Chicago Homes: A Portrait of the City’s Everyday Architecture

Architectural historian Bruni and illustrator Thompson provide a sprawling survey of the evolution of Chicago homes. Though the first home in Chicago is often attributed to Fr. Jacques Marquette, a French-Canadian Jesuit missionary who built a log cabin in 1674, the authors begin by spotlighting the Indigenous Potawatomi’s 17th-century homes constructed from “bark or woven mats of reeds.” From these beginnings through the 1940s, Bruni and Thompson survey the city’s various styles of houses, apartments, and hotels, providing detailed descriptions, exquisite pen and ink drawings, and thorough explorations of contemporaneous events that yielded each era’s distinctive aesthetics. The latter makes for the most fascinating aspect of the book, revealing how “our homes are a physical expression of our history,” as when the city’s 19th-century population explosion ushered in a glut of “cheap and easy” wooden cottages that were decimated in the Great Fire of 1871, or when the 1893 World’s Fair led to a boom in rental properties. The volume is also valuable as a resource for identifying the styles of still-standing homes, with bullet-pointed lists of features that aid in distinguishing Gothic Revival (“distinctive pointed-arch windows”) from Beaux Arts (“symmetrical facade”). A bit too dense for casual perusal, this is best suited for dedicated Chicago architecture aficionados. (Oct.)