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Collects the best of Kamin's writings for the Chicago Tribune from the past decade.
This text collects the best of architecture critic Blair Kamin's columns. Using Chicago as a barometer of national design trends, the book sheds light on the state of American architecture during 'the Nervous Nineties'.
Offering the complete, never-before-told story of the twenty-five gates that form portals to Harvard Yard, this beautiful gift book recounts the aesthetic vision for America's preeminent university, developed by renowned architecture firm McKim, Mead & White. The book discusses the architectural intentions of the gates, as well as the human drama behind their fruition—tales of wealth, power, and institutional and personal ambition. Illustrated with previously unpublished sketches by Roger Erickson, architect and landscape architect; stunning color photographs of each gate by Ralph Lieberman; and a beautiful hand-drawn three-dimensional aerial map of Harvard Yard that denotes the location of each gate by RISD graduate student Christopher Beck.
This illustrated guide to 100 of the world's most important concert halls and opera houses examines their architecture and engineering and discusses their acoustical quality as judged by conductors and music critics. The descriptions and photographs will serve as a valuable guide for today's peripatetic performers and music lovers. With technical discussions relegated to appendices, the book can be read with pleasure by anyone interested in musical performance. The photographs (specially commissioned for this book) and architectural drawings (all to the same scale) together with modern acoustical data on each of the halls provide a rich and unmatched resource on the design of halls for presenting musical performances. Together with the technical appendices, the data and drawings will serve as an invaluable reference for architects and engineers involved in the design of spaces for the performance of music.
As anyone who has flown into Los Angeles at dusk or Houston at midday knows, urban areas today defy traditional notions of what a city is. Our old definitions of urban, suburban, and rural fail to capture the complexity of these vast regions with their superhighways, subdivisions, industrial areas, office parks, and resort areas pushing far out into the countryside. Detractors call it sprawl and assert that it is economically inefficient, socially inequitable, environmentally irresponsible, and aesthetically ugly. Robert Bruegmann calls it a logical consequence of economic growth and the democratization of society, with benefits that urban planners have failed to recognize. In his incisive h...
In celebration of the 200th anniversary of Amherst College, a group of scholars and alumni explore the school’s substantial past in this volume. Amherst in the World tells the story of how an institution that was founded to train Protestant ministers began educating new generations of industrialists, bankers, and political leaders with the decline in missionary ambitions after the Civil War. The contributors trace how what was a largely white school throughout the interwar years begins diversifying its student demographics after World War II and the War in Vietnam. The histories told here illuminate how Amherst has contended with slavery, wars, religion, coeducation, science, curriculum, t...
Southern Exposure is the definitive guide to the often overlooked architectural riches of Chicago's South Side by architecture expert and former Chicago Sun-Times architecture writer Lee Bey.
The transformative power of urban design in shaping our experiences within high-rise cities takes center stage in Humanizing the High-Rise City: Podiums, Plazas, Parks, Pedestrian Networks, and Public Art. This captivating exploration delves into the art of turning towering skyscraper cities into vibrant havens that foster human connection, celebrate culture, and build communities. Unveiling the secrets behind the creation of urban spaces, from dynamic plazas that encourage social interaction to tranquil parks that infuse life into steel and glass, the book unfolds a narrative that resonates with the innate rhythms of humanity. Examining 20 major high-rise cities worldwide (including Chicago...
In the nineteenth century, politicians transformed a disease-infested bog on the shore of Lake Michigan into an intensely managed waterscape supporting the life and economy of Chicago. Liquid Capital shows how Chicago's waterfront became both an economic hub and the site of many precedent-setting decisions about public land use.
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 o...