Why architecture matters: lessons from Chicago

This work collects best of architecture critic Blair Kamin's columns, including his acclaimed series advocating intelligent development of Chicago's lakefront. Centred in Chicago, America's foremost architectural city, book paints a portrait not just of soaring skyscrapers but also of vibrant immigrant neighbourhoods, troubled public housing projects, and sprawling suburbs. Using Chicago as a barometer of national design trends, book sheds light on state of American architecture during the Nervous Nineties. It is a period of unparalleled affluence and underlying anxiety, of soothing retro buildings and provocative new ones that express frenzied state of modern life. Chicago perfectly represents decade's contradictions, rediscovering itself as a city but losing its architectural nerve. Throughout book Kamin pursues question of how people actually use space, and how architects and planners might better design it to enrich human experience. Architecture matters, he argues, because it simultaneously reflects and affects how we live.