According to articles databases, I wrote a great deal about Chicago “architecture.” In fact I seldom wrote about architecture per se, being untrained in the field and only intermittently interested in it. I am interested in buildings, however, and that was always my true subject.

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Chicagoans do go on about their buildings. They remind me of the relative who’s always going on about her straight-A son. Among those Chicagoans are most local architecture critics. There were some I admired— Lee Bey and (later) Lynn Becker—but reading the Tribune’s critics was like biting on a sore tooth. (I’m not one for banning words, but a hacker who can penetrate the Trib’s computer system and disable the word “gritty” on any appearance in a Blair Kamin column should get the Pulitzer Prize for criticism.)

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Journalism about architecture in Chicago tends to overstate the city’s importance in the architecture world. The fact is that Chicago has not been a center for new architecture for a century. It has produced no native innovators since Wright and Sullivan and Charles Atwood. (The Bauhaus gave us Mies, the way the French gave us the Statue of Liberty.) Too much of what was news back then was attempts to save good buildings rather than building them.