Blair Kamin – Page 10

The River Center at 111 N. Canal St. is former brick warehouse, now is a combination commercial and residential space, photographed on Feb,. 25, 2020.

Column: Can an Amazon warehouse deliver the architectural beauty of Chicago’s old warehouses and factories? Don’t bet on it.

February 28, 2020 at 5:42 p.m.

The next time an Amazon package arrives at your door, think of where it came from: A sprawling warehouse that's a miracle of logistics and a piece of architecture with...

Wheaton College student Jeremy Chong preaches the gospel at Millennium Park on Feb. 21, 2020, in Chicago.

Column: Millennium Park isn’t an art gallery — it’s a park. So the city should stop its attempt to restrict free speech there.

February 26, 2020 at 1:20 p.m.

Millennium Park's website calls the spectacular downtown public space "a new kind of town square." It is indeed a new kind of town square — one where aesthetic busybodies from...

Column: Is Chicago’s fear of fire ebbing? Nearly 150 years after the Great Fire, the city steps, gingerly, into innovative ‘mass timber’ construction

August 18, 2021 at 10:00 a.m.

Wood is having a moment in the world of architecture. Other cities, including Milwaukee and Minneapolis, are going all-in on an innovative type of wood whose boosters claim takes less...

The exterior of Johnson Chapel at Amherst College.

Column: How buildings tell a story: Architecture critic returns to the New England college that launched him on a journey to Chicago

February 18, 2020 at 8:17 a.m.

Today's column isn't about Chicago. It's about the college that launched me on a journey to Chicago — a storybook slice of New England, its simple redbrick buildings and white-towered...

The Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago at 230 S. LaSalle St., seen in Chicago on Jan. 8, 2020. The architecture communicates a message of financial stability.

Column: How should Trump make federal architecture great? By ignoring the ideologues who speak for classicism and modernism.

February 12, 2020 at 1:29 p.m.

Casting a critical eye at banks that resembled Roman temples, the great Chicago architect Louis Sullivan famously wrote nearly 120 years ago that their bankers should wear togas and sandals,...

Flags fly near part of the Chicago Federal Center, designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, in 2018.

Column: A plan mandating classical and traditional design for federal buildings could be heading for Trump’s desk. My advice: Rip it up.

February 12, 2020 at 8:53 a.m.

Less than six weeks into 2020, we already have a leading candidate for the year's most misguided architectural idea: A proposal, now reportedly circulating in the Trump White House, that...

An occupied section of the Lathrop Homes CHA project is shown March 15, 2013, looking south from Diversey Avenue over the Chicago River. The campus of low-rise buildings has been added to Preservation Chicago's list of the city's seven most-threatened historic places.

Column: A former North Side public housing project is beautifully remade, but at what cost?

February 7, 2020 at 10:20 a.m.

Millennials peer into glowing laptops at a coffee shop. A jogger runs across a walkway that swoops over the Chicago River and offers views of the downtown skyline. Handsome brick...

The living room at Taliesin in Spring Green, Wis., was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, and is decorated with Wright-designed furniture.

Column: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin was a community, not just an academy. That’s why many mourn the architecture school’s loss.

February 1, 2020 at 9:16 a.m.

When the news broke Tuesday that Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin architecture school would shut down after 88 years, architects and architecture buffs shuddered. Some probably even cried. Why? Because in...

The drafting room, shown in 2017, at Taliesin West in Scottsdale, Ariz., the winter home of architect Frank Lloyd Wright and the architecture school he founded.

Founded by Frank Lloyd Wright, famed Taliesin school is closing

July 30, 2020 at 11:39 a.m.

Founded by Frank Lloyd Wright during the Great Depression, the famous school of architecture that once bore his name will close at the end of June, the school announced Tuesday....

The Jin Mao Tower, Shanghai World Financial Center and Shanghai Tower in Shanghai.

Column: How coronavirus in China is troubling Chicago’s architectural firms

January 28, 2020 at 5:14 p.m.

In Wuhan, epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak that has killed more than 100 people so far, a mass of concrete and steel has been rising into the sky and soon...

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