Your walk down Prairie Avenue, once the grandest residential street in Chicago, leads to the city's most influential house. Glessner House was completed in 1887 for farm-machinery magnate John Glessner, and it was the last major commission of architect Henry Hobson Richardson, who died before it was finished. Its rough granite face turns a near-windowless fortress wall to the street, austere and forbidding, then opens inward to a warm courtyard and sun-filled rooms hidden from view.
Young architects, including Frank Lloyd Wright, studied it closely; its logic of plain strength over applied ornament helped point American building toward the modern. In its day this block held the mansions of Marshall Field, George Pullman, and the meatpacking barons. Most are gone now.
Walk the granite wall and notice how little it reveals; the house keeps its luxury private, facing in toward its own quiet courtyard.