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The tallest building on earth is always there, wherever you look. Telescopic in design, its square shoulders fall away at certain points, relieving the monotony of its huge black surface. A temple to the mail-order business that once revolutionized home life here in the Midwest, Sears Tower stands out decisively among the great skyscrapers around Chicago’s central Loop. You just have to go up.

Even if the sky isn’t clear enough to see all four lakeside states at once, you still enjoy a mighty view over the second city, its vast grid of streets as plain as a map, little silver glints of river and canal, tiny toy railroads snaking away to the prairies. Far below, the famous towers of corporate America cluster round, baring their heads yet not able to look you properly in the eye. For this is turning out to be rather too much of an aerial view. The Sears Skydeck ought to be about fifty floors lower, where you could focus on the fine architectural detail that distils these tall blocks into something more than just Real Estate, a level where you can touch hands with the very birth of high-rise building.

It all began with the great fire of 1871, apparently caused by a cow kicking over a lantern - one of those folksy bedtime stories that sound apocryphal but aren’t. At any rate, those timbered streets went up like a torch and overnight the city was a rubble-strewn swamp. But Chicago was too important to die. As the hub of the coast-to-coast rail route and also the inland shipping centre for New York (thanks to the Erie Canal), it would have to be rebuilt.

Perhaps no city has ever seen such an influx of talented architects and engineers eager to make their name. Daniel Burnham, who fought off speculators to create the lakeside’s cherished greenery. Louis Sullivan, brains behind the city’s 1893 World Fair, but now less famous than his pupil Frank Lloyd Wright. And the developers of the electrified lift (or ‘vertical railroad’ as it was nicknamed with awe), which effectively enabled skyscrapers, just when business was starting to look up in more ways than one.

Those early skyscrapers seem to us merely nostalgic, reminding us of silent films or the deep Art Deco ledges from which ruined financiers are supposed to have flung themselves on Black Thursday. Yet in their time they were seen as something bewilderingly new. The first steel-framed buildings, free of heavy masonry and with wide, generous windows all the way up, left whole crowds uncomprehending - a miracle of lightness and grace. Also they were not conceived as skyscrapers, simply as taller versions of the traditional office block with its base, shaft and capital. Today this adds another strand of curiosity to the city skyline. If Chicago does not have an Old Quarter in the accepted sense, it has only to stay put to become in due course a historic zone like no other.

For us, it was too late in the year for the popular Chicago Architecture Foundation River Cruise, while the bus trip sounded too much like a crick in the neck. So we settled for the guided walking tour of the Loop - definitely the high point of a busy week’s sightseeing, despite swirling snow and temperatures thirty degrees lower than forecast.

But in Chicago, your architectural tour never ends. I do not want to be the ten thousandth journalist to mention canyons, but we must risk a few clichés in defining the charm of this unique cityscape. For these are the crowning turrets and basilicas of excited minds that knew they were giving high-rise architecture its first creative push. And so, most of this skyline panorama of classical columns, Egyptian temples, buttresses and floodlit belfries, carries a spirit of innocent quest, different from the later and more studied corporate grandeur of Manhattan.

Most but not all. Lifelong readers of the excellent Chicago Tribune have been known to wince at its 23-storey office topped by what looks like one of the smaller Oxford colleges - a self-commissioned monument to a proprietor for whom egotistical was not the word. Even more odd, though somehow less pretentious, is the First United Reform Church - a Gothic spire atop a conventional office block in the heart of the financial quarter.

Still it will probably be from among the newer creations that you select your favourites - at least newer than the slab-like social statements of Mies van der Rohe that disfigured mid-century Chicago. The corner of Michigan Avenue and Randolph Street gives you two of the great modern masterpieces : the Prudential with its powerful ribbed profile and elegant peak, and the Stone Container building, sliced through diagonally in a bright diamond of glass facing the lake. A third, not rated as a classic, carries no name but a big address - 75 East Wacker Drive - and it grew on me steadily with its high white tower that suggested a minaret. Putting the address upfront is now mandatory anyway, to help the fire services, but also helping many of us who have been lost in foreign cities (or even our own) and could use a street-number or two.

Another kind of urban landmark is Chicago’s unusually diverse range of street sculpture. Federal Plaza is totally dominated by a couple of bent girders called Flamingo, which left me cold, though the other controversial abstract, an untitled fifty-foot cubist figure that must have been one of Picasso’s last efforts, is not without intrigue. Chagall, Miró and Henry Moore can also be found within a five-minute radius, while on the representational side, Abe Lincoln (once an Illinois senator) sits huge and sombre in Grant Park.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s impact on Chicago is hardly visible in the Loop, as he mostly built private homes, so it is the well-kept suburb of Oak Park that serves as his open-air museum. Some of us find it hard to explain Wright’s vast reputation, looking at these dark, heavy structures overhung with deep gables, like a low-brimmed hat tending to obscure a lovely face. As though adjusting our eyes for night vision, we eventually pick out a few odd gleams of delight - perhaps a ray of evening sun peeping through a tiny redcurrant square of leaded glass to catch a trail of foliage against oak or cedar. But there is no denying the popularity of this domestic style throughout his seventy-year career, and Oak Park soon became a code for genteel living, thus provoking the inevitable reaction. Five of Chicago’s Nobel laureates including Saul Bellow had once graced the city’s famous university. But a sixth one got away straight from school, heading briefly for Kansas, but then Paris and the world. He was the son of a highly typical Oak Park suburbanite called Doctor Hemingway. “Bet your bottom dollar you lose the Blues in Chicago...” Actually Chicago claims to be capital of the Blues in their more modern upbeat style that dates from about 1950 when the newly industrialized blacks began to feel different from their downhome parents and with the help of electric guitars overlaid that raw pessimist wail with elements of cheek and charm - including a particular slide-action on the bass string that is said to be infallibly aphrodisiac - which then gave birth to Rock.

On the small brightly-lit stage at Blue Chicago on Halstead, an immense black woman in a floppy hat is lamenting her husband’s cruelty and negligence, but also dropping hints about an amorous young neighbour who has caught her eye. The alternating gusts of emotion seem so exaggerated that she may possibly be sending herself up, but like all other local Blues clubs, this is very much for tourists and suburban whites. The nearest you’ll get to the real thing is a long and not necessarily safe cab-journey down to 43rd Street (double-named Muddy Waters Drive) where the Checkerboard partially lives up to its name as the true bluesman’s hangout.

Tonight it’s a young male trio - guitar, keyboard, drums - full of quips and asides. We whites are listening in keenly, but the blacks are either drinking, chatting or playing cards. One group has fallen asleep under a notice reading ‘No profanity of any kind’ - a quaint echo of the puritanism that always grows up in rough areas like dock-leaves among the nettles. And this is the seriously rough end of town, the South Side. (Barkeeper Mickey Finn worked not far from here.)

Puritanism bulks large in Chicago nightlife - perhaps surprising to those first-timers whose image of the city is still haunted by Al Capone, even though his only legacy is a modest waxwork son-et-lumière on Clark Street, scene of the Valentine’s Day massacre. Full-blooded raunch is notably missing from the scene, and one dedicated bon-viveur told me that he had had more pleasure from Chicago’s excellent theatres than anything the flashing neon could promise. The jazz-joints are ‘lounges’ rather than clubs and do not seem fiercely Chicagoan. The city’s three principal topless bars are teetotal and the no-fraternising rule reminds you of that joyless masquerade that was the Playboy Club. Meanwhile gambling remains illegal, except on gaming boats which are allowed on any ‘body of water’. Which is why factories or warehouses backing on to Chicago’s various canals are liable to catch the unexpected sight of a brightly-decked imitation Mississippi steamer carrying on recklessly in the full spirit of "the town that Billy Sunday could not shut down."

A pretty slim volume. And a lot of air between the lines. Come on, Studs Terkel, I heard this was meant to be the supreme book of Chicago, the one work that would reveal the poetry of its soul - which most of us didn’t know it had.

At first, only the photographs seem poetic. A flaky wooden chapel basking in the sun. A kid walking on his hands. A cigar-chewing ‘precinct captain’ who looks the image of corruption. A prizewinning black authoress full of impish wonder. The dented glass and chickenwire of an old billiard-hall. Endless rolling stock from the rail days. And what’s this ? A study of serene old age, sunlight through the proud white hair, a what-the-hell stoicism in the eyes, but a whole lot of living yet to do : Studs Terkel himself.

They dubbed him Chicago’s recording angel because of his daily broadcasts, and the book does superficially suggest local radio chat, spiced with names that mean nothing to us, and heavily conversational. (Well, ‘windy city’ was originally meant as a pun on Chicago’s garrulous promoters.) But then you read on - and you read in. And you begin to see that Studs Terkel is really Chicago’s Will Rogers, the urchin philosopher. Out of these myriad little anecdotes and pen-portraits there rises a vividly impressionist Chicago, alive with bold dabs of character.

Its God, he tells us, can only be the ambiguous Janus - appropriate indeed for the city that swung Kennedy’s election by methods that evoke the chuckling Irish ward-bosses of another age calling “Anybody not voted twice?” But apparently Chicago’s double standards are not unique. The city is simply ‘more colourful in its shadiness’.

Terkel’s story is largely flavoured by big guys hammering little guys. Chicago grew up as Hog Butcher to the World, and the unsentimental spirit of the abattoir has seeped down from the days of Upton Sinclair’s ‘The Jungle’ (which exposed the stench and disease of the stockyards), via Dillinger and Capone, to the Mercantile Exchange where red-coated young men crowd into trading pits marked ‘Live Hogs’ and ‘Pork Bellies’ and compete so vigorously that one of them recently had his back broken in the rush for stock. Gracelessness under pressure, Terkel puts it.

Still he knows it’ll never be any different, and he views it with a shrug and a slow headshake, the exasperated love of a wayward child. This radio-airy wit is not just wind after all. It turns out to be the long-distilled essence of a city that transcended mere brawn and became famously creative. And this little book - ‘Chicago’, what else ? - mysteriously packs everything into its brief span : an immortal gallery of mayors and merchant princes, poets and pork-trimmers, boxers and bag-ladies, gospellers, graffiti artists and those robust cowboy connoisseurs who shout "Where’s the one with the dots ?" as they are guided towards Seurat’s La Grande Jatte, pride of the Art Institute on Michigan Avenue.

How easily we could have missed the one crystal moment that suddenly defined this city for us. On a whim, we are being shown through a little door from the dense opulence of the Hilton’s penthouse suites out on to a bare asphalt roof and a November wind about the ears.

Not quite thirty floors up, this could be the greatest skydeck of all if it wanted. But that would mean glass enclosures, fluorescent lamps, whole liftloads of other people. Instead we are enjoying an unexpected little private view not really allowed up here, a secret snapshot. But in any case, it is probably too good to last.

For once, we are seeing these great skyscrapers as they should be seen - at a slight distance, with a huge sensation of space between us and them, yet close enough to recognize their handsome features. The autumn twilight is narrowing fast to a ribbon of blue, while a brisk Northerly sends the clouds hurrying headlong down to the wide open skies of Indiana.

Already a million windows are lit up, and soon this will be any other nightscape, a thing of neon and floodlight. But just now, for one charmed instant, we catch the immense office-blocks at their most eloquent. Still asserting their muscular contours, their uncompromising surfaces, but with a twinkle in the eye. And before the city’s great square shoulders fade into silhouettes, these massed turrets take on a mystic sublime quality that is not just greatness but glory - a stolen moment of Byzantium

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