August 31, 2023 Ι Architects’ Newspaper In the 1960s, the same Chicago city agency conjured some of the worst and the best in American residential high-rises, and in rapid succession. The Chicago Housing Authority’s (CHA) Robert Taylor Homes were the nation’s largest public housing project when they opened in 1963: the buildings locked in a… Continue reading High in the Sky, Where the Money Stacks Up
Tag: Racism
Chicago critic Blair Kamin’s Who is the City For? takes aim at aesthetic bungles while thornier issues go largely unaddressed
Architect’s Newspaper Ι Nov. 4, 2022 In a 2011 column, “Signs Uglify Our Beautiful Bridges,” anthologized in Blair Kamin’s book Who Is the City For? Architecture, Equity, and the Public Realm in Chicago, the recently retired Chicago Tribune architecture critic takes aim at garish vinyl Bank of America (BoA) ads affixed to the Wabash Avenue… Continue reading Chicago critic Blair Kamin’s Who is the City For? takes aim at aesthetic bungles while thornier issues go largely unaddressed
Dismantling The Design Syllabus
Landscape Architecture Magazine Ι Nov. 6, 2020 Newly appointed this summer, Sara Zewde is the first tenure-tracked Black woman landscape architecture professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) and one of only 19 Black landscape architecture professors at accredited programs in the United States. And now that her first semester teaching at her… Continue reading Dismantling The Design Syllabus
Re-Shaped by Crisis, an “Anti-Biennial” Reimagines Chicago
Oct. 2, 2021 Ι Bloomberg CityLab The 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennial was held, like its two predecessors, in the Chicago Cultural Center, a sumptuous late-19th-century meeting hall in the downtown Loop. Two years later, rocked by Covid-19 and local protests against police violence, North America’s largest architecture and design show finds itself in very different surroundings.… Continue reading Re-Shaped by Crisis, an “Anti-Biennial” Reimagines Chicago
When Monuments Go Bad
June 7, 2021 Ι Bloomberg CityLab The stately eagle atop the 50-foot-tall fluted column of the Illinois Centennial Monument can be seen from blocks away. Located in the gentrifying Logan Square neighborhood on Chicago’s North Side, the memorial was designed by Henry Bacon and Evelyn Beatrice Longman and built in 1918 as an allegorical representation… Continue reading When Monuments Go Bad
What We Talk About When We Talk About Architecture
February 12, 2021 Ι Architects Newspaper In early June, I put on a white KN95 mask and a black sweater and left my apartment like thousands of other Chicagoans to protest the murder of Black Americans by police. An hour or so of marching and chanting culminated at an intersection near my home dominated by… Continue reading What We Talk About When We Talk About Architecture
Chicago Teens Unveil Vision for Change and Public Safety in Their Neighborhood
Next City Ι Sept. 23, 2020 The Chicago teens enrolled in urban design non-profit Territory’s programs usually spend their time exploring public spaces, designing prototype installations, and building them in a studio. But with this summer’s COVID-19 lockdown, the youth-focused design, public art, and community planning organization founded in 2012 had to figure out how… Continue reading Chicago Teens Unveil Vision for Change and Public Safety in Their Neighborhood
Chicago’s 1855 ‘Beer Riot’ Is a Bridge to the Unrest of 2020
Bloomberg’s CityLab Ι Aug. 14, 2020 It’s been one of the most striking images of this summer’s season of urban uprising: bridges over the Chicago River drawn up to block access to downtown Chicago’s Loop, the raised structures standing like iron sentinels guarding nearly deserted nighttime streets. Mayor Lori Lightfoot ordered the drawbridges raised early Monday morning… Continue reading Chicago’s 1855 ‘Beer Riot’ Is a Bridge to the Unrest of 2020
A Seat at the Table
Architect Magazine Ι Feb. 3, 2020 Early in the development of the Ruth Ellis Clairmount Center in Detroit, an LGBTQ+ affordable housing and outreach center that focuses on young people of color, Jack Schroeder, AIA, of Landon Bone Baker (LBB) knew there would be an arts component to the mostly residential project, but he wasn’t… Continue reading A Seat at the Table
An Activist Architecture Stirs in Chicago
The Atlantic’s CityLab Ι Oct. 9. 2019 Perhaps the most compelling installation in this year’s Chicago Architecture Biennial doesn’t feature a single architectural model, rendering, or image of buildings (or of anything else). It’s a series of short blocks of text, probing the Chicago police’s killing of Harith Augustus on the city’s South Side in July of last… Continue reading An Activist Architecture Stirs in Chicago