Although there are several theories that radically alter the official version, on the night of October 8, 1871, the O'Leary family barn burned and the history of the cities changed forever.
With that barn on De Koven Street, southeast of Chicago, more than five square kilometers of the city were burned, then mostly built with wooden structures.
Hundreds of people died and 100,000 citizens, almost a third of the population at the time, were left homeless.
By the time the metropolis grew back, brick had replaced wood for fear of another fire.
That decision made it possible to grow in height —from six floors to 10 or 16—, the city was densified and opened the way for the buildings of the future.
Considered Chicago's first skyscraper, William Le Baron Jenny's Home Insurance Building, dates back to those years, 1885, when the world changed.
Over time, construction engineering — and the elevator — would allow buildings to grow much larger.
However, today the achievements can be more formal than technical and, beyond the platoon of prisms debtors of the containment of Mies van der Rohe's Seagram Tower, there are cucumber-shaped skyscrapers (The Gherkin in London) of toaster (20 Fenchurch Street, also in London), pagoda (Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur) or lollipops (The Pearl in Shanghai).
What then draws the identity of a city?
A building like the Eiffel Tower or the Empire State Building or the sum of the most visible?
Manhattan seen from the sky.
Lucas Jackson Reuters
In the same way that the horizon is the line that joins the ground, or the sea, with the sky, the English language defines the
skyline
("sky line") as the contact between what is built and the sky.
It is in that vast heavenly space where cities now build their "postcard";
more your business card than your identity.
It is convenient that this image is not interchangeable.
Cities that are developing with more formal criteria —not necessarily urban or social— take this factor into account.
The
quintessential
skyline
is that of southern Manhattan.
Not for nothing, the word
skyline
was first used in 1896 in New York: it was the title of an illustration by painter and surveyor Charles Graham that appeared in the
New York Journal.
After its publication, the silhouette of the skyscrapers remained as a definition of the profile of a city, its
skyline
.
Cities began to be viewed from above, like iconic colossi, and may have accelerated the distance from reality below.
So much so that many cities, such as Dubai, hardly offer the possibility of directly seeing what they advertise: the palm-shaped islands that their advertisements display.
Acropolis of Athens.
A. Savin Wikipedia Commons
Two things help create an attractive sky line: distance and terrain.
The water, in front of Manhattan, or the Huangpu River, in front of the Financial District of Shanghai, force one to take distance to contemplate - as they do every afternoon in the Chinese city - how the sun sets behind the skyscrapers of the Financial District.
The orography defines, however, a much more exclusive profile.
Think of the Acropolis —which far from skyscrapers builds its
skyline
with Greek temples and olive trees— or the Roman hills that compete with the domes as architectural landmarks.
On a smaller scale, the Tibidabo in Barcelona marks
the city's
skyline
above the Sagrada Familia.
And, being an exception in Spain, Benidorm offers, in the distance, an image as dense and vertical as many other cities on the planet.
What it says of a city crowned by olive trees, history or economic power is a matter of height.
On the ground, there is consensus that the best cities have always been those that have been built in layers, with years, with doubts and with a mixture.
It is impossible to summarize a city in a building or on a
skyline
.
The sky lines, however, serve to dream.
And also to be able to send postcards.