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After a long slumber, architecture in Chicago is again commanding a lot of attention. The current issue of the trade journal Architectural Record is dedicated to the city's revival, with nods to Soldier Field, Millennium Park, Koolhaas and Jahn at the new IIT campus, and Ralph Johnson's Skybridge, plus an overview of rising younger architects such as Jeanne Gang, Doug Garofalo, Darryl Crosby, and Melinda Palmore. This weekend the sixth annual Great Chicago Places and Spaces offers more than 170 architectural tours. And next month the American Institute of Architects will hold its yearly convention in Chicago for the first time in over a decade.

To stay on top of the action, a good guidebook is a must, and Chicagoans
are lucky enough to have their choice of two, Chicago's Famous Buildings
and the AIA Guide to Chicago, both of which have been revised recently. How do the contenders stack up?

Chicago's Famous Buildings was first published in 1965 by the newly created Chicago Landmark Commission as a guide to the city's first 39 official landmark buildings and other notable structures. (That 20 of them have since been demolished shows how anemic the spirit of conservation still was at the time.) The fifth edition came out last fall and is more than a hundred pages longer than the original. The AIA Guide to Chicago, edited by Alice Sinkevitch, was first published in 1993-the last year the AIA held its convention here-and it's been specially revamped for the return of the conference June 12th through the 14th.

The two books are different in format. At 350 pages, CFB is more compact but covers fewer buildings-about 150 in total. The 560-page AIA Guide covers more than 1,000, most with a short paragraph and many with a picture. Dozens of the city's most significant structures get extended essays. Both books contain up-to-date information on new landmarks like Millennium Park and Erie on the Park. Both provide extensive coverage of Oak Park, but only CFB covers other suburbs.

CFB's is more democratic in spirit, including essays on such cherished, if architecturally unorthodox, landmarks such as the Loop L and the Chicago Theater. Since the book is pitched to a general audience, you'd expect the prose to be scrappy and evocative - a fun read. Instead, it's a bit of chore, dry as dust, and as impersonal as the instructions for dissecting a frog.

Why this should be is a bit of mystery. Franz Schulze is a Chicago icon, author of two lively, indispensable biographies of Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson. His co-author Kevin Harrington, professor of humanities and architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology, gave an engaging informative lecture at the Chicago Architecture Foundation at the time of CFB's publication that traced how perceptions of what qualifies as important architecture have evolved through time. One of his stories related how 1930's architectural students at the Armour Institute - now IIT - looked down their noses at the shiny white terra?cotta facing of the Wrigley Building as "a series of stacked urinals."

The original CFB was subtitled "a photographic guide," including multiple photos, and even floor plans, of significant buildings like the Rookery and Auditorium. In more recent editions, that subtitle has been dropped. Harrington notes that entries now are restricted to "a single mug shot", an approach he'd like to rethink for future revisions. Yet CFB's essays - not unlike Bob Woodward's writing - too often choke on the unweighted density of their own facts. Those in the AIA Guide beat them almost every time.

Compare the books respective essays on the Carl Schurz High School at Milwaukee Avenue and Addison. CFB tells us that the building was designed by Dwight Perkins, uses colorful materials and "interlocking forms" (twice in an essay of fewer than 150 words), and incorporates influences from "Northern Europe" (not defined.) The AIA Guide's essay, admittedly three times as long, includes most of the same details, but brings the building to life with the story of
Jane Addams's role in commissioning the structure and the way its design
represented a huge advance from the dank, prison-like schools of its time.
CFB's entry for Burnham and Root's Monadnock Building at Jackson and
Dearborn takes the time to the name all four of its sections and even to situate them geographically, but other than citing its "bold simplicity" makes no
reference to its total absence of applied ornamentation, which was revolutionary for the 1890s.

There's no question the AIA Guide can seem a bit overwhelming. "Too many buildings!" was the reaction of a Seattle architect visiting the city last month, and that's a typical first take. But for an architecture junkie, consulting the AIA Guide is like being handed to keys to the candy store. You can walk down a Loop street and find information on just about every distinctive building you pass.

AIA's prose is also lively enough to encourage sustained reading. Perry R. Duis's introduction provides a great overview of the history of Chicago and its architecture in just 20 pages, and Jack Hartray's critique of the concrete gulag that is River North is right on the mark.

CFB is divided into three sections-one for the city center, one for the neighborhoods, and one for the suburbs-and contains ten maps. The AIA Guide is divided into seven geographic sections, with 20 neighborhood subections, and 34 maps, including ones that pinpoint where the famous bodies are buried in Graceland, Rosehill, and Oak Woods cemeteries.

At $14, CFB is the economical choice: the AIA Guide costs $30. And even if it's a drag to read, each entry in CFB has its own photograph. The AIA Guide covers far more entries, but less than a third include photos
.
Or maybe you want to trade up to John Zukowsky's new Masterpieces of Chicago Architecture, hitting the shelves this month. The book is a career valedictory for Zukowsky, who's stepping down after 26 years as the Art Institute's architectural curator. Although its coffee-table bulk makes it even less practical than the AIA Guide as a portable reference, Masterpieces offers over 200 illustrations, drawn from the Institute's stash of 150,000+ items, and - contrasted to both AIA and CFB, where all the photos are in black?and?white - 100 are in color. ($65.00 list)

lynnbecker@lynnbecker.com

© Copyright 2004 Lynn Becker All rights reserved.