Chicago

Compréhension écrite : Chicago

La ville de Chicago, au Nord-Est des États-Unis, s'étend sur plus de 600 km² et compte presque 3 millions d'habitants. Située dans l'état de l'Illinois, c'est la troisième ville du pays. Fief du malfrat Al Capone, mais aussi de l'ancien président Barak Obama, la ville est aussi célèbre pour avoir lancé la mode des gratte-ciels. Avec presque plus de 200 ans d'histoire, c'est l'une des plus anciennes villes du pays.
 
The city that changed architecture forever
It was in Chicago that the world's first skyscraper rose up –  and the city's energy and dynamism has had a lasting impact on architecture throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. Chicago. The Windy City. (…) When the settlement was founded in 1830 on the southwest of Lake Michigan, its population was less than two hundred. Designated a city seven years later, this had grown to 4,000. From then on it skyrocketed with wagon trains, boats and then trains bringing hundreds of thousands of emigrants to the Midwest and the boundless opportunities it offered. (…)
Manufacturing, banking, commerce and culture along with salubrious public parks and the country's first comprehensive sewage system were all part of the city's phenomenal growth. In 1880, Chicago's population was 505,000. (…) While there was plenty of space on the windswept plains to house so many people, the city's commerce was concentrated in a tightly focused district that, as space became a premium, shot skywards in scores of big, bold and dazzling buildings. By the mid-1880s, these included the world's first skyscraper. (…)
On 8 October 1871, a fire swept through the young city along a four-mile corridor. Three hundred people died, 100,000 were made homeless and 17,500 buildings were destroyed. Then Chicago rip-roared back to life: (…) two recent inventions revolutionized Chicago's post-fire architecture: safety elevators pioneered by Elisha Otis and first demonstrated to a thrilled audience at the New York World's Fair in 1854 and the Bessemer Convertor of 1856, an English device allowing the mass-production of high quality, low-cost steel. (…) Charged with bringing their city back to life and pre-eminence, and to outdo New York, Chicago's architects were now able to build sky high.
The world's first skyscraper was the 10-storey Home Insurance Company on the northwest corner of LaSalle and Adams Street, designed by William Le Baron Jenney and completed in 1884. (…) It was demolished in 1931, its place taken by the 54-storey Art Deco Field Building.
Jonathan Glancey, October 5th, 2015, BBC