Perched on the 94th floor of the tower at 875 North Michigan Avenue, the observation deck branded today as 360 CHICAGO ranks among the highest public viewpoints in the city. The skyscraper opened in 1969 as the John Hancock Center, and an observatory has occupied its upper floors almost from the beginning, carrying sightseers roughly 1,000 feet skyward in about 39 seconds aboard some of the fastest elevators in the country. A multi-million-dollar renovation in 2014 retired the old name, introduc.....

Instantly recognisable for the giant X-shaped braces running up its sides, the 100-storey tower at 875 North Michigan Avenue has anchored the Chicago skyline since 1969. It was conceived as the John Hancock Center, financed by the insurance company whose name it carried for half a century, and designed by architect Bruce Graham with structural engineer Fazlur Rahman Khan of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. Their exterior braced-tube system let the building rise without a forest of interior columns .....

When the Adler Planetarium opened on the lakefront in May 1930, it became the first planetarium in the Western Hemisphere, bringing a German-built Zeiss projector and the night sky indoors to American audiences for the first time. The institution was funded by Max Adler, a Sears executive who stepped back from business to support astronomy education, and it opened to the public on his birthday. Its twelve-sided, rainbow-granite building, designed by Ernest Grunsfeld Jr., won an architectural med.....

The first museum in the country devoted entirely to American authors opened on North Michigan Avenue in May 2017, the product of nearly a decade of planning by founder Malcolm O'Hagan, an engineer who had admired a similar museum in Dublin and wondered why the United States had none of its own. It sits on the second floor of a building overlooking the Loop, a short walk from Millennium Park, and treats writing in the broadest sense: poetry and fiction alongside speeches, song lyrics, journalism .....

Set at the centre of Grant Park, Buckingham Fountain has been one of Chicago's signature landmarks since its dedication in August 1927. Built in an ornate, rococo wedding-cake style and inspired by the Latona Fountain at the Palace of Versailles, it was designed by the architect Edward H. Bennett, a key figure behind the 1909 Plan of Chicago, with sculpture by the Frenchman Marcel Loyau. The fountain was a gift to the city from the philanthropist Kate Sturges Buckingham, who funded it in memory.....

Overlooking the Chicago River where Michigan Avenue meets Wacker Drive, the Chicago Architecture Center is a museum and tour hub devoted to the buildings of a city famous for them. It opened on this riverfront site, inside a Mies van der Rohe-designed tower, in August 2018, the latest home for an organisation that began in 1966 as the Chicago Architecture Foundation, formed by volunteers trying to save a historic Prairie Avenue mansion from demolition. The centrepiece of its galleries is the Ch.....

More a programme than a place, Chicago Architecture Tours refers to the broad slate of guided tours run by the Chicago Architecture Center, the long-established non-profit that has been interpreting the city's buildings since 1966. The offering runs to dozens of distinct itineraries by boat, on foot, by bus and even aboard the elevated train, all led by a corps of several hundred trained volunteer docents. The flagship is the architecture river cruise aboard Chicago's First Lady, which threads .....

Spread across 385 acres of islands and lagoons in the suburb of Glencoe, north of the city, the Chicago Botanic Garden is one of the most visited public gardens in the United States, despite its name suggesting a downtown location. It opened to the public in 1972 on land owned by the Forest Preserve District of Cook County, and it is run by the Chicago Horticultural Society, an organisation whose roots reach back to the nineteenth century. The garden is organised into more than two dozen distin.....

Standing at the southern edge of Lincoln Park, where Clark Street meets North Avenue, the Chicago History Museum holds the collections of the Chicago Historical Society, an institution founded in 1856 and among the oldest cultural organisations in the city. Its early collections were twice devastated by fire, including the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, and the society rebuilt each time before moving to its present Georgian-style building, which opened in 1932. The museum took its current public n.....

A 110-ton sculpture of polished stainless steel shaped like a vast, seamless bean, Cloud Gate is the centrepiece of Millennium Park and one of Chicago's most photographed sights. The work of the British artist Anish Kapoor, it measures 66 feet long and 33 feet high, and its mirror-smooth surface reflects and distorts the surrounding skyscrapers, the sky and the crowds who gather beneath it. The nickname almost everyone uses, the Bean, comes from that shape; Kapoor disliked it at first but is sa.....