Inland Architecture: Subterranean Essays on Moral Order and Formal Order in Chicago

Inland Architecture is in part an effort to gather and preserve a set of essays representing one portion of Chicago’s architectural discourse from the early-1980s to the early-1990s, but is also guided by the thought that the cultural and architectural issues raised in these essays continue to be germane to Chicago, and perhaps to a wider audience as well. In a fairly straightforward way, the essays that follow are about urban baseball parks and libraries and museums and housing; about architectural education and professional practice; and about architectural criticism and architectural theory.  But there are recurring themes other than "Chicago" that tie these essays together, among them that architecture is properly understood as an aesthetically, programmatically, and symbolically complex discipline; that architecture is best thought about in relationship to cities; that cities are best thought about in terms of ideas about the good life for human beings; and that the good life for human beings entails individual freedom, communal belonging, aesthetic and moral sensibility, a certain playfulness, and a transcendent dimension.