860–880 Lake Shore Drive Apartments
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe · Chicago, United States · 1951
The paired Lake Shore Drive apartment towers established a highly influential model for the modern residential high-rise. Mies placed two nearly identical steel-and-glass slabs at right angles on a shared open site, allowing the ground plane and lakefront views to flow around them. The precisely articulated exterior mullions give the façades a disciplined structural rhythm even where they are not themselves load-bearing. Completed in 1951, the complex became a canonical demonstration of Miesian repetition, proportion and urban openness.