These orderly twin residential towers on N. Lake Shore Drive that face Lake Michigan embody the “less-is-more” philosophy of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. When completed in 1951, some found the steel-and-glass skyscrapers too stark, but they quickly became the template for modernist towers around the world.

The John Hancock name may be gone, but this signature 100-story tower—now known by its address—remains an unmistakable presence on the Chicago skyline. Conceived by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and engineer Fazlur Khan in 1969, the basalt-black building features a system of framed tubes and stacked steel X-braces that removed the need for internal support columns.

Mies’ influence is felt strongly in the design of the Lake Point Tower, completed in 1968. George Schipporeit and John Heinrich, former students of Mies at the Illinois Institute of Technology, based it on Mies’s unbuilt design of a glass skyscraper in Berlin. At 70-stories, the curved ‘Y’ shaped residential tower was once the tallest apartment building in the world and tallest reinforced concrete structure.

Architect Bertrand Goldberg, who was taught by Mies at the Bauhaus School, is best known for designing this highly influential 65-story corncob-shaped Marina City in 1959. It was meant to be a “city-within-a-city,” with amenities like a theater, bowling alley, stores, and restaurants to stop more people from fleeing to the suburbs. In Chicago, it’s sometimes called the “Wilco Towers”  because of their appearance on the cover of Wilco’s 2002 album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.

Chicago’s first major public building to be constructed in a modern rather than a classical architectural style, the Daley Center was heavily influenced by the steel and glass skyscrapers of Mies. Designed by C. F. Murphy Associates, the building was innovative for its huge spans of steel framing, its exceptional spatial flexibility and the first-ever use of Cor-Ten steel as an exterior “skin” for a skyscraper. The Daley Center is arguably most famous, however, for the Picasso sculpture placed in the building’s plaza in 1967.

This corporate headquarters building—completed in 1957—it was the first high-rise tower constructed in the Loop after World War II. Designed by Bruce Graham and Walter Netsch of SOM, it’s famous for its modern features such as stainless steel cladding, column-free interior, and the consolidation of elevators and other service functions in a separate tower that allowed for a highly flexible floor layout.

The Mies-designed Federal Center complex at 219 S. Dearborn was a massive steel-and-glass project erected between 1964 and 1971. There are several components consisting of today’s Kluczynski Federal Building, Dirksen Federal Building, and U.S. Post Office.

There’s been talk about demolishing this underutilized 49-year-old modernist convention hall designed by former Mies student Gene Summers and building everything from a casino to George Lucas’s museum. But for now, the Lakeside Center—the world’s largest space-frame structure—is still here.

Designed to house Illinois Institute of Technology’s departments of architecture, planning, and design, S.R. Crown Hall is considered Mies’ modernist masterpiece. The clean design of the building—which was completed in 1956 and renovated in 2005—is so simple that Mies once described it as “almost nothing.”