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Reviewed by:
  • Chicago Architecture: Histories, Revisions, Alternatives
  • Sharon L. Irish (bio)
Chicago Architecture: Histories, Revisions, Alternatives. Edited by Charles Waldheim and Katerina Rüedi Ray. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Pp. xxiii+488. $40.

Twenty-eight essays and more than 300 illustrations in Chicago Architecture: Histories, Revisions, Alternatives provide the reader with a wide array of representations of the city and its built environment. Seven of the essays were published elsewhere between 1984 and 2003, but, with two exceptions, have been revised for inclusion here. While many essays do not relate significantly to the history of technology, most convey an understanding of the interconnections among technology, design, politics, finance, and social concerns. In Richard Solomon's words in the foreword, Chicago's dynamism is evident in its architecture, "an architecture that cannot be separated from the social and cultural context—from the power matrix—in which it is embedded" (p. viii).

This dynamism is the book's chief strength and also its main weakness: the shifting and divergent views range from personal reminiscences to thorough scholarship, from visual urban portraits to a one-man play. The lengths of the essays vary, as do the authors' writing styles and abilities, resulting in an uneven treatment of diverse topics. This ungainliness, partly due to the effort by the editors to break "the spell of the past," has a certain appeal. Five essays directly address issues of racism, sexism, and homophobia in the history of Chicago's built environment, part of a deliberate effort "to counter Chicago's current conservative architectural culture" (p. xiii). Refreshing angles and new material promise to invigorate subsequent scholarship on Chicago.

The editors assert that "no single city has played such a pivotal role in the history of modern architecture as Chicago," noting that SHOT's own Carl Condit (1914–1997) was a key shaper of that history. Condit himself moved away from his 1952 and 1964 interpretations of Chicago's architectural history, revising his own work in the 1970s. But this volume vigorously engages mid-century scholarship by Condit, as well as Lewis Mumford, [End Page 663] Sigfried Giedion, and others. Rather than placing these writers into historiography, the editors set them up as creators of a "'straw' Chicago 'ready for burning . . .'" (p. xiii). While carefully revising history and creating alternatives is completely legitimate and essential, the strident rejection of past approaches here seems unnecessary given that no scholars I know of fully accept the versions of Chicago's architectural history that were written more than four decades ago.

This shift in understanding is due in part to Robert Bruegmann's influential essay, "The Myth of the Chicago School," reproduced here essentially as it was published in 1991. Daniel Bluestone insightfully places the myth into a larger framework by noting that the "Chicago School of architecture" served both local architects and civic boosters well, as when U.S. Steel and other corporate groups sponsored the 1957 Chicago Dynamic Week, aimed at countering the perceived decline of the city with "a historically inspired postwar building boom" (p. 66). Christopher Reed's excellent essay on Chicago's sexual and ethnic enclaves creatively spins off of the "Chicago School myth" to suggest that the 1922 Tribune Tower's "pluralist tokenism might be seen as more prescient of Chicago's future than any glass-and-steel box" (p. 163). He concludes by inserting canonical architects into historical tradition: "[T]he first and second Chicago schools—embodied in Sullivan's Moorish fancywork or Mies's equally fanciful exercises in Germanic rationalism—might themselves be seen not as the kind of universal template claimed for modernism but as expressions of their own ethnic and sexual identities" (p. 175). The same might be said of Condit and other historians.

Eric Mumford, in his consideration of multifamily housing, broadens the history of twentieth-century residential design in Chicago beyond "heroic structural expression" (p. 91). David Dunster then discusses "Selling Mies," the ways in which Mies was "flexible and accommodating" in his designs in order to "accommodate site constraints, [keep] costs to a very low per square foot price . . ." (p. 93), and satisfy his clients. Beyond Mies, Bertrand Goldberg (who briefly apprenticed with Mies) and...

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