I spent this week at the annual conference of the International Association for Shell and Spatial Structures, presenting some spinoff Nervi work in sessions on shell history and archives. The conference was in Turin, Italy a longtime favorite city for many reasons, not least of which is that it contains some of Nervi's most important work. As "Italy's Detroit," Turin not only built all sorts of industrial buildings, some of them by Nervi.

CHSA Mexico City had many highlights, but one bucket-list item for many of us was seeing this adorable piece of concrete-shell construction on UNAM’s campus. I’ve used Felix Candela’s Cosmic Ray Pavilion to introduce students to shell principles for well over 20 years, so seeing it in person was a much-anticipated stop on our campus tour. Candela was commissioned in 1951 to design and build the pavilion to house sensitive equipment used to detect incoming cosmic rays, high-energy particles that would have been absorbed by heavy building materials.  

Courtesy UNAM Returning home from a stellar few days at UNAM in Mexico City, where the Construction History Society of America held its 10th regular meeting as part of a bi-national event with the newly formed Mexican society, which announced its founding as part of our closing ceremonies. When CHSA started in 2007, we debated whether the right term was "of America" or "of the Americas," and this week was clear evidence that the boundaries between largely English-language work north of the Rio Grande and largely Spanish-speaking scholarship south of it are at once important and permeable.

Subah Samaeen & Michael Jozwiak How do you combine an accreditation-required Integrated Design Studio with curricular requirements for a high-rise project and a general interest among students in adaptive reuse? You Frankenstein a program together with some help from ace professionals with connections and their own ideas for recycling historic buildings into economically viable, culturally and socially relevant additions to downtown.

Display Ad, General Electric Refrigerators. Chicago Daily Tribune, June 12, 1949. B9. “Ask anyone conversant with urban problems to tick off the names of private builders who are devoting their efforts to building ‘a better civic civilization’ through urban redevelopment, for example, and chances are he could do it on the fingers of one hand.  And it is a safe bet that one of the names mentioned would be that of ‘Herb’ Greenwald.”

Winchester-Hood Apartments I, Holsman, Holsman, Klekamp, & Taylor, 1949-51. Photograph by Stanley Jurocich, Architectural Forum, January, 1950. 81. In August, 1949, a team of seventeen building industry professionals from Great Britain toured the United States, seeking American “know-how” to help their home country rebuild after WWII.  Under the auspices of the “Anglo-American Council on Productivity,” a spinoff from the Marshall Plan, the group toured seven U.S.

5617 Dorchester, Hyde Park. Henry K. Holsman, 1928. Chicago Tribune, Feb. 20, 1927. B1. Holsman’s low-rise forays into the Hyde Park and South Shore neighborhoods were successful enough that he moved on to taller buildings: an eight-story building containing fourteen apartments at 5617 Dorchester (1928),[i] and a fourteen-story tower with twelve apartments, each taking up a whole floor, around the corner at 1321 E.

Henry K. Holsman (1866-1961). Quick—name a Chicago architect in the center of a Venn diagram containing: Mies van der Rohe, A defunct automobile company, The 1933 Century of Progress Exposition, Michelle Obama, and The shortest (perhaps?) federal prison term on record. As you can tell, this is quite a story. Henry Holsman was born in 1866 in Dale, Iowa (pop.

Under the unlikely headline "Mushroom Infringement Suits," the trade journal Cement Age published an article by C.A.P. Turner in May, 1911, announcing that he had brought suit against the Deere and Webber Company for building a bootleg version of his mushroom slab system in their new building (still standing) on Washington Avenue in downtown Minneapolis. "It is the intention of Mr.

Part of our conversations about the recent "Modern Concrete Skyscraper" show at the Skyscraper Museum involved the development of flat-slab high-rise structures, which became the standard for residential construction in Chicago (and elsewhere) beginning in the 1920s. The evolution and development of the flat slab as a technique has a long and fairly tortured history, much of which involves Chicago engineers and builders, but one aspect has been particularly interesting to me.

Put your baseball knowledge to the test! Immaculate Grid is a daily trivia game powered by Sports Reference. Come back for a new MLB grid challenge every day!

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…

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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.

Photo: Ken DeMuth So, define “high-rise studio…” Preservation folks will recognize the buildings in the back there as the cause du jour. The Century Building (front, Holabird and …

31 December 2022 Update: The State of Illinois has sold the 23-acre site on which the Santa Fe silos (now known as the Damen silos) stand to the owners of MAT Asphalt, a company with a checkered hi…

Muntasir Hakim, Michael Zemaitis, and Anam Haque My Integrated Design Studio this semester was a collaboration with Related Midwest that looked at the evolving plans for The 78, a 62-acre brownfiel…

This holiday season, AIA Chicago has compiled a list of books by - or featuring - AIA Chicago members. In addition to a fresh group of stunning monographs, this year’s list of books includes a variety...

In 1965, the 47-story and 623ft/190m Place Victoria in Montreal’s financial district, also known as the Stock Exchange Tower or Tour de la Bourse, surpassed Chicago's 1000 Lake Shore Plaza as the worl...

A 400-foot version of the Chicago Temple, as published in the Tribune, March 26, 1922 I was honored to be part of the Chicago Temple’s 100th birthday celebrations earlier this month.  UIC’s Ro…

HABS/HAER Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan designed the Kehilath Anshe Ma'arav Synagogue in 1890 as a worship and community center for the German-Jewish community in Douglas.  As the Black community ...