Charles Dudley Arnold, "Administration Building Seen from the Roof...", 1893

The Chicago Architecture Imagebase
An Era-By-Era Collection of Images

Bob Thall "IBM Building North, View East," from The Perfect City

A Project of the Department of Art History,
The University of Illinois, Chicago

Chicago has gone through a series of stages in the development of its built environment, stages that conform broadly to the development of many urban-industrial cities of the 19th and 20th centuries. We have organized some of the views in the imagebase into clusters around significant moments in the city's history; from some of these images, you can jump to files related to the architects, the photographers, the artists, the buildings, or the area of the city.
  • Early Chicago
  • The Great Fire of 1871
  • Rebuilding Chicago: 1871-1893
  • White City and Grey: Chicago and the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893
  • From the Fair to World War I: Images and Sources
  • Chicago Between the Wars
  • Chicago, 1945 to the Present

    This webpage is a part of the Chicago Imagebase Project of the Department of Art History, The University of Illinois, Chicago
    Robert Bruegmann, Professor
    Peter Bacon Hales, Professor
    If you have comments or suggestions, email me at pbhales@uic.edu