As we were preparing to ship this issue to the printer in early January, the city of Los Angeles erupted in flames. At press time, we could only be sure of the immense devastation, with new blazes igniting and no fully adequate infrastructure for containment. Despite the frequency of wildfires in that part of the country, it was immediately evident that this was different—the kind of inferno that could potentially alter the city forever, like the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, which killed hundreds and destroyed over 17,000 structures.
Part of the reason that fire spread so flagrantly in Chicago was the ubiquity of balloon framing in the city, a construction method pioneered there in the 1830s and one that is still very much in use in the U.S. today. At the time of the disaster, Chicago had minimal fire-safety codes. It had no schools of architecture and only a handful of architects who could train apprentices. Yet, as Carl W. Condit noted in The Chicago School of Architecture (1964), “in little more than a decade after the fire they invented and mastered the modern technique of riveted steel framing and were thus able to develop the office building, hotel, and apartment block as we know them today.” Advances in the use of terra-cotta as a fireproof cladding method also followed. Firefighting capacity was expanded, new building codes implemented, and Chicago emerged as one of the country’s most modern and prosperous urban spaces.
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