Why Architecture Matters

This work collects the best of architecture critic Blair Kamin's columns, including his acclaimed series advocating the intelligent development of Chicago's lakefront. Centred in Chicago, America's foremost architectural city, the book paints a portrait not just of soaring skyscrapers but also of vibrant immigrant neighbourhoods, troubled public housing projects, and sprawling suburbs. Using Chicago as a barometer of national design trends, the book sheds light on the state of American architecture during "the Nervous Nineties". It is a period of unparalleled affluence and underlying anxiety, of soothing retro buildings and provocative new ones that express the frenzied state of modern life. Chicago perfectly represents the decade's contradictions, rediscovering itself as a city but losing its architectural nerve. Throughout the book Kamin pursues the question of how people actually use space, and how architects and planners might better design it to enrich human experience. Architecture matters, he argues, because it simultaneously reflects and affects how we live.