Hasta La Ideas

If it wasn’t made obvious by the near-weekly links we post to the writing of the Chicago Tribune‘s resident architecture critic, Blair Kamin, we’re big fans. While it’s always great to read his column and blog for the paper, it’s all the better when he has his own material to talk about and heads out on a press tour. His new book has just been released, Terror and Wonder: Architecture in the Tumultuous Age, which looks back at the business of building since 2001, ranging from terrorist attacks, an engineering disaster in the wake of a hurricane, and the booms and busts in construction and real estate. We’re eager to grab a copy and dig in. In the interim, he’s an interview with Kamin from the Tribune and here’s a bit from his appearance on Marketplace earlier this week:

…there were a lot of predictions made right after 9/11 that proved untrue. The skyscraper certainly didn’t succumb to the terrorist attacks. In fact, the world went on the greatest skyscraper building boom in its history — with more skyscrapers, with more formal invention being built than in any time in human history.

The larger point here is that this building boom in large cities gave us what I call “urbanization without urbanity.” Where there was an incredible surge of building, but there was also a cityscape that wasn’t necessarily humane.

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