Chicagoland Architecture
According to articles databases, I wrote a great deal about Chicago “architecture.” In fact I seldom wrote about architecture per se, being untrained in the field and only intermittently interested in it. I am interested in buildings, however, and that was always my true subject.
Chicagoans do go on about their buildings. They remind me of the relative who’s always going on about her straight-A son. Among those Chicagoans are most local architecture critics. There were some I admired— Lee Bey and (later) Lynn Becker—but reading the Tribune’s critics was like biting on a sore tooth. (I’m not one for banning words, but a hacker who can penetrate the Trib’s computer system and disable the word “gritty” on any appearance in a Blair Kamin column should get the Pulitzer Prize for criticism.)
Journalism about architecture in Chicago tends to overstate the city’s importance in the architecture world. The fact is that Chicago has not been a center for new architecture for a century. It has produced no native innovators since Wright and Sullivan and Charles Atwood. (The Bauhaus gave us Mies, the way the French gave us the Statue of Liberty.) Too much of what was news back then was attempts to save good buildings rather than building them.
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I Think Icon, I Think Icon, I Think Icon
Building iconography explained, sort of
Crain's Chicago Business April 5, 1993
Cheers for the 1990s restoration of Chicago’s Rookery
Crain’s Chicago Business August 3, 1992
Edifice Complex for Architecture
Designing buildings for fun and not much profit
Crain's Chicago Business June 14, 1993
Merchandising Modern Art
Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art
Reader April 10, 1992
Homage to the Barons Who Built Chicago
Great buildings need great developers
Chicago Enterprise November 1992
Walter Netsch’s brutalist Chicago campus is mugged
Inland Architect March/April 1993
Dismembering the Sullivan Legend
Louis Sullivan and modern architecture
Illinois Issues October 1986
Saving History from the Wrecking Ball
Richard Nickel and Louis Sullivan's legacy
Illinois Issues October 1986

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