860-880 Lakeshore Drive

Designed as a prototype for postwar urban housing, these apartment buildings by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe served as a model not only for his own subsequent skyscrapers, but for those of many architects throughout the world. Appearing as the heroic culmination of Chicago Frame, this pair of buildings also demonstrates the subtlety of Mies’s approach. Their structural frames, for example, do not appear directly on the facade, but are represented there through supplemental steel members. Striking enough by day in their understated elegance, the towers are stunning at night, when their dark steel grids appear to float above cubes of frosted glass lit from within.