Masterpieces Of Chicago Architecture

Over 200 illustrations drawn from the Art Institute of Chicago's repository of architectural drawings, models, and building fragments present a striking record of Chicago's great buildings and structures.

Building Chicago presents the best of this country’s first city of architecture. Colloquially known as America’s "second city," Chicago is widely regarded as this country’s crown jewel when it comes to architecture. The roster of masters who have helped shape its skyline and streetscape stands as a who’s who of the architectural pantheon from the last two hundred years, from Louis Sullivan, Daniel Burnham, and Frank Lloyd Wright to Mies van der Rohe and Frank Gehry. Lavishly illustrated, this volume compellingly displays the masterworks of Chicago architecture—from the Chicago Tribune Tower (1925) and the Rookery (1888) by Burnham & Root to the Trump International Hotel and Tower (2008) by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and the residential skyscraper Aqua (2009) by Jeanne Gang. It features the city’s beloved masterpieces by Wright, including the Robie House, such milestones as the Willis Tower and the John Hancock Building, Gehry’s Pritzker Bandshell, as well as a wealth of little-known treasures from Chicago’s early days culled from the vast collection of the Chicago History Museum.

“A handy guidebook that profiles a building per page, with a drawing and vital statistics on most of Chicago’s major historic and modern buildings.”—Chicago Tribune Updated and expanded to chart the changing urban landscape of Chicago--as well as to incorporate a section on Chicago’s campus architecture, including works by Rem Koolhaas at the Illinois Institute of Technology and Frank Lloyd Wright at the University of Chicago--the second edition of this popular handbook is a perfect companion for walking tours and an excellent source of background information for exploring the internationally acclaimed architecture of Chicago. Over 100 highlights of downtown Chicago are covered, from Michigan Avenue to the riverfront to the Loop, with accompanying maps, a glossary of architectural terms, and an index of architects and buildings.

An expansive take on American Art Deco that explores Chicago's pivotal role in developing the architecture, graphic design, and product design that came to define middle-class style in the twentieth century Frank Lloyd Wright’s lost Midway Gardens, the iconic Sunbeam Mixmaster, and Marshall Field’s famed window displays: despite the differences in scale and medium, each belongs to the broad current of an Art Deco style that developed in Chicago in the first half of the twentieth century. This ambitious overview of the city’s architectural, product, industrial, and graphic design between 1910 and 1950 offers a fresh perspective on a style that would come to represent the dominant mode of modernism for the American middle class. Lavishly illustrated with 325 images, the book narrates Art Deco’s evolution in 101 key works, carefully curated and chronologically organized to tell the story of not just a style but a set of sensibilities. Critical essays from leading figures in the field discuss the ways in which Art Deco created an entire visual universe that extended to architecture, advertising, household objects, clothing, and even food design. Through this comprehensive approach to one of the 20th century’s most pervasive modes of expression in America, Art Deco Chicago provides an essential overview of both this influential style and the metropolis that came to embody it.

"Introductory essays [by John Vinci] about the firm's work are followed by a catalogue raisonne of Adler & Sullivan's projects, with historical photographs and images by Nickel and his contemporaries. ... The catalogue raisonne ... contains essays about each building accompanied by historical images and plans when available."--P. 3.

Collects the best of Kamin's writings for the Chicago Tribune from the past decade.

Universally recognized as an architectural center, Chicago contains some of the world’s finest buildings by the most renowned architects of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis Sullivan, Mies van der Rohe, and many more left their stamp on the city’s skyline and, as a result, influenced the practice of architecture across the globe. This book, published in association with the Chicago Architecture Foundation, features an in-depth analysis of forty-two seminal works of Chicago architecture. This accessible and engaging volume is the latest addition to the successful Universe Architecture Series. Both a guide for those visiting the city and a valuable reference for architecture enthusiasts, Chicago Architecture includes residential icons such as Mies van der Rohe’s 860–880 Lake Shore Drive, skyscraper prototypes such as Sullivan’s Schlesinger and Mayer Store (Carson Pirie Scott & Co.), and engineering masterpieces such as Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s Sears Tower.

The City of Big Shoulders has always been our most quintessentially American—and world-class—architectural metropolis. In the wake of the Great Fire of 1871, a great building boom—still the largest in the history of the nation—introduced the first modern skyscrapers to the Chicago skyline and began what would become a legacy of diverse, influential, and iconoclastic contributions to the city’s built environment. Though this trend continued well into the twentieth century, sour city finances and unnecessary acts of demolishment left many previous cultural attractions abandoned and then destroyed. Lost Chicago explores the architectural and cultural history of this great American city, a city whose architectural heritage was recklessly squandered during the second half of the twentieth century. David Garrard Lowe’s crisp, lively prose and over 270 rare photographs and prints, illuminate the decades when Gustavus Swift and Philip D. Armour ruled the greatest stockyards in the world; when industrialists and entrepreneurs such as Cyrus McCormick, Potter Palmer, George Pullman, and Marshall Field made Prairie Avenue and State Street the rivals of New York City’s Fifth Avenue; and when Louis Sullivan, Daniel Burnham, and Frank Lloyd Wright were designing buildings of incomparable excellence. Here are the mansions and grand hotels, the office buildings that met technical perfection (including the first skyscraper), and the stores, trains, movie palaces, parks, and racetracks that thrilled residents and tourists alike before falling victim to the wrecking ball of progress. “Lost Chicago is more than just another coffee table gift, more than merely a history of the city’s architecture; it is a history of the whole city as a cultural creation.”—New York Times Book Review

The first authoritative study of Chicago's city houses, portraying a private world of midwestern splendor.

The first survey of the classic twentieth-century houses that defined American Midwestern modernism. Famed as the birthplace of that icon of twentieth-century architecture, the skyscraper, Chicago also cultivated a more humble but no less consequential form of modernism--the private residence. Modern in the Middle: Chicago Houses 1929-75 explores the substantial yet overlooked role that Chicago and its suburbs played in the development of the modern single-family house in the twentieth century. In a city often associated with the outsize reputations of Frank Lloyd Wright and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the examples discussed in this generously illustrated book expand and enrich the story of the region's built environment. Authors Susan Benjamin and Michelangelo Sabatino survey dozens of influential houses by architects whose contributions are ripe for reappraisal, such as Paul Schweikher, Harry Weese, Keck & Keck, and William Pereira. From the bold, early example of the "Battledeck House" by Henry Dubin (1930) to John Vinci and Lawrence Kenny's gem the Freeark House (1975), the generation-spanning residences discussed here reveal how these architects contended with climate and natural setting while negotiating the dominant influences of Wright and Mies. They also reveal how residential clients--typically middle-class professionals, progressive in their thinking--helped to trailblaze modern architecture in America. Though reflecting different approaches to site, space, structure, and materials, the examples in Modern in the Middle reveal an abundance of astonishing houses that have never been collected into one study--until now.