A colorful photo of downtown Chicago buildings at night in 2014.

Prominent in the foreground is 301 South Wacker Drive, completed in 1989 in a postmodern style, identifiable by its green pyramidal roof and vertical glass grid patterns that reflected late-20th-century corporate architectural design in Chicago. Just to the right are the Marina City towers, completed in 1967 by architect Bertrand Goldberg as one of the earliest large-scale mixed-use residential developments intended to draw residents back into the urban core during a period of downtown population decline.

Farther north, the tall dark building with twin antenna masts is the John Hancock Center, completed in 1969 using innovative bundled-tube engineering developed in Chicago, a system that allowed greater height and wind resistance while reducing material use. Beyond it, the Lake Michigan shoreline reveals Chicago’s growth toward the lakefront, where residential high-rises expanded throughout the 1970s and 1980s to serve tourism, business housing, and dense urban living. The view illustrates the evolution of Chicago’s skyline as a center of architectural experimentation and urban redevelopment.

The 35 West Wacker building in downtown Chicago.