Chicago Architecture Center

This guide to the Chicago Architecture Center opens on April 16, 1966, when four young men fresh out of an office job with Mies van der Rohe raced to stop a wrecking crew from demolishing Glessner House, a mansion by architect H. H. Richardson. It follows their scramble to save the building and found what became the Chicago Architecture Foundation, then reaches back to the Great Fire of 1871, when the city lost roughly three hundred people and eighteen thousand buildings. Lawyer Paul Lurie talked the seller of Glessner House down from seventy thousand dollars to thirty-five thousand.