BRUCE GRAHAM (1925–2010)

Bruce Graham, the hard-driving architect of the Willis Tower, once the world’s tallest building, and the John Hancock Center, the X-braced giant that became a symbol of Chicago’s industrial might, died Saturday at his home in Hobe Sound, Florida, reports the Chicago Tribune. He was eighty-four years old.

At the peak of his influence, from the 1960s through the ’80s, Graham was the top man at Chicago’s biggest architectural firm, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, and had the ear of the city’s leading business leaders and politicians. From that power base, he shaped a legacy that suggests the epitaph on the tomb of Sir Christopher Wren, who is buried in his masterpiece, St. Paul’s Cathedral in London: “Reader, if you seek his monument, look around you.”

Besides the Willis (originally Sears) Tower and the Hancock Center, which bracket the Chicago skyline like enormous black parentheses, Graham played a major role in designing such landmark Chicago structures as the Inland Steel Building, Three First National Plaza, One Magnificent Mile, and the 1986 expansion of McCormick Place.

And Graham’s impact extended beyond individual designs. Though his name is often linked with the planning for the aborted 1992 Chicago World’s Fair, he helped produce the visionary Chicago 21 plan of 1973, which led to such improvements as the Museum Campus.

“He was the Burnham of his generation,” said the Chicago architectural historian Franz Schulze, referring to the legendary Chicago architect and urban planner Daniel Burnham.