Why Architecture Matters: Lessons from Chicago (Paperback)

"Why Architecture Matters" collects the best of Kamin's columns, including his acclaimed series advocating the intelligent development of Chicago's lakefront. "Activist criticism is based on the idea that architecture effects everyone and therefore should be understandable to everyone," Blair Kamin writes in "Why Architecture Matters," "Activist criticism invites readers to be more than consumers who passively accept the buildings that are handed to them. It bids them, instead, to become citizens who take a leading role in shaping their surroundings." The Pulitzer Prize-winning "Chicago Tribune" critic has taught millions of readers exactly what this approach can do in the decade he has been writing his fiery, intelligent essays on the state of contemporary architecture. Working from the palette of Chicago, America's foremost architectural city, Kamin also paints on a broad canvas, and in his work he has assessed everything from Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain to the "green skyscraper" as it is developing in Germany to the haunting U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.