Like those Gothic cathedral builders who created the illusion of heaven, Mies expressed his own ultimate truth here: monastic and modern, wide like the Illinois prairie, made of hard Chicago steel. I am struck silent in its presence. It is glorious, utterly in repose, essential to itself—essential, it seems, to the collection of transcendent things we humans have created.

For all the tall buildings in Chicago (skyscrapers were born here, after all—don’t you dare forget it!), the city’s modern history is best expressed by this one-story building at 34th and State.