A safe, clean, on-time ride. That's all most of us expect from the Chicago Transit Authority. But why not ask for something more? Station architecture that puts zing in the journey and elevates the city around it. That's what we get at the crisply modern new Morgan "L" station on Chicago's Near West Side. — chicagotribune.com

Chicago Past collects large photos of historic Chicago. — chicagopast.tumblr.com

Platescrapers navigates itinerant fare, comestible politics, and gastro-ritual to purvey stories about social issues and exaggerated realities; each story illustrates food as a monument to galvanize the public. — SOILED

The team led by James Corner Field Operations has been selected as the winner in the international Navy Pier Redesign Competition. The Pierscape concept is part of the larger vision for Chicago's famous Navy Pier called The Centennial Vision, which seeks to make the "People’s Pier a truly iconic and world-class destination as it approaches its 100th anniversary in 2016." — bustler.net

Many of us evaluate a restaurant based on the food; after all, restaurants are about eating. But how many of us stop and think about the design--like the look of the interior, the materials used, and the color scheme--when it comes to our food experiences?
This is the question that the Chicago Architecture Foundation wants you to think about through their series Appetite for Design. — gapersblock.com

Between 2000 and when he left office last May, then-Mayor Richard M. Daley and agencies under his control approved roughly $20 million in payments to an architectural firm co-owned by his cousin’s husband.

That cousin — Theresa Mintle — now is chief of staff to Daley’s successor, Rahm Emanuel.

But city officials say Emanuel won’t be following Daley’s lead in approving new work for VOA Associates Inc., run by Mintle’s spouse, Michael Toolis. — suntimes.com

Some architects swear by Stanley Tigerman. Others, especially those who’ve been wounded by Tigerman’s biting criticisms, prefer to swear at him. In a disarmingly honest moment, the 81-year-old Chicago design maven tells a film interviewer: “There’ll be a lot of people, when I pass away, that’ll say, ‘He’s gone. Thank God!’ — featuresblogs.chicagotribune.com

Its astonishing 6,100 sq ft of outrageous opulence - including 33 stained glass windows, four fireplaces, several wood panelled walls, seven bedrooms and its very own working elevator - has allowed its residents to live in spectacular splendour for almost 120 years.

Now prospective home-owners have the chance to buy into bliss as Chicago's luxurious Isodore H Heller House goes on the market for $2.5million. — dailymail.co.uk

A Michigan native who as a boy played with Legos and wrote a fifth-grade essay titled "Why I Want to Be an Architect," Ronan wears the black-on-black palette that is a modernist uniform and goes well with his fluffy gray hair. The recognition for the Poetry Foundation headquarters is his second national Honor Award from the AIA. The first, given in 2009, was for the brightly colored Gary Comer Youth Center in the South Side's Greater Grand Crossing neighborhood. — Blair Kamin, Chicago Tribune

Chicago architect Gene Summers, the former dean of the College of Architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology and the chief designer of the muscular McCormick Place convention hall, died Monday. Summers also served as a right-hand man for Mies van der Rohe, working on such significant projects as the Seagram Building in New York. — featuresblogs.chicagotribune.com

The new Rush hospital is already a major success as a work of architecture and urban design. It reminds us that a hospital needs to be designed for two sets of clients: Those who use it and those who simply pass by. The best-designed hospitals heal scars in the cityscape as well as patients. We'll know next year if the new Rush does both. — Blair Kamin

It was, on the whole, a quiet year for architecture, the lack of widespread construction activity reflecting the lingering impact of the 2008 financial crisis. But there were still new buildings to celebrate, along with rare victories for historic preservationists and an even rarer accolade for Chicago architect Jeanne Gang. — featuresblogs.chicagotribune.com

If bookmakers put odds on architecture, they surely would have made Chicago architect Jeanne Gang one of the favorites to win the big design competition to remake the public spaces of Navy Pier. [...]

But when Navy Pier officials winnowed 11 semifinalist teams to a list of five finalists last week, Gang, surprisingly, lost out. And she wasn't the only high-profile name who didn't make the cut. — chicagotribune.com

The five teams, which include a mix of architects, urban designers, landscape and other designers, are headed by the firms AECOM, Aedas Architects, James Corner Field Operations, and the Xavier Vendrell Studio, the only team headed by a Chicagoan. The fifth team, known as !melk, includes the large firm HOK. — featuresblogs.chicagotribune.com

DeStefano Partners becoming units that, respectively, will focus on domestic, international projects — chicagotribune.com