860–880 Lake Shore Drive Apartments

The twin residential towers at 860–880 Lake Shore Drive were completed in 1951 on Chicago's lakefront, designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe as a rigorous exercise in International Style modernism. Their exposed steel-and-glass curtain-wall facades were among the first of their kind at residential scale — Mies made the structural skeleton a deliberate aesthetic element, a move that would define postwar high-rise construction globally. The project directly informed subsequent landmarks such as the Seagram Building in New York City and established the template for the glass tower as urban typology. Listed in the National Register of Historic Places, the buildings remain privately occupied apartments while drawing architects and students from around the world; the Chicago Architecture Foundation regularly includes the lakefront promenade in front of the towers on its guided tours.