This month marks the opening of the first Chicago Architecture Biennial, which is also the first such event in North America (October 3'January 3). The setting couldn't be more appropriate: in the realm of modern architecture, Chicago has never been the second city. Yet the Biennial, as its cocurators, Sarah Herda and Joseph Grima, point out, isn't just celebrating local architecture and history; instead, it is turning a wide lens on the future of design around the world. With more than 100 mostly young, international firms showing their work, and dozens of programs, installations, and pop-up projects in a variety of neighborhoods, the city will be both backdrop and foreground to this major three-month-long happening.

So it seems a good moment to take Chicago’s pulse once more as a capital of architecture and urbanism, and in the pages ahead, Architecutural Record explores the city’s past, present, and future. It was the birthplace of the skyscraper—or was it? That depends more on technical innovation than just height. It was, of course, the city where Mies van der Rohe landed in the U.S. and refined his vastly influential brand of postwar modernism. In an essay, “The Place Between,” writer Thomas Dyja extols Mies’s 1956 masterpiece, Crown Hall at IIT, while eulogizing the immense 1892 apartment complex, home to generations of African-Americans, that was razed to clear the site. As Dyja demonstrated in his award-winning book, The Third Coast: When Chicago Built the American Dream, the city was a crossroads of migrants, cultures, and aspirations, with a history of racial, social, and economic dissonance still much in evidence. Long after the demolition of the city’s infamous housing projects such as Cabrini-Green, for example, the provision of decent dwellings for a diverse, low-income population remains a serious problem.