As always, happy to weigh in on the latest political news. Yesterday saw extensive coverage of the remodeling of the “Lincoln bathroom” in a central Washington, D.C., residence, along w…

A contestant in Chicago's first official International Aviation Meet, August, 1911. With NASCAR racing in Grant Park earlier this summer and Chicago's annual Air + Water Show warming up over the lake, this seems an appropriate time to point out that Chicago has a long history of racing and aviation in its otherwise pastoral 'front yard.' My current research project is a history of Chicago's airports.

Concrete is all around us, and we haven’t quite wrapped our heads around it. Understanding its history more clearly, the Skyscraper Museum’s new exhibition in Manhattan implies, just might help us emp...

Parth Solanki and Siddharth Shah (UIUC), with Alice Wimbe (SAIC) We finished up a challenging but exciting studio project this week with final reviews at the Chicago Architecture Center–many …

As part of our research for the Skyscraper Museum’s Modern Concrete Skyscraper exhibition, Carol Willis and I worked to understand how and why Chicago became the acknowledged center of high-strength and high-rise concrete design for much of the last half of the 20th century. What follows has relied on perspectives and input from conversations and virtual lectures held with, among others, Bill Baker, Paul James, Kim Clawson, Ken DeMuth, Geoffrey Goldberg, Matthys Levy, Joseph Colaco, and, especially, the late Charlie Thornton.

As part of our research for the Skyscraper Museum’s Modern Concrete Skyscraper exhibition, Carol Willis and I worked to understand how and why Chicago became the acknowledged center of high-strength and high-rise concrete design for much of the last half of the 20th century. What follows has relied on perspectives and input from conversations and virtual lectures held with, among others, Bill Baker, Paul James, Kim Clawson, Ken DeMuth, Geoffrey Goldberg, Matthys Levy, Joseph Colaco, and, especially, the late Charlie Thornton.

As part of our research for the Skyscraper Museum's Modern Concrete Skyscraper exhibition, Carol Willis and I worked to understand how and why Chicago became the acknowledged center of high-strength and high-rise concrete design for much of the last half of the 20th century. What follows has relied on perspectives and input from conversations and virtual lectures held with, among others, Bill Baker, Paul James, Kim Clawson, Ken DeMuth, Geoffrey Goldberg, Matthys Levy, Joseph Colaco, and, especially, the late Charlie Thornton.

University Towers, NYC. I.M. Pei. 1966-1967. JSTOR Happy to announce that after a couple of years of great conversations, deep dives into obscure 1920s issues of Cement Age, and ace model-making by a student team here, The Modern Concrete Skyscraper is opening this week at the Skyscraper Museum in New York. Carol Willis, the Museum's Director and Founder, approached me about helping to curate an exhibition that would be a 'gentle corrective' to the idea that the skyscraper's evolution was primarily a steel story.

Neom executives shielded Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman from the challenges of his fantastical plans, including by engaging in ​“deliberate manipulation​” of financials, an internal report​ ​found

(A version of this appears in Chicago Skyscrapers, 1934-1986. Dusting this off as Kluczynski Building has--supposedly--been on the list of federal properties the current administration is looking to sell). (Update--Or not). Everett McKinley Dirksen Building, John C. Kluczynski Building, and United States Post Office (Chicago Federal Center Architects, a joint venture of Schmidt Garden & Erickson, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, C.F.

Any University of Illinois School of Architecture graduate will recognize the name Nathan Clifford Ricker. Our library and two school publications are named for him. We’ll waste no opportunity to point out that he was the first American to receive a home-grown architectural degree—in 1873. He designed several key buildings on the Urbana-Champaign campus, in addition to his own home nearby, and he stayed on as a faculty member (1916), director of the nascent architecture program (1910), and general guiding spirit until 1922.

Construction of the U.S. Supreme Court Building in December, 1933. (Architect of the Capitol). Greenough's argument against "the adoption of admired forms and models for purposes not contemplated in their invention," particularly the use of classical architecture for modern programs, found a resonant application nearly a century after his death when the Maison Carree was once again the model for a monumental government structure.

Every four or eight years, the age-old question "in what style should we build" seems to enter political discourse; modernism (or in the current iteration, a straw-man "brutalism") and classicism come to stand in for left vs. right in a way that seems to encapsulate arguments about individualism, tradition, beauty, and whatever else is the argument du jour. To be clear: there is good classicism and good modernism.