Chicago is a largely modular city, with common materials, forms, and patterns that make the city highly identifiable.
The forms of Chicago are strikingly modular, with a significant number of buildings using a rectangular shape or one that is largely composed of right angles, forming jagged teeth like protrusions on the plans. The heights of these buildings are in a constant pattern, where it rapidly gets very tall at the edge of the lake, continues to increate in height for a little while as you move into the heart of downtown Chicago. As you move away from the main skyscraper areas of Chicago the buildings get slowly smaller as you move closer to the river that runs through Chicago. After the river, the building heights even out as they reach a stable height that they continue out for many miles.
Brick is easily the most common building material within Chicago, and most buildings incorporate it or a similar material throughout the exterior of the buildings. Even the taller buildings often use modular materials in their construction, giving the feeling of brick without the difficultly of using bricks for large buildings. Large rectangular glass panes are used on the outside of such skyscrapers, stacked on top of each other in a simple and rectangular array. This allows the feeling of a modular brick façade even on non-brick buildings. But those are not the only buildings with a modular façade, many of the brick buildings incorporate a different brick façade on top a separate brick structure. This is extremely popular in the residential zones, where some of the buildings are old and falling apart, but still maintain a good view from the street by using a much newer and painted brick on the street side, keeping the rich history of Chicago while allowing the buildings to improve how they look. This style of construction is not specific to any one zone or style in Chicago either, with commercial skyscrapers along the lake front sharing similar themes to the simple houses much deeper inland.
This complex network in Chicago’s transportation in some ways keeps the modular system of the buildings, but in other ways makes active moves against the modularity. On the one hand, the simple roadways of the city are extremely modular, with roads that are nearly perfectly evenly spaced both north to south as well as west to east, creating a gridded network that stretched a long way in all directions. This system does not seem to care for landmarks or landscape, and largely moved completely unobstructed from the edge of the lake inland. The highways play an interesting role in this system, because on one hand they do move largely from north to south and east to west, but also take advantage of some of the important features of the land in their pathing, snaking its way along the main river that runs through Chicago. The Railroads of Chicago run mostly in a gridded system but is far less modular than the roadways. They gather rightly around a few main axes, and then stretch out from there until they meet another part of the system running in the other direction. The busses and subway routes are very well laid out, some of which follow the river through the city, others run in a certain direction away from a central loop.
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