Cap the height of new buildings (at 130 feet from 1893) so that the business district does not become a canyon of towers; the cap was raised to 260 feet in 1902 and lowered to 200 in 1911.
1893: 130 ft (≈ 40 m) · 1902: 260 ft · 1911: 200 ft
The Masonic Temple of 1892, some twenty-one storeys, provoked fears about light, congestion and fire, and the council answered with a flat limit. Its effect is visible in any photograph of the Loop around 1900: a plateau of blocks of ten to twelve storeys, built out to the lot lines and up to the ceiling, with a few older towers standing above it. Unlike Paris, Chicago did not relate height to street width; that came with zoning in the 1920s.
Treat a tall office building as base, shaft and top: an open, accessible ground storey for shops and entrances; an indefinite stack of identical office floors expressed as one; and a distinct attic that closes the composition.
base (1–2 storeys) + shaft (n identical storeys) + attic
Lay the whole island out in a single rectangular grid regardless of the ground: avenues 100 ft wide running its length, cross streets 60 ft wide across it, and blocks 200 ft deep between them, the houses to be straight-sided and right-angled because such houses are cheapest to build and most convenient to live in.
avenue 100 ft (30 m) · street 60 ft (18 m) · block 200 ft (61 m) deep, 600–900 ft long
Treat the city’s railways, elevated lines and streetcars as a single system serving the business centre, and plan their stations and routes together, relieving the elevated loop with subways and through routes.
Keep the whole shore of the lake as public park, with lagoons, beaches and harbours, and set the city’s museums and libraries along it as its cultural forecourt.
Widen one street into the city’s main axis, running from a monument on the lakefront to a domed civic centre on high ground inland, and let the rest of the plan hang on it.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “A ceiling over the Loop”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/chicago-height-limit. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.