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Chicago Architecture: 1885 to Today
Edited by Edward Keegan
(Universe Publishing, 2008) .
Chicago has long been recognized as one of the world's most important architectural laboratories. The small volume, Chicago Architecture, 1885 to Today by Edward Keegan, in Association with the Chicago Architecture Foundation (Universe Publishing, 2008), offers a fast-paced romp down memory lane and into the present when the city is still offering innovative designs through such luminaries as Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas and Tadao Ando, as well as leading the way in green solutions to improve its environment and beyond. In the introduction, Keegan, an architect and architectural critic, says that many architects and builders recognized an opportunity to leave their mark in Chicago after the Great Fire of 1871 had destroyed many of its buildings. That milestone was followed by the 1993 World's Columbian Exposition, which led to more architectural innovations, and then the arrival of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in 1938. The book offers 42 examples of the city's best building legacies, from H.H. Richardson's circa 1885-87 Glessner House on Prairie Avenue where the city's elite once lived to Frank Gehry's Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park, a new lakefront gathering spot.
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Jean Michel Frank
by Pierre-Emmanuel Martin-Vivier
(Rizzoli, 2008).
Jean-Michel Frank is described in the book, Jean-Michel Frank: The Strange and Subtle Luxury of the Parisian Haute-Monde in the Art Deco Period by Pierre-Emmanuel Martin-Vivier (Rizzoli, 2008), as the most influential Parisian designer and decorator of the 1930s and ‘40s, having established his reputation for understated luxury and a perfect foil for art when he designed the home of the Vicomte Charles de Noailles, a patron of major Parisian painters. Frank, a cousin of Anne Frank, also designed stage sets. Among the homes he decorated was that belonging to Italian born, French fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli, which he transformed with wide divans, white wool rug and square tables on tapered legs. The owner explained, "...it was unexpected and new, which lent considerable charm." Frank also designed a sitting room in New York, circa 1939, for another art patron, Nelson Rockefeller, with elegantly simple and unadorned pale wood walls, fireplaces with streamlined mantels of streaked black marble, a large rug wit floral motifs and furniture arranged without any attempt at traditional and expected symmetry. The book, filled with photographs of rooms and furnishings, showcases why he was such an important design influence. Sadly, he died in 1941, having thrown himself from a Manhattan building.
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