The Rookery Building

This guide to The Rookery Building in Chicago traces its name back to a shabby temporary city hall thick with pigeons after the 1871 fire, and to the fireproof landmark that architects Daniel Burnham and John Wellborn Root raised in its place in 1888. It follows Root's engineering gamble on Chicago's soft soil and the light court he built beneath a glass skylight, then turns to a young Frank Lloyd Wright, hired years later to modernize that same lobby he had once kept an office in himself.