The University of Chicago: An Architectural Tour

The newest title in the Princeton Architectural Press Campus Guide series takes readers on a tour of the University of Chicago, an institution that since its founding in 1890 has exerted a profound impact on American higher education. This elegantly written guide highlights the fascinating social and intellectual history of the university showing the campus as a wonderfully eccentric and vastly under appreciated element of Chicago's revered built environment. Designed in the English Gothic style of its time, the original campus, planned by Chicago architect Henry Ives Cobb, had a commonality of vision that made it equal in quality to the finest in America. As the traditional reliance on the Gothic gave way to modernist styles, the campus was expanded with buildings by such notable architects as Eero Saarinen, Mies van der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Walter Netsch. The university's most recent additions include Cesar Pelli's 2003 Gerald Ratner Athletics Center and Rafel Vinoly's Graduate School of Business complex. Beautifully photographed in full color, the guide presents an architectural walk of this campus distinguished by landmark buildings.