Chicago Makes Modern: How Creative Minds Changed Society (Edward Lifson, Architect's Newspaper)

"To end then, we quote Moholy-Nagy, from Chicago Makes Modern. He wrote his wife, "There’s something incomplete about this city and its people that fascinates me...It seems to urge one on to completion. Everything still seems possible.”

I look out of the Reliance Building lobby, on a pre-spring day on State Street. Out there, people of all backgrounds hurry by, bent forward against the elements that hit you in the face in this creative, modern American metropolis. Most peek only fleetingly through the glass lobby windows.

But we’re united by the tall towers above, some still rising, the new ones mostly of taut glass. And at ground level, as I travel through the city, I see an equal number of broken-glass-filled empty lots on which, here in Chicago, everything still seems possible."