Chicago, United States

Chicago is the most rewarding architecture city in the United States and one of the most underrated big cities in the world for a visit. After the Great Fire of 1871 cleared the centre, the city rebuilt itself as a laboratory for modern building — the first steel-framed skyscraper went up here, and the line runs unbroken through Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe and the supertall towers of today. You read that story best from the Chicago River, on an architecture boat tour that remains the single finest introduction to any American city. Above the river, the Loop's elevated trains rattle around the business core; east of it, Grant and Millennium Parks open onto the lake with Cloud Gate (the "Bean"), the Pritzker Pavilion and the Art Institute, whose collection of Impressionist and American painting is among the world's greatest. The lakefront itself is Chicago's defining feature — eighteen continuous miles of public beach, bike path and park where the city meets an inland sea. Beyond downtown the city is a federation of neighbourhoods: blues and gospel on the South and West Sides, Mexican Pilsen, Polish and Ukrainian enclaves, the Gold Coast and Lincoln Park along the lake, Wicker Park's music and dining. Eating is serious and unpretentious — deep-dish pizza and the Chicago hot dog are the clichés, but the city also holds one of America's deepest fine-dining benches. Winters are famously hard and summers are glorious; the festival calendar from June to September, much of it free along the lake, is when Chicago is at its best.