Daniel Bluestone

An excellent book about (mostly) nineteenth-century Chicago's "look and feel"--the buildings, the churches, the parks.

And the people. Turns out you can't discuss the development of Chicago without discussing the politics and culture of the city, particularly since the two are intertwined. The book's an argument that the culture's more important than most Chicago and architectural historians seem to recognize, and occasionally the author addresses those disagreements directly. But mostly he just tells the story of how Chicago got to be Chicago.

While Bluestone discusses some specific buildings in detail--the Chamber of Commerce comes to mind, and a couple iterations of the City/County building--his main interest is more general than that. He mentions the skyscrapers others have studied in detail, here and there, but those are just to illustrate the larger points he's making about how the city became the city.

The chapter about the parks--and the planning issues raised by the parks--is especially illuminating; wonderful work.

I gigged the book a half-point for its format. This is an academic study in the form of a coffee-table book, which makes sense for the many photographs and other graphics but makes the small-print essay difficult to read. It's difficult to hold, and I often found it difficult to keep the print in focus. A side effect is that I read it haphazardly, over several months.

Would have preferred to read it straight through. Nonetheless I'm delighted to have read it.… (altro)