotional space for people of any faith.
The House of Worship is a domed structure surrounded by gardens and fountains on a 6.97-acre (2.82 ha) plot of land. The dome is 138 feet (42 m) high and 72 feet (22 m) in diameter. The auditorium seats 1,191 people.
Since nine is the last number in the decimal system, Baháʼís believe it symbolizes perfection and completion. Nine is also the value of the word Bahá (Arabic for “glory”) in Abjad numerology. Thus, many elements of the building occur in groups of nine. For example, there are nine entrances to the auditorium, nine interior alcoves, nine dome sections, and nine fountains in the garden area.
The cladding of the building is composed of a concrete mixture of Portland cement and two types of quartz. Many intricate details are carved into the concrete: writings of Baháʼu’lláh, and the symbols of many religions, such as the Christian cross, the Star of David, and the star and crescent, can be found in each exterior pillar. The pillars are also decorated with a symbol used by Hindus and Buddhists in the form of a swastika. At the top of each pillar is a nine-pointed star, symbolizing the Baháʼí Faith. One can see an Arabic inscription inside the center of the dome ceiling. This is a Baháʼí symbol called the “Greatest Name”; the script translates as “O Thou Glory of Glories”. Gurnee Mills. Gurnee. This is a relatively old-fashioned mall north of Chicago.