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by Ellen Shubart, Docent Class of 2006

Author: Vladimir Belogolovsky

DOM Publishers, Berlin, 2022

You have the AIA Guides and all the “See Chicago” books—do you need another guide to Chicago’s architecture? Yes, you do. And it is this book. 

Sam Bowling, manager of the CAC store, says this one is his Number 1 best seller. It is a slim paperback with a deceivingly plain baby blue-and-white cover and no pictures. But inside, it gushes color – with 4-color photos of buildings, color coding for neighborhood areas, colored maps, and double-page spreads of the skyline. It easily draws you in.

Belogolovsky put this book together after writing one about New York. He subtitled that book A Critic’s Guide to 100 Iconic Buildings in New York. But  when collating Chicago’s buildings, he chose the title “Post-Modern Buildings.”  As he put it, “it would be much less convincing to the character all the (Chicago) buildings presented here as iconic. Architects in the City of Broad (sic) Shoulders do not set out to produce icons the way they do in the Big Apple. So, I selected buildings around a different theme.” And that’s how he came to Post-Modernism.

Most docents think of Post Modernism as a style that ended the 20^th century and began the 21^st,  supplanted by what we call Contemporary, a style awaiting time to give it a name. But Belogolovsky is eloquent in arguing that Post-Modernism did not die but should be used to describe today’s architecture. 

His opening essay on Post-Modernism is an sophisticated dance through the timeline of Modernism’s decline. He agrees with others to date that decline from the implosion of the Pruit-Igo public housing project in St. Louis at 3:32 p.m. on July 15, 1972. This event gave rise to Post-Modernism and its first product in Chicago—Stanley Tigerman’s 1978 Illinois Regional Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped (now owned by St. Ignatius College Prep) on Roosevelt Road. He traces Chicago’s Post-Modernism from the formation of the Chicago Seven to today’s architects. 

Post-Modernism is defined as returning to, “the most basic elements of architectural grammar, namely the classical language of architecture, by loosely relying on historical and pop-cultural quotations with a touch of irony.” Its emphasis would be in reinstating ornamentation, three-dimensionality, monumentality, and playfulness. That has not disappeared. 

In addition to the descriptions of the buildings, Belogolovsky includes an excellent history of Chicago’s architects and a collection of interviews with Stanley Tigerman, Helmut Jahn, Adrian Smith, Ralph Johnson, John Ronan, and Jeanne Gang, the cream of today’s crop and responsible for many of the buildings included. There are maps throughout and QR codes embedded for even more information.

The AIA Guide is an encyclopedia of Chicago architecture and won’t be displaced. This is a soupçon of more recent architecture, a companion to the older guides. And one that makes me want to call all the new buildings Post-Modern. Read this, and then we can argue over terms.   

Vladimir Belogolovsky (b. 1970, Odesa, Ukraine) is an American curator and New York-based critic and architect. After practicing for 12 years, he founded the New York-based Curatorial Project, a non-profit that focuses on curating and designing architectural exhibitions worldwide. He writes for myriad international publications and has authored 15 books, many focused exclusively on architecture, including Architecture Guide New York (2019), Conversations with Architects (2015), and Soviet Modernism 1955-85 (2010).

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