Search results for ""Author Lee Bey""

A vividly illustrated collaboration between two of Chicago’s most celebrated architecture critics casts a wise and unsparing eye on inequities in the built environment and attempts to rectify them. From his high-profile battles with Donald Trump to his insightful celebrations of Frank Lloyd Wright and front-page takedowns of Chicago mega-projects like Lincoln Yards, Pulitzer Prize–winning architecture critic Blair Kamin has long informed and delighted readers with his illuminating commentary. Kamin’s newest collection, Who Is the City For?, does more than gather fifty-five of his most notable Chicago Tribune columns from the past decade: it pairs his words with striking new images by photographer and architecture critic Lee Bey, Kamin’s former rival at the Chicago Sun-Times. Together, they paint a revealing portrait of Chicago that reaches beyond its glamorous downtown and dramatic buildings by renowned architects like Jeanne Gang to its culturally diverse neighborhoods, including modest structures associated with storied figures from the city’s Black history, such as Emmett Till. At the book’s heart is its expansive approach to a central concept in contemporary political and architectural discourse: equity. Kamin argues for a broad understanding of the term, one that prioritizes both the shared spaces of the public realm and the urgent need to rebuild Black and brown neighborhoods devastated by decades of discrimination and disinvestment. “At best,” he writes in the book’s introduction, “the public realm can serve as an equalizing force, a democratizing force. It can spread life’s pleasures and confer dignity, irrespective of a person’s race, income, creed, or gender. In doing so, the public realm can promote the social contract — the notion that we are more than our individual selves, that our common humanity is made manifest in common ground.” Yet the reality in Chicago, as Who Is the City For? powerfully demonstrates, often falls painfully short of that ideal.

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In an expanded and updated edition, photographer Eric Holubow captures the melancholy, haunting beauty of decaying structures across the US. Across the United States, decaying ruins of once-thriving structures lie dormant and forgotten as time and nature leave their melancholy mark. Yet through this deterioration is an undeniable and haunting beauty, which Holubow skillfully captures. In this second edition, additional photos bring new stories and stirring sights to life. Centered in the Rust Belt but spanning the entire country, this photographic journey evokes the erosion of important parts of history. From big cities to small towns, breathtaking images of over 100 sites recall the faded glory of factories, churches, theaters, prisons, and power plants. Arranged according to the functions these buildings served—working, living, learning, healing, playing, praying—Abandoned is a memento mori for industries, communities, and empires. Through rubble and rot, broken glass and clinging ivy, long-forgotten and forsaken corners of the country emerge as reminders of the fate that they—and everything we know—will eventually share.

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