Chicago's Famous Buildings (5TH 04 Edition)

Ratifying the obvious, the American Institute of Architects recently named Chicago the city with the finest architecture in the country, and this book, recently published in a fully revised and expanded fifth edition, has long been the standard guide to the city's most distinguished buildings. In fact the AIA's own guide, now out of print, was a far more detailed and inclusive one-volume handbook, but its straightforward descriptions read as though they'd been drafted by committee. It lacked the personality (and portability) of this handbook, which has been substantially different in each edition, owing to the taste and proclivities of its changing editors and to the evolution of architectural fashion. (The first two editions, for instance, focused heavily on the city's canonical Chicago and Prairie School buildings; the third edition, in 1980, considered many more modernist buildings, and the inclusive emphasis of it and the fourth edition, published in 1993, reflected the postmodernist aesthetic then in vogue.) The current editors — who, in a departure from earlier editions, also wrote all the entries — have continued the previous two editions' practice of describing and assessing the architectural character of neighborhoods, not just single buildings, which renders their examinations of "Chicago's famous buildings" in this already very general guide sometimes too general. And, inescapably, one quibbles with some of the emphases and selections. But Schulze and Harrington are unusually brisk, even saucy, writers, and their descriptions are commendably concrete and vivid. This is an admirable reworking of a book that's at once a classic and a work in progress.

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