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Nearly 70 years after Frank Lloyd Wright unveiled plans for a mile-high skyscraper that would have dwarfed every building on Earth, the visionary structure has been brought back to life through a series of detailed 3D renderings by Spanish architect David Romero.
Known as The Illinois, the unbuilt tower was one of Wright's most ambitious concepts—a 528-story "city in the sky" that promised to redefine urban living and push architecture into entirely new territory. Romero worked on renderings of The Illinois and other unrealized Wright buildings for an issue of the Frank Lloyd Wright Quarterly magazine.
Romero's photorealistic reconstructions of The Illinois offer a glimpse of what the futuristic megastructure might have looked like had it ever risen above the Chicago skyline.
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The renewed interest in Wright's unbuilt giant comes amid growing debate about whether architecture's future lies in building ever higher or in preserving and upgrading what already exists.
Last month, Gordon Gill, the architect behind Saudi Arabia's under-construction Jeddah Tower, which will be the world’s tallest building upon completion, told Newsweek that the future of architecture lies not in building higher, but rather in "refreshing" existing buildings to keep them relevant and maintain their longevity.
The American Institute of Architects has similarly noted that reusing existing buildings can avoid 50 to 75 percent of the carbon emissions associated with new construction, because renovation prevents the release of embodied carbon tied to manufacturing and assembling new materials.
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Bringing Wright's Most Famous Unbuilt Design to Life
Romero, whose Hooked on the Past project recreates unrealized architectural designs, said The Illinois had long been a goal.
"I'd wanted to tackle the Illinois for a long time; it's Wright's most famous unbuilt design, so it was on my list from fairly early on in the Hooked on the Past project," he told Newsweek.
However, Romero deliberately waited until he had studied and modeled more of Wright's completed towers, including the S.C. Johnson Research Tower and Price Tower, before attempting the project. Those buildings provided the references he needed to fill gaps left by Wright's surviving drawings.
Once work began, the undertaking proved immense.
"It took several months of my spare-time work," Romero said. He described it as the second-largest model he has created for the project, partly because he wanted to place the tower convincingly within the real Chicago skyline rather than rendering it in isolation.
The Most Surprising Feature of Wright’s Soaring Tower
While creating the renderings, Romero said he gained a new appreciation for the building's internal logic.
"What surprised me most is how uncompromising the scale actually is once you model it against real dimensions."
He said that although the tower's height can seem like an act of provocation on paper, placing it alongside landmarks such as the Eiffel Tower and Empire State Building reveals a more thoughtful architectural rationale and that Wright "wasn't just chasing height for its own sake.”
According to Romero, Wright's tapered tetrahedral form was not decorative. Instead, it was intended as a “genuine structural response” to wind forces at unprecedented heights.
"This wasn't fantasy engineering," Romero said. Rather, it represented an extrapolation of structural principles Wright had already tested in completed buildings.
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Could The Illinois Be Built Today?
Romero believes parts of Wright's engineering logic remain remarkably relevant, but other aspects were firmly rooted in the technological optimism of the 1950s.
"Structurally, some of it holds up better than people expect," he told Newsweek.
He noted that Wright's taproot foundation concept and tripod-shaped, wind-shedding geometry resemble principles used in modern supertall engineering. But Romero said a literal mile-high tower constructed exactly as Wright envisioned would not be realistic today.
The architect pointed to Wright's proposed elevator system, which relied on atomic-powered double-deck elevators, as well as mechanical and life-safety systems that would not satisfy modern building codes.
"My honest read is that The Illinois works best as a conceptual proof," Romero said, describing it as a demonstration of how far Wright's organic structural ideas could be pushed rather than serve as a buildable blueprint.
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A Vertical City Ahead of Its Time
Romero believes Wright's vision still holds lessons for urban planners.
He noted that The Illinois combined housing, offices, commerce, and transportation infrastructure within a single vertical development. In many ways, he said, that mirrors contemporary arguments for dense, mixed-use development instead of continued suburban sprawl.
Romero noted: “Wright's ‘city in the sky’ packed housing, offices, commerce, and infrastructure—highways, rail, even a heliport —into a single self-sufficient vertical footprint, which is essentially the argument now being made for transit-oriented, mixed-use vertical density instead of horizontal sprawl.”
As for its effect on Chicago's skyline, Romero believes the impact would have been transformative.
"At a mile high, it wouldn't have shared the skyline with anything—it would have redefined what the skyline was," he said.
That, he argued, helps explain why the design continues to fascinate architects today and challenges modern assumptions about height, density, and the future of cities.
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