torino esposizione re-imagined

I spent this week at the annual conference of the International Association for Shell and Spatial Structures, presenting some spinoff Nervi work in sessions on shell history and archives. The conference was in Turin, Italy a longtime favorite city for many reasons, not least of which is that it contains some of Nervi's most important work. As "Italy's Detroit," Turin not only built all sorts of industrial buildings, some of them by Nervi.

architecture-farm.com

candela at UNAM

CHSA Mexico City had many highlights, but one bucket-list item for many of us was seeing this adorable piece of concrete-shell construction on UNAM’s campus. I’ve used Felix Candela’s Cosmic Ray Pavilion to introduce students to shell principles for well over 20 years, so seeing it in person was a much-anticipated stop on our campus tour. Candela was commissioned in 1951 to design and build the pavilion to house sensitive equipment used to detect incoming cosmic rays, high-energy particles that would have been absorbed by heavy building materials.  

architecture-farm.com

CHSA-CDMX

Courtesy UNAM Returning home from a stellar few days at UNAM in Mexico City, where the Construction History Society of America held its 10th regular meeting as part of a bi-national event with the newly formed Mexican society, which announced its founding as part of our closing ceremonies. When CHSA started in 2007, we debated whether the right term was "of America" or "of the Americas," and this week was clear evidence that the boundaries between largely English-language work north of the Rio Grande and largely Spanish-speaking scholarship south of it are at once important and permeable.

architecture-farm.com

spring 2026 studio–second leiter building adaptive reuse and tower

Subah Samaeen & Michael Jozwiak How do you combine an accreditation-required Integrated Design Studio with curricular requirements for a high-rise project and a general interest among students in adaptive reuse? You Frankenstein a program together with some help from ace professionals with connections and their own ideas for recycling historic buildings into economically viable, culturally and socially relevant additions to downtown.

architecture-farm.com

The Architectural Legacy of Henry K. Holsman (conclusion)

Display Ad, General Electric Refrigerators. Chicago Daily Tribune, June 12, 1949. B9. “Ask anyone conversant with urban problems to tick off the names of private builders who are devoting their efforts to building ‘a better civic civilization’ through urban redevelopment, for example, and chances are he could do it on the fingers of one hand.  And it is a safe bet that one of the names mentioned would be that of ‘Herb’ Greenwald.”

architecture-farm.com

The Architectural Legacy of Henry K. Holsman (part 3)

Winchester-Hood Apartments I, Holsman, Holsman, Klekamp, & Taylor, 1949-51. Photograph by Stanley Jurocich, Architectural Forum, January, 1950. 81. In August, 1949, a team of seventeen building industry professionals from Great Britain toured the United States, seeking American “know-how” to help their home country rebuild after WWII.  Under the auspices of the “Anglo-American Council on Productivity,” a spinoff from the Marshall Plan, the group toured seven U.S.

architecture-farm.com

The Architectural Legacy of Henry K. Holsman (part 2)

5617 Dorchester, Hyde Park. Henry K. Holsman, 1928. Chicago Tribune, Feb. 20, 1927. B1. Holsman’s low-rise forays into the Hyde Park and South Shore neighborhoods were successful enough that he moved on to taller buildings: an eight-story building containing fourteen apartments at 5617 Dorchester (1928),[i] and a fourteen-story tower with twelve apartments, each taking up a whole floor, around the corner at 1321 E.

architecture-farm.com

The Architectural Legacy of Henry K. Holsman (part 1)

Henry K. Holsman (1866-1961). Quick—name a Chicago architect in the center of a Venn diagram containing: Mies van der Rohe, A defunct automobile company, The 1933 Century of Progress Exposition, Michelle Obama, and The shortest (perhaps?) federal prison term on record. As you can tell, this is quite a story. Henry Holsman was born in 1866 in Dale, Iowa (pop.

architecture-farm.com

concrete patent battles

Under the unlikely headline "Mushroom Infringement Suits," the trade journal Cement Age published an article by C.A.P. Turner in May, 1911, announcing that he had brought suit against the Deere and Webber Company for building a bootleg version of his mushroom slab system in their new building (still standing) on Washington Avenue in downtown Minneapolis. "It is the intention of Mr.

architecture-farm.com

“Flat” Slabs

Part of our conversations about the recent "Modern Concrete Skyscraper" show at the Skyscraper Museum involved the development of flat-slab high-rise structures, which became the standard for residential construction in Chicago (and elsewhere) beginning in the 1920s. The evolution and development of the flat slab as a technique has a long and fairly tortured history, much of which involves Chicago engineers and builders, but one aspect has been particularly interesting to me.

architecture-farm.com

Immaculate Grid: Baseball

Put your baseball knowledge to the test! Immaculate Grid is a daily trivia game powered by Sports Reference. Come back for a new MLB grid challenge every day!

sports-reference.com

lincoln bathroom

As always, happy to weigh in on the latest political news. Yesterday saw extensive coverage of the remodeling of the “Lincoln bathroom” in a central Washington, D.C., residence, along w…

architecturefarm.wordpress.com

Bookshop: Buy books online. Support local bookstores.

An online bookstore that financially supports local independent bookstores and gives back to the book community.

bookshop.org

chicago’s first international airport

A contestant in Chicago's first official International Aviation Meet, August, 1911. With NASCAR racing in Grant Park earlier this summer and Chicago's annual Air + Water Show warming up over the lake, this seems an appropriate time to point out that Chicago has a long history of racing and aviation in its otherwise pastoral 'front yard.' My current research project is a history of Chicago's airports.

architecturefarm.wordpress.com

Is This 19th-Century Factory the World’s First Skyscraper?

nytimes.com

Decades ago, concrete overtook steel as the predominant structural material for towers worldwide—the Skyscraper Museum’s new exhibition examines why and how

Concrete is all around us, and we haven’t quite wrapped our heads around it. Understanding its history more clearly, the Skyscraper Museum’s new exhibition in Manhattan implies, just might help us emp...

archpaper.com

century and consumers–final review

Parth Solanki and Siddharth Shah (UIUC), with Alice Wimbe (SAIC) We finished up a challenging but exciting studio project this week with final reviews at the Chicago Architecture Center–many …

architecturefarm.wordpress.com

“Concrete City” Part 3 (of 3)

As part of our research for the Skyscraper Museum’s Modern Concrete Skyscraper exhibition, Carol Willis and I worked to understand how and why Chicago became the acknowledged center of high-strength and high-rise concrete design for much of the last half of the 20th century. What follows has relied on perspectives and input from conversations and virtual lectures held with, among others, Bill Baker, Paul James, Kim Clawson, Ken DeMuth, Geoffrey Goldberg, Matthys Levy, Joseph Colaco, and, especially, the late Charlie Thornton.

architecturefarm.wordpress.com

“Concrete City” Part 2 (of 3)

As part of our research for the Skyscraper Museum’s Modern Concrete Skyscraper exhibition, Carol Willis and I worked to understand how and why Chicago became the acknowledged center of high-strength and high-rise concrete design for much of the last half of the 20th century. What follows has relied on perspectives and input from conversations and virtual lectures held with, among others, Bill Baker, Paul James, Kim Clawson, Ken DeMuth, Geoffrey Goldberg, Matthys Levy, Joseph Colaco, and, especially, the late Charlie Thornton.

architecturefarm.wordpress.com

“Concrete City” Part 1 (of 3)

As part of our research for the Skyscraper Museum's Modern Concrete Skyscraper exhibition, Carol Willis and I worked to understand how and why Chicago became the acknowledged center of high-strength and high-rise concrete design for much of the last half of the 20th century. What follows has relied on perspectives and input from conversations and virtual lectures held with, among others, Bill Baker, Paul James, Kim Clawson, Ken DeMuth, Geoffrey Goldberg, Matthys Levy, Joseph Colaco, and, especially, the late Charlie Thornton.

architecturefarm.wordpress.com

“the modern concrete skyscraper” at the skyscraper museum

University Towers, NYC. I.M. Pei. 1966-1967. JSTOR Happy to announce that after a couple of years of great conversations, deep dives into obscure 1920s issues of Cement Age, and ace model-making by a student team here, The Modern Concrete Skyscraper is opening this week at the Skyscraper Museum in New York. Carol Willis, the Museum's Director and Founder, approached me about helping to curate an exhibition that would be a 'gentle corrective' to the idea that the skyscraper's evolution was primarily a steel story.

architecturefarm.wordpress.com