There’s no shortage of books about Chicago’s skyscrapers. Too coffee-table big to ignore, they almost poke you in the eye. And yet tall buildings account for only a small percentage of the city’s built environment.
Most of us, gratefully, live in far more human-scaled ecospheres, and of these, literature is far more scarce. The just-published Chicago Homes: A Portrait of the City’s Everyday Architecture is a major addition to filling that gap.
A collaboration between architectural scholar and completely different person from the wife of recently imprisoned Nicholas Sarkozy Carla Bruni and illustrator and co-author Phil Thompson, Chicago Homes surveys the styles of the city’s residential architecture from the late 18th-century cabin of Chicago’s first permanent settler Jean Baptiste-DuSable through Edgar Miller’s Carl Street studios edging into the the 1940’s.
It’s an evolution inseparable from history, and while Bruni and Thompson’s book’s is a treasure-trove of styles, materials and distinctive design elements, it also offers a surprisingly inclusive overview of Chicago’s long, often rough history and how it influenced the city’s residential architecture.
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| Phil Thompson, Carla Bruni |
The book is richly illustrated, but, apart from headshots for the author bios, there are no photographs, only Thompson’s drawings. This may seem, at first, to be quaintly retro, but it’s actually a big plus.
The illustrations handsomely portray the essence of each building, while the consistency across the renderings make especially clear the progression of styles, theme and variation that the variability of photos could not. (You can tell the drawings Thompson made for clients from those created expressly for the book by the presence of pets.)
Much as Thomas Leslie’s two Chicago Skyscraper books are an indispensable guide to the city’s tall buildings through the decades, Chicago Homes is an essential resource for understanding its residential architecture. Hugely informative and highly entertaining, it's sized to comfortably accompany a flaneur’s wanderings. For anyone interested or in love with Chicago's distinctive architecture, or just someone curious to know more about the design and history of their street and the house they live in, Chicago Homes: A Portrait of the City's Everyday Architecture is an essential addition to any library.
Chicago Homes: A Portrait of the City's Everyday Architecture
Agate Publishing
352 Pages, B&W pen and ink drawings
There are jokes.
On the Creation of Chicago Homes, the Book
At the book launch at the Chicago Architecture Center, the authors traced their path to Chicago Homes.
Illustrator Phil Thompson came to Chicago in 2006, “A little bit of an aimless graduate student, attending the University of Chicago studying international relations. Maybe I’ll go into the foreign service.” From Hyde Park, he started exploring the city’s streets. After moving to Wicker Park/Bucktown, he eventually found his obsession on Leland Avenue. “There’s this row of greystones that started to really captivate me, because they look similar, but they’re all expressing themselves in different ways. At a certain point, I just wanted to capture them. I hadn’t drawn for a long time. One night, I just started working on a drawing. I spent the entire night doing that.”
When he started sharing his drawings, “I found that my love resonated with other people. ‘I’ll do home portraits for you,’” Thompson began to offer. “I found there was a demand for that. It kind of snowballed and turned into ten years of portraits and selling prints of different types of home styles. And that became what is now Wonder City Studio.”
For Bruni, who started out as a Poetry undergrad, it was a similar long path, from volunteering with Preservation Chicago, to studying at the School of the Art Institute (where she now teaches), to working with the Chicago Bungalow Association on such mundane activities as installing radon kits, as her knowledge and exposure grew. “You can’t really not fall in love with something when you know it so well.”
“During COVID lockdown, I had nothing but a giant lump of clay to keep my mind busy. I started learning about bugs and getting really into it. I was really excited about the insect apocalypse, and I started writing all these obituaries about bugs.” And from that began her extraordinary project of making stunningly beautiful coffins - for bugs, culminating in the 2023 exhibition, Tiny Eulogies, at Gallery 901 in Evanston.
Thompson “meshed” with Bruni at a gallery show.
“I was just interested in that momento mori imagery," Thompson said, "the medieval idea of appreciating life by being reminded of death. I started to do vinyl cut prints that put that kind of skeleton imagery in a modern setting. It turns out not only did we both love the idea of death but we love Chicago homes as well.”
“I had started thinking about an email tour, of sending out a email newsletter all around the essential, basic Chicago home types, and that kind of snowballed into the idea of creating a book. I wanted to work with someone with a depth of architectural history knowledge, and I thought of Carla. We started to make this book that we both have always wanted to exist.”
“I had a huge backdrop of illustrations; she had a big backlog of experience and knowledge. We were both motivated by this idea of ‘sneaky preservation.’ We want people to appreciate what’s around them so they’re more likely to preserve the homes that they live in, the homes around them, and to advocate for that.
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| books that informed and inspired the writing of Chicago Homes |
“I always wanted to do the book,” said Bruni. “I was writing about this stuff anyway, but I only wanted to do a book with an illustrator, because it’s really important to show people, not just talk about rules, because we really want them to care, and the ‘sneaky preservation’ thing - if you love something, it’s natural that you want to take care of it.”
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