Architecture

Open House Chicago is back, allowing you to peek inside buildings across Chicago. With more than 170 sites to choose from, Geoffrey Baer has fourteen recommendations for unique places to visit. 

The Moorish Revival building in River North was initially built for the Shriners, but has seen a circus, demolition threats, the Dalai Lama, an early MLK Day celebration, a Bloomingdale's, and more over its more than century of existence. 

If you're in search of beautiful buildings, the biggest bang for your buck is to explore Chicago-area college campuses, which have noteworthy structures within easy walking distance of each other. Geoffrey Baer highlights a few. 

In his newest special, Geoffrey Baer explores The Most Beautiful Places in Chicago, from gilded lobbies to verdant parks and eye-bending skyscrapers to glorious sacred spaces. He discusses the project, and what he loves about Chicago. 

"This is a city that does pay attention to its architecture, but often the architecture of the South Side is ignored,” says Lee Bey, the host of a new documentary exploring the architecture of the South Side.

The Welsh architect Jonathan Adams believes that the proud Welsh heritage of Frank Lloyd Wright's maternal family influenced his philosophy and architecture, a claim Adams explores in a documentary and book. Plus, he discusses Wright's ahead-of-its-time attention to nature. 

Seventy years ago, the New Yorker writer and New York City native A.J. Liebling published a series of articles about Chicago that saw the city as a "not-quite-metropolis" imbued with a "collective sense of disappointment." Was he right?

Take a look at Orchestra Hall's more than 100-year history and the prominent Chicago architects who have shaped and renovated the home of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, at a time when the New York Philharmonic's newly redesigned hall is receiving all the attention.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning former Chicago Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin has a new book out featuring photography by his one-time competitor Lee Bey, architecture critic of the Chicago Sun-Times. They discussed the book and equity in urban design and architecture.

There are more than 150 sites across Chicago and some of its suburbs taking part in Open House Chicago this year, so Geoffrey Baer shares some of his favorites to help you plan your own excursions.

In a year where two icons of Chicago's Latino community became official landmarks, explore other works by architects of Latin American descent that can be found in and around Chicago. 

The Chicago area has been a center of Muslim movements that catered to African Americans, such as the Nation of Islam, as well as a new home for Muslim immigrants from the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Africa, and other parts of the world.

As iconic signs like Dinkel's and Orange Garden's disappear from Chicago, celebrate some of Chicago's most memorable restaurants, past and present, the kind of places where the surroundings are an inextricable part of the experience. 

Brian Lee has designed one of the tallest buildings in the world as well as neighborhood-level buildings such as three libraries in Chicago. "To be able to reinforce and maybe enhance a neighborhood with a building—I think that’s a great positive goal of architecture and urban design,” he says.