Archinect - News

Blair Kamin: ‘Writer underwriting writer’

2024-10-24T17:59:00-04:00

The [Chicago] Tribune, which had been reducing staff and budgets for years before Alden Global Capital accelerated the process with its May 2021 purchase of Tribune Publishing, did not replace Kamin, just as it did not replace several other culture writers who left the paper. So the retired critic took matters into his own hands.

We covered the debut of the Windy City’s newest critic Edward Keegan back in August along with the restart of work on 400 Lake Shore Drive. His position is being funded by Blair Kamin after Kamin stepped aside in January 2021. He explains the situation to Northwestern's vaunted J-school's Local News Initiative blog.

"I decided that if initially they weren’t going to make a grant, that I would make a grant myself to do this," he tells of his personal philanthropy. "But it’s complicated, because when you have a so-called donor-advised fund, you can’t give money legally to a for-profit enterprise. So you need to find a nonprofit to give the money to, and they, in turn, will give the money to the for-profit. So it took forever going through a variety of possibilities."

Frank Lloyd Wright's first private commission on the market for $1.98 million in Illinois

2024-09-17T17:30:00-04:00

Frank Lloyd Wright’s first independent commission in River Forest, Illinois has hit the local real estate market for just under $2 million. The historic 1894 Winslow House was the young architect’s first after leaving Adler & Sullivan’s Chicago office, reports Blair Kamin.

Christie’s International listed the 5,000-square-foot/five-bedroom property, which was restored recently for $1.3 million. Wright credits the nascent underpinnings of the Prairie Style to its development in several sources including his biography per Crain’s. The National Register of Historic Places added the landmark to its database in 1970.

Wright’s early Warren Hickox House in nearby Kankakee, Illinois also hit the market in March after being held in private hands for 48 years.

Chicago proposes three alternatives to the Bears' planned Soldier Field exodus

2022-07-27T12:32:00-04:00

Chicago’s last-ditch effort to dissuade its Bears football team from decamping to a new home in the northwest suburbs has yielded a trio of design alternatives after Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s office released renderings for three proposed Soldier Field redesigns on Monday.

Two of the three options include either installing a dome or creating the capacity to do so in a fan experience-oriented renovation that could cost between $900 million and $2.2 billion to complete, according to figures quoted in the city’s plan.

Rendering of the 'Dome' proposal. Courtesy Landmark Chicago Interests.

The third proposes the creation of a flexible multi-sport layout oriented more towards concerts and other tourist draws. Further components of the proposal include major transportation improvements and the creation of a new public plaza to be located in place of the existing Solidarity Drive.

Rendering of the 'Dome' proposal. Courtesy Landmark Chicago Interests.

Rendering of a proposed transformation. Cour...

Graham Foundation announces $507,500 in grants to individuals working to advance the global discourse on architecture

2022-05-24T14:47:00-04:00

The annual round of Graham Foundation individual grants has been announced today in Chicago.

A total of $507,500 was given to 56 different projects, publications, exhibitions, films, and other intellectual endeavors from around the world that expand contemporary understandings of architecture, according to the Foundation.

This year’s projects offered a range of different voices utilizing a variety of new media. Catalina Mejía Moreno and Huda Tayob’s podcast “Architectures of the South: Bruising, Remembering, Repairing” was included along with publications like Lee Bey and Blair Kamin’s excellent new title Who Is the City For? Architecture, Equity, and the Public Realm in Chicago, and Marina Otero Verzier’s Evanescent Institutions: On the Politics of Temporary Architecture, among others.

Albert Brenchat-Aguilar’s exhibition “'As Hardly Found' in the Art of Tropical Architecture” for the Architectural Association in London was one of seven to receive recognition for their incisive an...

Architecture critic Blair Kamin is leaving the Chicago Tribune after 33 years

2021-01-11T13:22:00-05:00

Blair Kamin, author and Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic for the Chicago Tribune, has announced that after 33 years, and nearly three decades in the role of the critic, he is leaving the paper.

Kamin published this Twitter thread on Friday, January 8:

1/7 After 33 years at Chicago Tribune, 28 as architecture critic, I’m taking a buyout + leaving the newspaper. It’s been an honor to cover + critique designs in the first city of American architecture + to continue the tradition begun by Paul Gapp, my Pulitzer-winning predecessor
— Blair Kamin (@BlairKamin) January 8, 2021

After 33 years at Chicago Tribune, 28 as architecture critic, I’m taking a buyout + leaving the newspaper. It’s been an honor to cover + critique designs in the first city of American architecture + to continue the tradition begun by Paul Gapp, my Pulitzer-winning predecessor.

During these 28 years, I have chronicled an astonishing time of change, both in Chicago and around the world. From the horrors of 9...

Midwest floods impact Chicago’s Willis Tower and Farnsworth House

2020-05-20T14:08:00-04:00

Two of Chicago's most treasured architectural landmarks have been impacted by recent torrential rains that have battered the Midwest.

The Chicago Tribune reports that flooding impacted the SOM-designed Willis Tower basement, which caused a building-wide power outage. The resulting blackout left the 1,729-foot-tall tower completely dark, producing an eerie sight on the otherwise brilliant Chicago skyline.

Have you seen the creepy pictures of Sears Tower sans lights? Flooding knocked out power to the building. Also, I like that people still call it the Sears Tower. Which reminds me, I need to stop at Hooks on the way home from work today. pic.twitter.com/phspRyfVGl
— Sean Copeland (@TheSeanCopeland) May 20, 2020

Similarly, rising waters from a river located nearby the Mies van der Rohe-designed Farnsworth House in the western suburbs threatened to overwhelm the glass-encased home, as well. The Chicago Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin reports, however, that the waters have alr...

'Enthralling gateway to its city:' Blair Kamin on Foster + Partners-led O'Hare expansion proposal

2019-01-30T15:14:00-05:00

Chances for architectural greatness are rare. When they come around, we best grab them. Such is the opportunity Chicago has before it with one of the five plans for a new global terminal at O’Hare International Airport.

Chicago Tribune architecture critic, Blair Kamin, comes out in clear support of the Norman Foster-led finalist entry to the $8.5B Chicago O’Hare 21 Terminal Expansion competition: "That plan, from a team led by London-based Foster + Partners architects, promises to be everything an airport should be: a precisely-honed machine for moving people and baggage; easy to get around intuitively; and an enthralling gateway to its city." Foster's joint venture team also includes Chicago-based architects Epstein and Moreno.

The other four finalist teams, announced last November, are Fentress-EXP-Brook-Garza Joint Venture Partners, Santiago Calatrava LLC, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), and Studio ORD Joint Venture Partners.

Previously: Questions raised over selection process for massive expansion of O’Hare International Airport

Blair Kamin's 2018 best architecture moments in Chicago and the Midwest

2018-12-10T14:27:00-05:00

Construction cranes filled the skyline, but much of the best work in Chicago and the Midwest in 2018 was tucked away in settings far from the high-rise commercial maelstrom.

Chicago Tribune architecture critic, Blair Kamin, takes a look back and lists 2018's most notable architecture moments in the Windy City and the greater Midwest region, including the transformation of Eero Saarinen's Gateway Arch landmark in St. Louis, the anticipated new home of the Chicago Architecture Center planned by Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture, the Tadao Ando-designed Wrightwood 659 art venue, and Studio Gang's energy-friendly Solstice apartment tower.

'Burst of space:' Blair Kamin reviews Tadao Ando's new Chicago art venue and Ando/Corbusier opening show

2018-10-19T13:54:00-04:00

Amid today’s polarizing political noise, Wrightwood 659 offers a comparable oasis. The building greets the visitor with a refurbished facade adorned with arches, festoons and other Beaux-Arts details. But the decorous facade turns out to be a mask. [...] Upstairs are clean-lined, contemplative galleries —“white boxes with a twist,” you might call them — filled with a trove of material about Corbusier and Ando.

Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin shares his impressions from the opening night at Tadao Ando's new Wrightwood 659 art venue in Chicago as well as its inaugural exhibition Ando and Le Corbusier: Masters of Architecture—and the review is full of praise: "The space is so good that it compels you to set aside the contradiction of a self-professed anti-elitist architect laboring once more in the service of a wealthy man," Kamin writes.

Chicago's Lake Point Tower is turning 50

2018-09-20T18:33:00-04:00

As Lake Point Tower, once the world’s tallest all-residential high-rise, celebrates its 50th anniversary this weekend, it’s an apt time to reflect on its legacy. The 70-story condominium tower, which sits just west of Navy Pier at 505 N. Lake Shore Drive, is both hero and villain, though it is more the former than the latter.

Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin looks back at the history and the significance of Lake Point Tower; as he calls it "by all accounts a spectacular and rare object — a poetic expression of curves in a city that worships the right angle."

'All the grandeur of a Holiday Inn': Blair Kamin on the latest Chicago Union Station expansion plans

2018-06-29T18:24:00-04:00

Daniel Burnham’s ghost and his much-quoted exhortation to “make no little plans” haunt the just-released, utterly underwhelming design for a vertical expansion of Chicago’s Union Station. To put things in Burnham-speak, these plans are little — very little. There’s nothing wrong with the idea of putting a 330-room hotel in the upper floors [...] The trouble is a planned apartment addition that would plunk a squat modernist box atop the existing structure’s neo-classical pedestal.

Tribune critic Blair Kamin comments on the latest expansion plans by Riverside Investment & Development for Chicago's iconic Union Station, which were unveiled Monday night. "The juxtaposition of past and present isn’t as violent as the spaceship-like seating bowl that’s plopped atop the classical colonnades of Soldier Field," writes Kamin. "It’s just banal, which Burnham buildings never are."

Modernist Columbia, IN building finds new life as architecture school outpost

2018-05-04T13:42:00-04:00

Next fall, Indiana University announced Monday, the building will house the university’s new master of architecture program, serving as an outpost of the flagship Bloomington campus 36 miles to the west. But this will be no ordinary outpost. Columbus, a small-town architectural mecca, boasts buildings by such renowned architects as Eliel and Eero Saarinen, I.M. Pei and Chicago’s Harry Weese.

Blair Kamin tells the story of the former The Republic newspaper building—a modernist gem designed by SOM partner Myron Goldsmith and opened in 1971—which will soon find a second life as Indiana University's new architecture graduate program studio in Columbus, Indiana.

Blair Kamin discusses architecture's #metoo moment — “The moral and professional [responsibility] is simply to bear witness”

2018-03-26T14:02:00-04:00

In other words— you ask, will there be a revision of canon? Should we revise the canon? I would say, it’s not so much that we’re going to revise the canon, but that there will certainly be a revised narrative of architects who contributed to the canon.

In light of the sexual harassment allegations against Richard Meier, architectural writer Eva Hagberg Fisher interviews Blair Kamin about writing and reporting on architecture's about-time-it-happened #metoo moment.

“So the first responsibility, the moral and professional is simply to bear witness. If you don’t confront, you just let it slide,” Kamin says to Eva Hagberg Fisher. “By not taking up the issue, you signal that it’s not important. So, yeah, the point is to bear witness and to put this issue in the public conversation. I also think it’s worth stressing that you don’t have to be a woman to do that...”

'Girder Gothic' or 'memorable traditionalism'? Blair Kamin reviews Yale's new residential colleges

2017-08-22T15:03:00-04:00

So Yale's new residential colleges, which New York architect and former Yale architecture school dean Robert A.M. Stern designed according to the Rogers model, have a very high bar to meet and some tough questions to confront: Do they refresh the Gothic tradition, as Rogers did, or are they a pastiche? Does it make sense for Yale, which claims to prize diversity and inclusion, to replicate the physical world of Rogers' day, when the university's student body was largely WASP and male?

When expanding, most university campuses follow the strategy of replicating the already established style of the existing architecture. Working on Yale's new residential colleges, A. M. Stern and his partner on the project, Melissa DelVecchio, are, too, striving to not stand apart physically or architecturally from the context in their design.

Blair Kamin of the Chicago Tribune reports on the university's recent campus additions,"...Stern's traditionalist architecture, which is draped like a Ralph Lauren suit over an underlying frame of steel and concrete, is uneven in quality, wavering between self-assured reinterpretation and over-the-top eclecticism.

It all feels like Yale: Monumental scale in the sky, human scale at ground level, the former not overwhelming the latter. The Gothic language, with its malleable asymmetry, was better suited to this site than the formal Georgian vocabulary of other Yale colleges. But even colleges as sizable as Murray and Franklin cannot replicate t...

Blair Kamin calls restoration of Frank Lloyd Wright's Unity Temple "triumphant"

2017-05-22T14:29:00-04:00

Frrank Lloyd Wright was never one to fret about meeting deadlines, sticking to budgets or roofs that leaked. So there is something fitting about the delayed, but altogether triumphant, restoration of Wright's Unity Temple, [...] the finest public building of Wright's Chicago years and home to one of the most beautiful rooms in America. Instead of finishing on schedule last fall, the $25 million project is wrapping up just in time for the 150th anniversary of Wright's birthday, June 8.

"Success, it's often said, has many fathers, and so it is with here," Kamin writes. "A team of consultants led by Chicago's Harboe Architects has lavished exacting care on every aspect of this project, from the restoration of jewel-like art glass to the recreation of textured plaster walls."

A Friend in Deed: Chicago Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin discusses his rocky relationship with Donald Trump, on Archinect Sessions #86

2016-10-20T15:37:00-04:00

Blair Kamin, Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic for the Chicago Tribune, has had a tempestuous relationship with Donald Trump for years. As a developer working in Chicago, Trump's buildings have been critiqued by Kamin, and as often happens when Trump is criticized, he does not shy away from firing back personal attacks—calling him "dopey" and "a lightweight" when Kamin decried the developer's decision to slap a 20-foot-tall "TRUMP" sign on his downtown Chicago hotel. But instances like the "sign feud" aside, Kamin has also experienced Trump's kinder side, and can attest to the complex (to say the least) personality of the business man both before and after his profoundly strange pivot onto the national political stage.

We invited Kamin on the podcast to discuss his relationship with the developer-candidate, how it's impacted his role as a critic, and how the 2016 campaign has invoked issues related to the built environment (or not).

Listen to episode 86 of Archinect Session...

Blair Kamin's tempestuous relationship with Donald Trump

2016-10-07T17:38:00-04:00

Over the years, Trump has courted me, comforted me, criticized me and sent me a handful of sometimes-fawning letters and notes. I saved the correspondence. Wouldn't you? [...] And the missives are telling. Combined with other things he's said and written, they show that Candidate Trump isn't all that different from Developer Trump. He remains a master media manipulator who can be charming, mercurial and vengeful. Only now he wants to be the most powerful man on earth.

In this relatively personal piece for the Tribune, architecture critic Blair Kamin recounts his tumultuous personal and professional relationship with Trump over 10+ years, talking (as developers and architecture critics do) about buildings.

Kamin explains that there were times when Trump was supportive (regarding a health issue), and praising of his criticism. But whenever the criticism didn't go Trump's way, he bucked at Kamin. Their back-and-forth frothed to a head in 2009, over Kamin's criticism of Trump's condo and hotel tower in Chicago—before it was emblazoned with the "TRUMP" sign:

"It's a good building," I said, praising the tower's glistening exterior but faulting its uninspired spire and riverfront bulk.

There was a pause.

"Good?" Trump said, sounding shocked. He had "sucked up" to me for all these years, he said, "and all I get is good?"

When Kamin did criticize the TRUMP signage in 2014, Trump called Kamin "dopey" and "a lightweight". Trump lumps Goldberger and Kamin to...

Blair Kamin opens up the "Gates of Harvard Yard"

2016-05-03T18:23:00-04:00

In an age that celebrates transparency and openness, it's fashionable to disparage gates. They have become symbols of elitism and exclusion, or just plain ugly instruments of control. Cue the gated subdivision. But the 25 gates that rim the perimeter of Harvard Yard tell a different story: Gates are expressions of beginning, of belonging, of entry into something larger than oneself.

Blair Kamin, the Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic for the Chicago Tribune, has a new book out today, The Gates of Harvard Yard. Here, Kamin presents why the illustrious university's gate designs are worth investigating in an exclusive intro for Archinect, followed by an excerpted piece from the book.

But the 25 gates that rim the perimeter of Harvard Yard tell a different story: Gates are expressions of beginning, of belonging, of entry into something larger than oneself. In delineating space, they mark crucial transitions—between ignorance and wisdom, captivity and freedom, life and death. Not for nothing does this oft-quoted inscription appear on one of the gates that lead into the Yard: “Enter to Grow in Wisdom.”

For the new book “Gates of Harvard Yard,” published b...

Chicago's Marina City designated official landmark status — it's about time!

2016-02-12T15:22:00-05:00

...it's tempting to turn cartwheels over the Chicago City Council's vote to grant permanent landmark status to Marina City, the city within a city best known for its iconic corncob-shaped towers. Marina City was a landmark building that lacked official landmark status and was therefore vulnerable — if not to demolition, then to insensitive additions that chipped away at the sculpted beauty of its curving concrete.

Since the process began last July, Chicago City Council unanimously voted 48-0 (with the absence of two aldermen) to designate Bertrand Goldberg's midcentury icon as a historic city landmark as of Wednesday, according to Loop North News.

"Ald. Brendan Reilly, 42nd, deserves credit for championing the protection of Marina City..." Blair Kamin writes in the Chicago Tribune. "Yet it can't be forgotten that Reilly in 2012 supported the demolition of the Goldberg-designed Prentice Women's Hospital, a building that lacked Marina City's picture-postcard appeal but was nonetheless worth saving because of its boldly engineered concrete shell structure and humanistic interior. In a sense, Prentice died so that Marina could live."

Previous news on this topic:

Architecture in the age of photoshop

2015-12-07T14:00:00-05:00

Architectural photography is supposed to be different from the airbrushed images of nude women that are about to disappear from the centerfold of Playboy magazine. But what if an edited photograph of a building doesn't just crop out visual clutter like street lights but alters the contours of the building itself? What should we think about an architectural award that was bestowed on the basis of such a doctored image?

In his column, Kamin scrutinizes the recent awarding of an honor award to El Centro, a building designed by Juan Moreno, by the Chicago branch of the AIA. Apparently, the architects provided the jurors with a photoshopped image of the building, notably erasing the clunky air circulation machines that crowd its roof and disturb its silhouette. With its regional awards, the AIA, unlike the Pritzker and other awards, does not mandate in situ inspection by jurors – or at least, up to now.

Before Donald Trump's beef with Blair Kamin, he tried to sue the Chicago Tribune over a drawing

2015-08-24T17:29:00-04:00

You may recall an entertaining Twitter spat that broke out between ... Donald Trump and Pulitzer-winning Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin. [...] Kamin got off easy compared to his predecessor, the late Paul Gapp, who was also a Pulitzer-winning architecture critic for the Chicago Tribune. [...] But [Gapp's] achievements were overshadowed by his run-in with The Donald: a $500 million lawsuit over one column, about Trump’s plan to build the tallest building in America in Manhattan.

More news from Trump and the Windy City:

Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic Blair Kamin on why his profession isn't dead

2015-07-21T13:06:00-04:00

Clearly, the days of the critic’s hegemony are done. [...] Yet as I know from years of blogging and tweeting, there is often wisdom in the crowd. The people who live in a neighborhood or work in a building often know more about it than the lazy critic who makes only a cursory inspection. My take on all this is that architecture criticism is not dead ... They fail to recognize that the circumstances of our time offer promise as well as peril.

In a speech delivered this past spring at Chicago's Society of Architectural Historians, Blair Kamin, architecture critic for the Chicago Tribune, addressed the nature of architecture criticism in today's media landscape. The talk came after Kamin's contentious Twitter exchange with "comb-over vulgarian" (Kamin's words) and now Presidential contender, Donald Trump, prompting a discussion of the critic's influence when their subjects (or anyone) can launch rebukes on social media.

Nieman Reports has collected select excerpts from his talk, covering not only Kamin's approach and ideology towards architecture criticism, but why calling it "dead" is short-sighted. Here, Kamin outlines the five core questions he asks himself when assessing a structure:

"First, quality: Does the design elevate prosaic materials to visual poetry, as does the extraordinary brickwork of Henry Hobson Richardson’s Sever Hall at Harvard? Or, like Peter Eisenman’s Aronoff Center for Design and Art at the Universit...

Blair Kamin not impressed by Chicago's latest housing developments

2015-04-15T15:28:00-04:00

This is a tale of two new West Loop high-rises and what they say about Chicago's apartment building boom, which has restored construction cranes to the skyline but has yet to give us architecture with a capital "A." The buildings — the underwhelming Arkadia Tower in Greektown and the better-than-average JeffJack Apartments west of Union Station — are the latest products of the construction surge [...].

Different city, similar lament: Jeff Sheppard calls downtown Denver's new housing developments "meaningless, uninspiring". Is bland the new dogma?

Old Guy Fight! Tribune’s Blair Kamin vs. Donald Trump

2014-11-20T17:14:00-05:00

Watching two grown men in a social media hissy fit over a building sign is actually a lot more amusing than one might think. In this corner, Donald Trump, rich guy, who, in the view of one esteemed newspaper critic, has defiled our fine city by slapping his name on the side of his silvery, shiny building. In the other corner, Blair Kamin, decorated architecture critic for the Chicago Tribune and defender of building aesthetics.

Chicago plans architectural biennial for 2015

2014-06-24T11:58:00-04:00

The upstart exhibition, which Mayor Rahm Emanuel plans to announce Tuesday, will be called the Chicago Architecture Biennial, a nod to the prestigious Venice Biennale, which just opened its 14th international architecture exhibition. Chicago is billing its biennial as North America's biggest survey of international contemporary architecture, but the event faces a crowded field.

Why China is turning to Chicago for advice on its new skyscrapers

2014-04-01T19:30:00-04:00

Architecture critic for the Chicago Tribune, Blair Kamin, writes about China's building boom in his story, "Designed in Chicago, made in China." [...] "Chinese developers lack the expertise to do great skyscrapers," he says. "During the Cultural Revolution their architectural profession was decimated. It really became more about purely engineering. So if you're a Chinese developer, you go to Chicago."

Also read Blair Kamin's recent three-part series for the Chicago Tribune about China's building boom, "Designed in Chicago, Made in China."