Take a summer study session in Chicago’s most renowned feature. This weekly series of 30-minute interactive presentations illuminates the human impact of the city’s architectural history, from grand commercial structures to humble neighborhood dwellings.

The architecture of Old Chicago, before the Great Fire, is utterly unlike the city we know today. Hard as it is to imagine, temporary wigwams and humble log cabins once stood where skyscrapers now soar above the prairie. This free Historic Happy Hour, part of our on-going Chicago Architecture Cra...

Join the third installment of our Architecture Crash Course series to learn about the most famous event in Chicago's history: the Great Chicago Fire. We'll recount how the conflagration destroyed the "First City" of Chicago and examine the ambitious architecture which replaced it in Gilded Age Ch...

In Part 4 of the Architecture Crash Course, Alex will discuss the architects behind Chicago's earliest skyscrapers, and define the groundbreaking style known as "the First Chicago School." Expect to hear about heavy hitters like William LeBaron Jenney, Daniel Burnham, and Louis Sullivan.

Chicago is a mecca for architecture, including the most macro element of architecture - urban planning. The architectural style of the the 1893 World's Fair had influence around the country for decades. Learn about how the Plan of Chicago created the layered city we have today, and the ideas behi...

Prairie School buildings smashed through traditional architectural aesthetics in the early 20th century. Part six of our Chicago Architecture Crash Course looks at this breathakingly modern style, especially the way its most famous practitioner, Frank Lloyd Wright, fused his personal philosophy i...

Architecture is often said to represent the zeitgeist--the spirit of the age. Perhaps no style has better reflected its age than Art Deco in the Jazz Age. Part eight of our Chicago Architecture Crash Course revels in this glamorous style, explaining its aesthetic breakthroughs and highlighting be...

The International Style of Modernism, popularized by Mies van der Rohe in Chicago, was de rigeur for corporate and civic architecture in the decades after World War II. Yet many then and now found the style cold, sterile, and institutional. Part nine of our Chicago Architecture Crash Course will ...

The narrative of Chicago's architectural history is often interpreted as a grand march of progress from one style to the next, each reaching a new height. Part ten of our Chicago Architecture Crash Course will look at the decades when this narrative seemed to stop dead in its tracks, during the "...

The architecture that comes after modernism tends to have only two reactions. People either utterly despise Brutalism and Postmodernism or they think there's just nothing better. Part eleven of our Chicago Architecture Crash Course will leave the judgments up to you, focusing on why architectects...

Architectural history tends to focus heavily on monumental structures, like Chicago's famed skyscrapers. We want to change the perspective in part seven of our Chicago Architecture Crash, looking at the evolution of the city's housing stock from the workers' cottages of the 1800s to the McMansion...

The final installment of our Chicago Architecture Crash Course catches up to the present day and examines the boom in computer-aided contemporary design. From the heights of the Vista Tower to the newly-accessible banks of the Chicago River, we'll see how new technologies and more diverse archite...