Chicago Cultural Center

The Tiffany dome in the Chicago Cultural Center holds the record as the world’s largest stained glass dome of its kind. When the building opened in eighteen ninety-seven as the city’s first central public library, the architect Charles Coolidge Haight insisted on this feature to project an air of civic prestige. Inside the Grand Army of the Republic hall, the mosaic glass remains exactly as it appeared to soldiers who gathered there to recount their experiences from the American Civil War.