Here are articles about architects and buildings (most of them in Chicago or Springfield), the architecture business,  landscape architecture, preservation, and reviews of (mostly) books on the same topics, as published mainly in Chicago’s Reader, Inland Architect, and Illinois Times.

​

My interest in buildings was homegrown. Like most Illinois towns of any size, the downtown Springfield I grew up in was a museum of  American commercial, civic, and religious building styles. Growing up, I wandered around and through them like a kid at a fair. Nor was my interest parochial. I suppose it signified something that,while on our one family outing to the big city, when I was about ten, the only snapshot I took in Chicago was of a building. (It was the 1955 Prudential Building, then the tallest and one of the newest in the city.)

 

Beginning during my teen years back in Springfield, fine old structures of every type were being replaced by nothing near as fine, if they were replaced by anything at all. Springfield's Romanesque city hall, its handsome old banks, its YMCA, its Carnegie library, its most splendiferous movie house—the embodied history of the city, which by then was my history too—was taken away bit by bit in the backs of trucks.

​

I lived for more than eleven years a block and a half from the house that Frank Lloyd Wright designed for Susan Lawrence Dana, which by then was the headquarters of a publishing firm and now is the state-owned Dana-Thomas House. The building beguiled, and the saga of its purchase for the public, its restoration, and attempts to recover its long-scattered original furnishings were stories I was happy to report on. In learning about his work I learned from Wright's critique of his predecessors, so to that extent he my teacher about architecture generally. 

 

In 1988 I moved to Oak Park, across the street and a world away from Chicago, and in 1990 I found myself again living up the street (exactly 714 feet, sayeth Google) from the door of another Wright-designed house, this one Wright's home and studio on Chicago Avenue. So amazing a place had the world become by the middle 1990s that I had acquired a global reputation as an expert on Wright. I spent an hour tutoring an importunate Japanese student as we sat beneath the nearly 200-year-old gingko tree in the courtyard of the studio whilst the cream of the world's tourists chattered and gawked all around us. 

 

Just as Chicago is a bigger city than Springfield, so was its architecture a bigger topic, and I wrote about it often. I knew nothing about it, really, but a freelancer must learn to masquerade his ignorance as respectful curiosity. I doubt that I fooled the editors at Inland Architect, but I suspect that they asked me to contribute anyway because I was willing to work cheap.

​

In any event, while posing as an architecture writer I got to meet and talk with distinguished practitioners such as Dirk Lohan and Harry Weese and Bertrand Goldberg from whom I collected quotes and they collected publicity according to the ancient laws of my profession, so everyone was happy. 

 

As for the articles, I convinced myself that my ignorance was a qualification insofar as I was had never been infected with the architecture-as-art virus then rampant in the better schools. My perspective instead was that of the public which is obliged to look at, move through, and use buildings, often (in Chicago) with delight, sometimes with befuddlement and annoyance. 

​

Note: Old buildings are perforce examples of the architecture of their period, and architectural styles are artifacts of their historical period. The distinction between architectural preservation and historical preservation is pretty blurred, so these articles about architecture include pieces about historic preservation.