It’s a good time to be in construction. The sector is booming, with some 250,000 housing units going up each year. The non-residential segment is just as strong, with as least a dozen new hotels, hospitals and universities in the works. If you think the builders are smiling, the makers of building systems and materials are even happier.
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While there are hopeful signs of new modernism around the city, there also are some flops
If you had asked most architects 25 years ago whether modern architecture could make a good city, the answer would have been a rousing “no.” Wounded by spiritless steel-and-glass boxes and the social tumult at notorious public housing projects such as Cabrini-Green, the dominant style of the 20th Century was in full retreat, even in Chicago, the nation’s pre-eminent stronghold of steel and glass.
Today, however, modernism is back, powered not only by the shifting winds of architectural fashion but also by things that have precious little to do with high design, including the drop-dead views — and higher prices — that floor-to-ceiling glass makes possible. Yet this revival, it turns out, is far from triumphal. (more…)
There is something refreshing about a man who dusts only when people are coming over, doesn’t own a vacuum cleaner and likes some rusticity between his vintage sofa and collection of architectural artifacts.
And yet, the nuances here: He has no store-bought couch. His is a camelback number from the 1920s, re-covered in a Ralph Lauren tweed. And his “knickknacks” are artful and thoughtful — artifacts that took him more than a decade to amass.
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