architecture

If you care about the history of Chicago and/or American architecture, you will be blown away by this photographic treasure trove of the Windy City's lost legacy. Through fire, ignorance and greed many of the country's most beautiful buildings have been lost. The Great Chicago Fire of 1871, the merchant princes and the stockyards, George Pullman and Hull House's Jane Addams, Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright, the Columbian Exposition. These people and events shaped what few would neglect to identify as one of America's architectural centers.

This beautiful book is filled with more than 200 black-and-white photographs of buildings, bridges and other structures tragically allowed to fall into disrepair, destroyed by natural disaster, or bulldozed for parking lots and malls, repeated testaments to the Gordon Curve, predicting that a building is valued most when it is new, that it is least valued and most likely to be razed at approximately 70 years of age, and that if it makes it past that nadir it will begin to rise again in value as a relic and monument.

Each chapter is preceded by several well-written and accessible pages, and each photograph is accompanied by informative paragraphs and quotes. The author delves into Chicago's beginnings as a frontier fort and its rapid growth into a bustling mercantile hive, along the way outlining the history of the peoples and policies of various times from 1803 to the 1970s, organized into ten conceptual and functional groups such as residences, hotels, railway stations, churches, arthouses, The Fire and the fairs.

The photographs are wonderful, many I've never seen before, and each is described well, though the book would benefit by containing more maps. The book is constructed of good heavyweight paper and concludes with picture sources and notes, and a good index. It should be of interest to those with some connection to Chicago, architecture or American history, particularly of the 18th and 19th century.

In Lost Chicago, historian David Lowe explores the architectural and cultural history of America's great "heartland" city. This is a community who architectural heritage was all to often squandered during the last five decades of its growth and evolution. Lowe's elegant, and informative text is wonderfully enhanced with more than 270 rare, period photos and prints (many of them published here for the first time). Lost Chicago is a celebration of the age of Gustavus Swift and Philip D. Armour and the greatest stockyards in the world; when Cyrus McCormick, Potter Palmer, George Pullman, and Marshall Field were the national barons of business and industry; when Prairie Avenue and State streets rivaled New York's Fifth Avenue; when architectural giants ranging from Louis Sullivan to Frank Lloyd Wright were designing buildings of incomparable excellence and innovation. Lost Chicago is a "must" for students of Chicago history, architecture, and personalities.

First issued in 1975, this book captures the magnitude and the magnificence of Chicago's architectural legacy that has been destroyed (by nature and man). Today Chicago is widely regarded as an architectural jewel (and it is, I live there!) but after reading this book you won't be able to stop imagining how much more amazing the city might be if the Urban Renewal movement of the 1960s and early 1970s had never happened. If you are interested in architechture, Chicago history or urban design and planning, read this book!