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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. — Northwestern University
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... View full entry
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... View full entry
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... View full entry
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... View full entry
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... View full entry
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... View full entry
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
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... View full entry
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
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... View full entry
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.
— Chicago Tribune
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... View full entry
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. — Chicago Tribune
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." View full entry
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.
— Chicago Tribune
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... View full entry
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.
— Chicago Tribune
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. View full entry
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. — Blair Kamin in Common Edge
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... View full entry
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? — Chicago Tribune
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... View full entry
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.
— chicagotribune.com
"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." View full entry
