Monday, September 30, 2024 
Monday, September 30, 2024
September 22, 2020
Humanity has been on a quest for millenia to build bigger and taller structures. In our reach skyward we’ve built ziggurats, pyramids, and coliseums. Our mythologies placed the seat of the gods in lofty towers high on mountaintops. We’ve had moralizing religious parables like the Tower of Babel, warning those who’d place themselves above a god. And some of the self-proclaimed greatest among us have always sought to immortalize themselves through massive works.
It’s safe to say our world civilization is one fixed on achieving ever higher milestones.
Yet, the dreams and wonders of yesterday’s buildings look like children’s toys compared to our structures now. In the past century and a half skyscrapers have come to dominate the city’s form and they haven’t stopped growing taller.
Now we have to ask ourselves, is it possible to build a skyscraper one mile high?
Perhaps. Let’s find out.
One of the first legitimate plans to build a mile-high tower that wasn’t some megalomaniac’s fever dream (maybe his was too), was famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s The Illinois.
On October 16th, 1956 at the Sherman House Hotel in Chicago, Wright at 89 years old presented his design for what he conceived to be the tallest skyscraper in the world, an incredible spire shooting one mile high. The structure proposed to stand 528 floors and 5,280 feet (1,609 meters) tall. Behind him stood an illustration that measured 25 feet (7.6 meters) tall with the skyscraper’s dimensions drawn at a scale of 1/16 inch to the foot. The Illinois’ dimensions would have been astronomical at the time, with:
“This is The Illinois, gentlemen… In it, will be consolidated all government offices now scattered around Chicago,” Wright proclaimed.
