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Journal of Urban Design

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Book Reviews
Brent D. Ryan a; John McCarthy b; Samer Bagaeen c; Philip Booth d; Cliff Hague e
a
Urban Planning and Policy Program, University of Illinois at Chicago, USA
b
School of the Built Environment, Heriot-Watt University, UK,
c
Department of Geography and Environment, University of Aberdeen, UK,
d
University of Sheffield, UK,
e
Heriot-Watt University, UK,

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To cite this Article: Ryan, Brent D., McCarthy, John, Bagaeen, Samer, Booth,
Philip and Hague, Cliff (2008) 'Book Reviews', Journal of Urban Design, 13:1, 147 -
157
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Journal of Urban Design, Vol. 13. No. 1, 147–157, February 2008

Book Reviews

Chicago Architecture: Histories, Revisions, Alternatives

Charles Waldheim & Katarina Rüedi Ray (Eds)
University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2005, 488 pp, £25.50 (hbk), ISBN-10
0226870383, ISBN-13 978-0226870380; £16.00 (pbk), ISBN-10 0226870391,
ISBN-13 978-0226870397

From the architect’s viewpoint, the 20th century was extraordinarily kind to
Chicago. In 1900 the city already boasted the United States’ leading programmatic
and stylistic design innovators, a group including Daniel Burnham, Holabird
and Roche, Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright that became known later as the
first Chicago school. In the 1930s Nazi Germany reinvigorated the city’s design
climate by driving Bauhaus directors Mies van der Rohe and Laslo Moholy-Nagy
to the Windy City as refugees. This set the stage for the second Chicago school of
the post-war era, when a new generation of American Modernists, including the
hugely successful architectural firm of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill made
Chicago the American capital of Modernism.
But urbanists might feel somewhat differently about Chicago’s 20th century.
In the 19th century Chicago was America’s fastest-growing big city, but after some
early decades of inspired master planning following Burnham and Bennett’s
1909 Plan of Chicago, the city’s growth slowed, stopped and began to reverse. As
Chicago declined in concert with the rest of America’s older cities, it lost not only
its leading national place in city-shaping but much of its small-scaled, humane
urban fabric as well. Experiments in large-scale public housing construction and
neighbourhood clearance inspired by the designs of Modern architects were
disasters, exacerbating the losses of population and housing units already
occurring. By the 1970s Chicago was flat broke fiscally and urbanistically, with
even wealthy neighbourhoods such as Lincoln Park and the Gold Coast were
perceived to be at risk of sliding into decay.
What has happened since then, to the consternation of Chicago architects,
is in no small part the subject of Charles Waldheim and Katerina Rüedi Ray’s
Chicago Architecture: Histories, Revisions, Alternatives. This book, inspired by a
conference entitled ‘Chicago is History’ that took place at the University of
Illinois at Chicago in the fall of 2001, can be read as a series of lightly connected
essays on Chicago architecture, urbanism and design, each reflective of its
author’s individual expertise and interests. But this interpretation would do
this book a disservice, for Chicago Architecture is actually a sincere, if
incomplete, attempt to come to terms with the conundrum posed by the third
phase of Chicago’s design history. For after 1980 the city’s urbanism began to
recover, if slowly, as people returned to the city. However, the city’s national
leadership in architecture ebbed away to the East and West coasts, leaving
behind confusion and a sense of loss. In Chicago, it seems, architecture and
urbanism do not mix.

DOI: 10.1080/13574800701803522
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148 Book Reviews

This would not have come as a surprise to the first and second Chicago
schools—Frank Lloyd Wright openly hated cities, and Mies’s urbanism is notable
mainly for its near-absence. But the mismatch between architecture and urbanism
is a more important concern today as Chicago architects search for their place in a
city that does not seem to need much architecture at all, the ornate megaprojects of
current Mayor Richard M. Daley notwithstanding.
Despite its editors’ thinly veiled warning that, architecturally speaking at
least, “Chicago is history” (pp. xiii –xv), Chicago Architecture does not directly
confront the dilemma facing Chicago architects today. Instead, the book
reexamines the history of Chicago’s first and second schools in an attempt to
“ . . . allow new and unknown futures to be examined” (p. xv), futures that,
presumably, will include a renaissance of Chicago design.
Both the scope and size of Chicago Architecture are ambitious—the book
contains a total of 28 essays—and these in large part deliver on the editors’
promise to not only re-examine the leading lights of Chicago architecture, but to
give exposure to architects, designers and ordinary citizens who played important
but under-appreciated roles in the first and second Chicago schools. The first third
of the book is given the subtitle ‘Revisions’, and it provides new perspectives on
the work of, among others, William Le Baron Jenney (Reuben Rainey); Frank
Lloyd Wright (Sidney Robinson); and Mies van der Rohe (David Dunster and
Janet Abrams).
In the latter two-thirds of the book, subtitled ‘Alternatives’, Chicago
architects and designers such as Harry Weese (Leah Ray), Walter Netsch (Martin
Felsen and Sarah Dunn, and David Goodman), and Bertrand Goldberg (Geoffrey
Goldberg and Katarina Rüedi Ray) are given long-overdue critical treatments.
Here also, Chicago designers and citizens historically discriminated against by the
city’s male-dominated power structure, such as female architects (Susan F. King),
low-income residents (Janet Smith), African-Americans (Lee Bey), and gays
(Christopher Reed), are given some of the attention that they have so long
deserved in the city’s physical history.
While I enjoyed the diverse essays of Chicago Architecture, I was left with the
uncomfortable feeling that, architecturally speaking at least, Chicago really is
history. Only two of the essays (Christopher Reed and G. Craig Crysler) treat
events that have occurred in the last 20 years, and both of these deal more with the
city’s urban resurgence than with any renaissance in design.
The editors of Chicago Architecture are not to blame for this omission. Any
treatment of recent Chicago architecture and urbanism would have to confront
not only the regeneration of the city’s neighbourhoods with structures of
negligible design quality, but the even more disquieting fact that the city’s design
elite, most of whom profess to love cities, build even less in Chicago than did the
city-hating Frank Lloyd Wright. Today’s mismatch between architecture and
urbanism extends far beyond Chicago. New York is home to many of the world’s
most well-known architects but suffers from a development culture that is
reductivist at best. Los Angeles is home to a vibrant and active design culture,
but it is handicapped by a fragmented urban fabric shaped by and enslaved to
the automobile.
Is Chicago’s current condition really a problem? Some urban scholars
would say that architects do not need cities and never have, and others would
respond that cities have never been constructed primarily by architects. Valid as
these points may be, the state of Chicago’s current design culture is disturbing
Downloaded By: [Harvard University Grad School Design] At: 21:05 19 February 2008

Book Reviews 149

for a different reason. Twentieth-century Chicago witnessed perhaps the

largest-scale and longest-lived intersection of design and urbanism in history, a
period of over 70 years from before 1900 to after 1970 that produced many of
the world’s greatest designers and buildings. The seeming absence of this
dialogue in today’s design and planning culture is a bad sign. If the cultural
knowledge attained with great difficulty and great labour during the city’s
Golden era of design is truly lost, it will take a long time to regenerate. When
will we begin again?

Brent D. Ryan
Urban Planning and Policy Program
University of Illinois at Chicago, USA
q 2008 Brent D. Ryan

Cultural Quarters. Principles and Practice

Simon Roodhouse
Bristol, Simon Roodhouse, 2006, 149pp, £29.95, ISBN 1-84150-139-5

This book is very ambitious in its aim, namely to provide an explanation of the
principles and practices involved in considering, developing and establishing
cultural quarters, which, as the book indicates, have become fashionable in the
UK as an increasingly popular means of bringing about urban regeneration.
Overall, it has a practical orientation, and is geared towards local authority
planners and economic development staff, as well as public agencies that
support and develop the cultural and creative industries. While the overall
approach of the book is from a cultural policy perspective, there are implications
for urban planning.
The book contains 10 chapters. The first chapter explores the economic and
cultural arguments for cultural quarters, and the principles and characteristics of
such quarters. The approach focuses on the institutions, structures and processes
of culture and heritage, reflecting that in the rest of the book. Definitions of
aspects of culture are covered, including creative industries and cultural quarters
themselves, and suggested pre-requisites for cultural quarters are set out.
The second chapter goes on to consider selected case studies of cultural
quarters, mainly in northern England, comprising Sheffield’s Cultural Industries
Quarter, the Sheffield Art Gallery and Museum Trust, Wolverhampton’s Cultural
Quarter, and the Newcastle Arts Centre. The Trust model (itself a response to the
convergence of arts and heritage) is suggested to offer a number of benefits,
including a focused approach to service delivery as well as access to a range of
business development opportunities. (However, the case study of Wolverhamp-
ton would have benefited from an explanation of its origins as a Leisure and
Entertainment Quarter.) Further case studies, from an international perspective,
are presented in Chapter Three, including Vienna’s Museums Quartier, Dublin’s
Temple Bar Cultural Quarter, and the Grand Opera House, Belfast.
There is a change of approach in Chapter Four, which begins to set the context
for an attempt to apply the principles of cultural quarters to Bolton. This chapter
sets out the local political context of Bolton, including the effect of nearby
Manchester, together with the origins of the cultural quarter concept in Bolton. It is
followed by a chapter that considers the geographical, demographic and cultural