A Chicago Sojourn
achicagosojourn.blogspot.com
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A tie: If you’re reading this, it probably means you live in arguably the greatest city for architecture in America. Whether it’s locals like Adam Gill working in Dubai or starchitects from elsewhere working on historically significant canvases like the IIT campus, Chicago’s given the world some of its most important buildings and gotten some in return. But you probably don’t live or work in any of them. And that’s long been a beef of mine with architectural coverage: it finds a city’s aesthetic in a handful of monumental buildings that few people will ever appreciate as anything other than passersby. Which is why I’m grateful for Robert Powers’s blog A Chicago Sojourn. He’s a fine architectural photographer with an eye for the beauty of the city’s workaday architecture: subtle variations in garage door decorative patterns, the city’s rich tradition of ersatz Sullivan terra-cotta, “Onassis modern” hospital chapels, and my favorite of his obsessions, suburban midcentury architecture. I thought I was alone in finding Berwyn apartments beautiful until I discovered Powers’s blog.
