Born on June 8, 1867, legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright envisioned The Illinois—a mile-high, 528-floor skyscraper designed for Chicago in 1956. The structure would have soared twice as tall as today’s Burj Khalifa and more than four times the height of the Empire State Building. Designed to house 100,000 occupants, it featured 76 atomic-powered, ultra-fast elevators, parking for 15,000 cars, and 100 helicopters.
While critics dismissed the mile-high tower as a total fantasy, Wright’s radical slender tripod structure was actually a masterclass in engineering. His design perfectly anticipated the exact aerodynamic principles used by modern engineers decades later to successfully build today’s mega-tall skyscrapers, proving his wild vision was scientifically grounded long before the technology existed to build it.
