Lincoln Yards plan: Bold, ambitious and not yet a good neighbor
An audible murmur rippled through the crowd Wednesday when backers of the massive Lincoln Yards project announced they want to build towers as tall as 800 feet. That would be...
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Exhibition space designed by Pritzker Prize winner Tadao Ando to open in October
A Chicago exhibition space designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Tado Ando will open to the public in October with a show that charts the influence of Le Corbusier, one of...
Evanston plan to demolish Harley Clarke mansion: Public vision or hidden agendas?
With a lack of transparency that would be stunning even in Chicago, Evanston is about to move forward with a plan that would privately fund the demolition of a publicly...
Chicago architect Wilmont Vickrey, founded firm that helped reshape Navy Pier, dies at 92
Wilmont “Vic” Vickrey, who founded and led a Chicago-based architectural firm that helped revive such landmarks as Navy Pier and designed hotels, hospitals, education buildings and theaters around the world,...
The national African-American museum still stirs the soul — and drops hints of what to expect at the Obama Presidential Center
The line to see the open casket that once held the tortured body of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old Chicagoan whose 1955 murder in Mississippi helped spark the civil rights movement,...
For July 4th, four architectural freedoms
Is there an architecturally appropriate way to celebrate the Fourth of July? You could make the pilgrimage to Philadelphia’s Independence Hall or the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Or you...
It’s great that the Uptown Theatre has a future. What kind of future will it be?
The surprising news that the long-shuttered Uptown Theatre will be renovated and reopen as a concert and live entertainment venue is a major victory for historic preservationists and a significant...
We’re only stuck with the lousy Union Station design if we fail to rethink it. Let the debate begin.
There’s nothing so wickedly amusing as watching a bad design become an architectural pinata everybody takes a swing at. That’s what’s happened since the release Monday of the deeply disappointing...
Union Station plans on the wrong track
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...
Wake up, Evanston leaders. You’ve got a treasure on your hands. Don’t demolish the Harley Clarke Mansion.
Even some of the people who want to tear down Evanston’s Harley Lyman Clarke House admit it’s a valuable piece of architecture. But they don’t seem to know just how...