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Chicago is a city dedicated to the modern—from the skyscrapers that punctuate its skyline to the spirited style that inflects many of its dwellings and institutions, from the New Bauhaus to Hull-House. Despite this, the city has long been overlooked as a locus for modernism in the arts, its rich tradition of architecture, design, and education disregarded. Still the modern in Chicago continues to thrive, as new generations of artists incorporate its legacy into fresh visions for the future. Chicago Makes Modern boldly remaps twentieth-century modernism from our new-century perspective by asking an imperative question: How did the modern mind—deeply reflective, yet simultaneously directed—help to dramatically alter our perspectives on the world and make it new?

Returning the city to its rightful position at the heart of a multidimensional movement that changed the face of the twentieth century, Chicago Makes Modern applies the missions of a brilliant group of innovators to our own time. From the radical social and artistic perspectives implemented by Jane Addams, John Dewey, and Buckminster Fuller to the avant-garde designs of László Moholy-Nagy and Mies van der Rohe, the prodigious offerings of Chicago's modern minds left an indelible legacy for future generations. Staging the city as a laboratory for some of our most heralded cultural experiments, Chicago Makes Modern reimagines the modern as a space of self-realization and social progress—where individual visions triggered profound change. Featuring contributions from an acclaimed roster of contemporary artists, critics, and scholars, this book demonstrates how and why the Windy City continues to drive the modern world.

Reveals Chicago’s lost architecture and tells the remarkable stories of their creation and destruction.

As you walk or drive down the street, do you ever wonder what it might have looked like in years gone by? What buildings used to be there? How have the surroundings changed over time?

For the first time, through the skill of Ryan Chester’s drawings, readers can see buildings throughout Chicago that were demolished decades before they ever lived. Chicago Rebuilt explores architectural styles that have been popular over the last two centuries and brings them to life in an entirely new way. Included are forty-four intricate architectural drawings of the city, juxtaposed with archival photographs and materials, as well as informative essays on each building. Together with Vincent L. Michael, Chester illuminates the fascinating histories of who made these structures, why they succeeded or failed, and why each was ultimately lost. 

Enchanting and haunting, Chicago Rebuilt tells the story of a vanished city by conjuring it anew through energetic renderings from one of Chicago’s most masterful architectural and artistic talents.

With stunning photography and abundant historical details, this book is a treasure trove that will delight any fan of architecture, Chicago, or the Art Deco era.

Chicago is America’s premier city for both historic and modern architecture. Even so, many of its finest buildings remain little known to visitors and Chicagoans alike. In Chicago’s Art Deco Skyscrapers, Joseph Gustaitis showcases nearly two dozen Art Deco towers that were built during the exhilarating years of the Jazz Age, from 1927 to 1933. These skyscrapers exemplify a state of mind from the time—an optimistic, forward-looking aesthetic that has been called the “last of the total styles,” as well as the first American style that spread across the globe. In the time between the Great War and the Great Depression, cities and their architects embraced industrial modernity and the exciting new possibilities of scale. Exploring places like the Board of Trade Building, the Merchandise Mart, and the Carbide and Carbon tower, Gustaitis tells the stories of their creation, architects and developers, construction and financing, zoning and engineering, and so much more.

With stunning aerial photography by Ian McClellan, this book also includes color photos of the buildings’ features, vintage images, a travel map, and in-depth historical information. Chicago’s Art Deco Skyscrapers is both a guidebook to these remarkable structures and a history of the upbeat era that created them. 

2025 John Brinckerhoff Jackson Prize, Association of American Geographers
2025 Abbott Lowell Cummings Award
2025 John Brinckerhoff Jackson Prize, UVA Center for Cultural Landscapes
2026 Hagley Prize in Business History, Hagley Museum and Library
2025 Honorable Mention, PROSE Award, Association of American Publishers (AAP)

California’s 1849 gold rush triggered creation of the “instant city” of San Francisco as a base to exploit the rich natural resources of the American West. City of Wood examines how capitalists and workers logged the state’s vast redwood forests to create the financial capital and construction materials needed to build the regional metropolis of San Francisco. Architectural historian James Michael Buckley investigates the remote forest and its urban core as two poles of a regional “city.” This city consisted of a far-reaching network of spaces, produced as company owners and workers arrayed men and machines to extract resources and create human commodities from the region’s rich natural environment.

Combining labor, urban, industrial, and social history, City of Wood employs a variety of sources—including contemporary newspaper articles, novels, and photographs—to explore the architectural landscape of lumber, from backwoods logging camps and company towns in the woods to busy lumber docks and the homes of workers and owners in San Francisco. By imagining the redwood lumber industry as a single community spread across multiple sites—a “City of Wood”—Buckley demonstrates how capitalist resource extraction links different places along the production value chain. The result is a paradigm shift in architectural history that focuses not just on the evolution of individual building design across time, but also on economic connections that link the center and periphery across space.