Issue 12
ISSUE
STORY TYPE
AUTHOR
13
BOOK REVIEW
November 25, 2024
A Mind-Body Experience of Architecture, Delivered in a Photo
by Marianela D’Aprile
13
PERSPECTIVE
November 18, 2024
Seeing Chinatown as a Readymade
by Philip Poon
13
PEOPLE
November 11, 2024
The Place of the Handmade Artifact in a Tech-Obsessed Era
by Anne Quito
13
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
November 4, 2024
How a Storied Printmaker Advances the Practice of Architecture
by Diana Budds
12
PEOPLE
October 21, 2024
Sounding Out a Better Way to Build
by Jesse Dorris
12
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
October 7, 2024
What It Means—and What It’s Worth—to Be “Light”
by Julie Lasky
12
PERSPECTIVE
September 23, 2024
Redefining “Iconic” Architecture and Ideals
by Sophie Lovell
12
PERSPECTIVE
September 9, 2024
Surrendering to What Is
by Marianne Krogh
11
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
August 26, 2024
Sometimes, Democratic Design Doesn’t “Look” Like Anything
by Zach Mortice
11
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
August 19, 2024
What Does Your Home Say About You?
by Shane Reiner-Roth
11
BOOK REVIEW
August 12, 2024
Is Building Better Cities a Dream Within Reach?
by Michael Webb
11
PEOPLE
August 5, 2024
The Value of Unbuilt Buildings
by George Kafka
11
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
July 29, 2024
Future-Proofing a Home Where Water Is a Focus and a Thread
by Alexandra Lange
11
BOOK REVIEW
July 22, 2024
Modernist Town, U.S.A.
by Ian Volner
11
PEOPLE
July 15, 2024
Buildings That Grow from a Place
by Anthony Paletta
10
URBANISM
June 24, 2024
What We Lose When a Historic Building Is Demolished
by Owen Hatherley
10
PERSPECTIVE
June 17, 2024
We Need More Than Fewer, Better Things
by Deb Chachra
10
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
June 3, 2024
An Ode to Garages
by Charlie Weak
10
PERSPECTIVE
May 28, 2024
In Search of Domestic Kintsugi
by Edwin Heathcote
10
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
May 13, 2024
The Perils of the Landscapes We Make
by Karrie Jacobs
10
PERSPECTIVE
May 6, 2024
Using Simple Tools as a Radical Act of Independence
by Jarrett Fuller
9
PERSPECTIVE
April 29, 2024
Why Can’t I Just Go Home?
by Eva Hagberg
9
PEOPLE
April 22, 2024
Why Did Our Homes Stop Evolving?
by George Kafka
9
ROUNDTABLE
April 8, 2024
Spaces Where the Body Is a Vital Force
by Tiffany Jow
9
BOOK REVIEW
April 1, 2024
Tracing the Agency of Women as Users and Experts of Architecture
by Mimi Zeiger
9
PERSPECTIVE
March 25, 2024
Are You Sitting in a Non-Place?
by Mzwakhe Ndlovu
9
ROUNDTABLE
March 11, 2024
At Home, Connecting in Place
by Marianela D’Aprile
9
PEOPLE
March 4, 2024
VALIE EXPORT’s Tactical Urbanism
by Alissa Walker
8
PERSPECTIVE
February 26, 2024
What the “Whole Earth Catalog” Taught Me About Building Utopias
by Anjulie Rao
8
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
February 19, 2024
How a Run-Down District in London Became a Model for Neighborhood Revitalization
by Ellen Peirson
8
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
February 12, 2024
In Brooklyn, Housing That Defies the Status Quo
by Gideon Fink Shapiro
8
PERSPECTIVE
February 5, 2024
That “Net-Zero” Home Is Probably Living a Lie
by Fred A. Bernstein
8
PERSPECTIVE
January 22, 2024
The Virtue of Corporate Architecture Firms
by Kate Wagner
8
PERSPECTIVE
January 16, 2024
How Infrastructure Shapes Us
by Deb Chachra
8
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
January 8, 2024
The Defiance of Desire Lines
by Jim Stephenson
7
PEOPLE
December 18, 2023
This House Is Related to You and to Your Nonhuman Relatives
by Sebastián López Cardozo
7
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
December 11, 2023
What’s the Point of the Plus Pool?
by Ian Volner
7
BOOK REVIEW
December 4, 2023
The Extraordinary Link Between Aerobics and Architecture
by Jarrett Fuller
7
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
November 27, 2023
Architecture That Promotes Healing and Fortifies Us for Action
by Kathryn O’Rourke
7
PEOPLE
November 6, 2023
How to Design for Experience
by Diana Budds
7
PEOPLE
October 30, 2023
The Meaty Objects at Marta
by Jonathan Griffin
6
OBJECTS
October 23, 2023
How Oliver Grabes Led Braun Back to Its Roots
by Marianela D’Aprile
6
URBANISM
October 16, 2023
Can Adaptive Reuse Fuel Equitable Revitalization?
by Clayton Page Aldern
6
PERSPECTIVE
October 9, 2023
What’s the Point of a Tiny Home?
by Mimi Zeiger
6
OBJECTS
October 2, 2023
A Book Where Torn-Paper Blobs Convey Big Ideas
by Julie Lasky
6
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
September 24, 2023
The Architecture of Doing Nothing
by Edwin Heathcote
6
BOOK REVIEW
September 18, 2023
What the “Liebes Look” Says About Dorothy Liebes
by Debika Ray
6
PEOPLE
September 11, 2023
Roy McMakin’s Overpowering Simplicity
by Eva Hagberg
6
OBJECTS
September 5, 2023
Minimalism’s Specific Objecthood, Interpreted by Designers of Today
by Glenn Adamson
5
ROUNDTABLE
August 28, 2023
How Joan Jonas and Eiko Otake Navigate Transition
by Siobhan Burke
5
OBJECTS
August 21, 2023
The Future-Proofing Work of Design-Brand Archivists
by Adrian Madlener
5
URBANISM
August 14, 2023
Can a Church Solve Canada’s Housing Crisis?
by Alex Bozikovic
5
PEOPLE
August 7, 2023
In Search of Healing, Helen Cammock Confronts the Past
by Jesse Dorris
5
URBANISM
July 31, 2023
What Dead Malls, Office Parks, and Big-Box Stores Can Do for Housing
by Ian Volner
5
PERSPECTIVE
July 24, 2023
A Righteous Way to Solve “Wicked” Problems
by Susan Yelavich
5
OBJECTS
July 17, 2023
Making a Mess, with a Higher Purpose
by Andrew Russeth
5
ROUNDTABLE
July 10, 2023
How to Emerge from a Starchitect’s Shadow
by Cynthia Rosenfeld
4
PEOPLE
June 26, 2023
There Is No One-Size-Fits-All in Architecture
by Marianela D’Aprile
4
PEOPLE
June 19, 2023
How Time Shapes Amin Taha’s Unconventionally Handsome Buildings
by George Kafka
4
PEOPLE
June 12, 2023
Seeing and Being Seen in JEB’s Radical Archive of Lesbian Photography
by Svetlana Kitto
4
PERSPECTIVE
June 5, 2023
In Built Environments, Planting Where It Matters Most
by Karrie Jacobs
3
PERSPECTIVE
May 30, 2023
On the Home Front, a Latine Aesthetic’s Ordinary Exuberance
by Anjulie Rao
3
PERSPECTIVE
May 21, 2023
For a Selfie (and Enlightenment), Make a Pilgrimage to Bridge No. 3
by Alexandra Lange
3
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
May 8, 2023
The Building Materials of the Future Might Be Growing in Your Backyard
by Marianna Janowicz
3
BOOK REVIEW
May 1, 2023
Moving Beyond the “Fetishisation of the Forest”
by Edwin Heathcote
2
ROUNDTABLE
April 24, 2023
Is Craft Still Synonymous with the Hand?
by Tiffany Jow
2
PEOPLE
April 17, 2023
A Historian Debunks Myths About Lacemaking, On LaceTok and IRL
by Julie Lasky
2
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
April 10, 2023
How AI Helps Architects Design, and Refine, Their Buildings
by Ian Volner
2
PEOPLE
April 3, 2023
Merging Computer and Loom, a Septuagenarian Artist Weaves Her View of the World
by Francesca Perry
1
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
March 27, 2023
Words That Impede Architecture, According to Reinier de Graaf
by Osman Can Yerebakan
1
PEOPLE
March 20, 2023
Painting With Plaster, Monica Curiel Finds a Release
by Andrew Russeth
1
PERSPECTIVE
March 13, 2023
Rules and Roles in Life, Love, and Architecture
by Eva Hagberg
1
Roundtable
March 6, 2023
A Design Movement That Pushes Beyond Architecture’s Limitations
by Tiffany Jow
0
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
February 7, 2023
To Improve the Future of Public Housing, This Architecture Firm Looks to the Past
by Ian Volner
0
OBJECTS
February 7, 2023
The Radical Potential of “Prime Objects”
by Glenn Adamson
0
PEOPLE
February 20, 2023
Xiyadie’s Queer Cosmos
by Xin Wang
0
PEOPLE
February 13, 2023
How Michael J. Love’s Subversive Tap Dancing Steps Forward
by Jesse Dorris
0
SHOW AND TELL
February 7, 2023
Finding Healing and Transformation Through Good Black Art
by Folasade Ologundudu
0
BOOK REVIEW
February 13, 2023
How Stephen Burks “Future-Proofs” Craft
by Francesca Perry
0
ROUNDTABLE
February 27, 2023
Making Use of End Users’ Indispensable Wisdom
by Tiffany Jow
0
PEOPLE
February 7, 2023
The New Lessons Architect Steven Harris Learns from Driving Old Porsches
by Jonathan Schultz
0
PERSPECTIVE
February 7, 2023
The Day Architecture Stopped
by Kate Wagner
0
OBJECTS
February 7, 2023
The Overlooked Potential of Everyday Objects
by Adrian Madlener
0
ROUNDTABLE
February 7, 2023
A Conversation About Generalists, Velocity, and the Source of Innovation
by Tiffany Jow
0
OBJECTS
February 7, 2023
Using a Fungi-Infused Paste, Blast Studio Turns Trash Into Treasure
by Natalia Rachlin
Untapped is published by the design company Henrybuilt.
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
08.26.2024
Sometimes, Democratic Design Doesn’t “Look” Like Anything

Dwight H. Perkins designed Chicago public schools as neighborhood centers in the early 1900s. Many still serve their communities today.

Present day image of Chicago’s Carl Schurz High School, designed by Dwight H. Perkins
Chicago’s Carl Schurz High School. (Photo: Paul R. Burley)


There is a lesser-known shadow twin to Daniel Burnham’s epic 1909 Plan of Chicago, which synthesized many elements of contemporary urbanism we have come to expect from cities: comprehensive parks and highway systems, an orderly street grid, preserving the city’s waterfront as a public amenity, and coherent neighborhood-scaled civic centers. Burhamn’s plan was a top-down vision of what city life could look like, and resides in our collective memory as perhaps the American sepia-toned path to refined and humane urban planning.

However…. A 1905 plan by architect Dwight H. Perkins saw the city radically differently, but was perhaps just as influential.

His plan peered beneath the illusory façade Burnham depicted with monumental boulevards and Classical, European airs into the violent, impoverished, and desperate reality of the streets. Perkins, a Progressive-Era reformer who spent formative portions of his career working with Burnham, instead illustrated the city with data on its lived conditions. Steeped in populist zeal with compatriot Jane Addams and the settlement house movement, Perkins saw Chicago through the lens of sociology and demographics, not through its urban form. He overlaid statistics on population density, crime, disease transmission, and more onto the map. There are no images of architecture.

Perkins’s metropolitan plan reimagined the city as “a terrain for sociological investigation and political activism,” according to a 2014 article in the journal AMPS (Architecture, Media, Politics, Society) by Jennifer Gray, who may be the foremost scholar on Perkins’s wildly understudied historical legacy. He would later use architecture—schools, in particular—to facilitate this activism. Curiously, what these schools looked like hardly concerned him. But from his study of the city and his time as a child near the South Side, raised by a single mom and wading through the butchery and offal of the stockyards that he quit school to work for after eighth grade, he knew exactly what they needed to do.

Perkins described schools as “the bulwark of democratic social organization.” In 1915, he wrote in the pages of The Brickbuilder, “The school, by its relation to all of the people, regardless of the divisions of politics, religion, or wealth, is the only institution which can be made to serve as a neighborhood or social center.” This sentiment, divorced from any agenda toward formal or stylistic gesticulation, managed to generate numerous schools across the city that are still operating and beloved today. Their longevity owes little to how they look, and a lot to their flexibility and the ways they’ve been able to serve diverse populations over the years.

Black and white portrait shot of the late architect Dwight H. Perkins, in 1915.
Dwight H. Perkins, in 1915. (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)


The city Perkins confronted had been corporatized in ways that were disturbing and deleterious. It was organizing the material resources of the center of North America into an industrial maw at the southern tip of Lake Michigan that ground cheap immigrant labor into the finished goods, and thus market command, that would help claim total American hegemony in the decades ahead.

“The pains of capitalist transformation had thrown into stark relief the depths of human misery that accompanied it: unspeakable housing conditions, contaminated food and water supplies, violent social conflict, labor exploitation, abject poverty, and so on,” Gray writes in her 2011 dissertation on Perkins, a powerful exploration of the role of a designer and advocate during an era where the modern conception of the public realm was still in formation. She notes that Perkins “argued that strategically placed, small-scale interventions would ameliorate the devastating impact that unplanned growth had on the urban poor, and that those spaces would advance democratic social ideals in a city highly segregated by race, ethnicity, and wealth.”

For an architect born a few years after the Civil War, that’s wildly modern framing. As presented by Gray, Perkins was perhaps the first American architect to challenge the framework of the laissez-faire metropolis as a designer-activist.

From 1905 to 1910, Perkins was the school board–designated architect for the city’s public schools. He designed more than 40 of them during this short span, around the time Chicago hit its stride as one of the fastest growing cities in the world. Directing a staff of 250, he replicated building templates with as little change from site to site as possible. Work was organized into a sort of drafting-table mass production.

In the archive stacks of the Chicago History Museum, Perkins’s correspondence is all about fireproofing schedules and window ratios. There is a six-page letter to the president of the school board about ventilation. Perkins gave lectures not on school aesthetics, but on lighting. He was a public architect working within narrow budgets and accustomed to compromise.

But buildings have to look like something, and Perkins’s turned out pretty well. They tend toward simple, abstract geometric detail without historicist flourishes, and draw texture and richness from simple materials, mainly brick and terra-cotta. They are very much transitional architecture, built at a time when the aesthetic range of acceptable styles was at a historically wide aperture, but executed in accordance with proto-Modern Chicago School formal and material honesty. Few preen or demand attention, and a quick drive-by signals not much more than “local civic building.” In a 1909 speech to the National Education Association about the schools, Perkins told his audience that “all parts—the plan and the exterior design—should be direct, straightforward, and simple.” But, he added, there was nothing wrong with charm … “if possible.”

Close up detail shot of the top of a column at Chicago’s Carl Schurz High School.
The top of a column at Chicago’s Carl Schurz High School (Photo: Photo: Paul R. Burley)


Perkins’s Chicago schools became more utilitarian (and perhaps more Modern, to contemporary eyes) and less stylized over time, which was perhaps the result of budget fights with corrupt board of education leadership. Earlier schools featured hipped, gabled roofs supported by copper-clad brackets. Later schools are stolid prize-fighters, flat-roofed and boxy with only subtle brickwork to differentiate them from the factories their students were bound for without more comprehensive education. Perkins’s son, Lawrence Perkins, would fully embrace Modernism and go on to found mega-firm Perkins&Will, with an early specialty in education architecture. Lawrence’s buildings brought his father’s ethos into this new formal and material language, deploying midcentury cutting-edge steel-and-glass schools for the residents of the city’s most impoverished and isolated public housing developments.

Programming was how Dwight Perkins made his schools vital. Before him, the first generation of Chicago public schools were designed as a stack of undifferentiated classrooms piled around a central staircase. Desks were bolted to the floor in rows with the teacher placed behind a raised desk, drilling students with hundreds of questions per class period. As factories for memorization and recitation, “school architecture” didn’t really exist. There were so few spatial performance requirements that a typology couldn’t form.

And there was little demand. Only a tiny percentage of American public school students went to high school in 1880. But progressive child labor laws and an understanding of adolescence as a distinct period of developmental growth quickly forced a much wider population into this strangely intimate interaction with the state, generating vast demand for education infrastructure. Given the exploitation experienced by the immigrant masses that teemed into Chicago (and also their predilection for sectarian cultural boundaries, which was viewed with suspicion), reformers urged districts to see educating not just children, but the entire community, as their responsibility—and to use schools to do it.

So Perkins’s schools were designed with a broad range of classroom spaces. There were massive manual training wings (machine shops, forges, carpentry), as well as art and print-making studios, test kitchens, and gardens for the study of biology and botany. Perkins saw schools as the front lines of the struggle for public health, insisting on playgrounds for physical activity, natural light to aid eyesight, fireproofing, and more.

The next step was to “throw away the keys to the front door,” as Perkins wrote in The Brickbuilder, designing all these offerings to be accessed by the entire community. As such, he would often favor village-like plans for large schools that would allow each of these distinct functions to be locked and opened independently for the wider population. Very often, a big auditorium would be located directly across from the main entrance to make it publicly accessible; this “fulcrum on which the entire school turned” (as Gray described it in her dissertation) was to be the neighborhood’s civic heart.

These social centers are evolutions of the traditional New England town hall, translating the outdated 19th-century democratic ideal into sectarian and unruly Chicago, which was more than 77 percent foreign-born in 1900. For progressives like Perkins and Addams, omnipresent neighborhood social centers—all-purpose spaces for social services, education, and organization—were required to address the needs of atomized immigrant communities largely divorced from the power structures that could make city life bearable.

As mature finance capital attracted workers from farther-flung regions of the globe and pressed them into new labor divisions in urban centers, this social stratification calcified, and access to the broader trough of American prosperity became illusory. The relatively homogenous White Protestant Concerned Citizens League making a petition on the Towne Greene back East had a common language, heritage, and culture with the power elite that governed them, but the situation was different in the Polish or Ukrainian quarters of Chicago, to say nothing of the South Side Black Belt or Chinatown.

As such, each of these communities needed their own civic spaces in which to build intersectional solidarity and synthesize demands. These social centers were both places to advocate for and to receive cultural and class-specific concessions as well as egalitarian forums, where people of different classes and ethnicities could form the social bonds required for representative democracy.

Perkins was a reformer, not a revolutionary, but his shadow is long enough in Chicago that more radical strains of activism would come to understand the value of his schools, just as he had. In 1971, the Chicago chapter of the Black Panther Party held sickle cell anemia testing at his William Penn Elementary School on the city’s West Side. Its mascot is the panther to this day. For both the Marxist Panthers and the reformer Perkins, public health was a right to be exercised at the school house.

Black and white image of children undergoing sickle cell anemia testing at William Penn Elementary, in 1971
Sickle cell anemia testing at William Penn Elementary, in 1971. (Courtesy Chicago History Museum)


Perkins didn’t get everything right. He was too optimistic about public schools’ ability to break down the barriers to true multicultural democracy. But his example is a piercing shriek of defiance for a populace lulled to nihilist complacency by the laissez-faire metropolis’s progeny, neoliberal austerity. “I wish we could return to the optimism that someone like Perkins and the whole progressive crew had,” Gray told me, “because they believed that as citizens, they had the power to advance change and try to improve things.”

There are other ways we’ve lost Perkins’s thread on what makes enduring architecture. So much debate and animosity today around the role of the built environment centers on how buildings look. This has always been the case, but lately, culture-war grievances have reached into the architecture discourse, plucked out a privileged set of styles and aesthetics (traditional, Classical, anti-Modern), and defined them as uniquely befitting American democracy and Western values—stuff Perkins took very seriously. To Gray, and to anyone who has thought about architectural history for more than five minutes, this is ridiculous. “You cannot link one particular style of architecture to something like democracy,” she says.

Soviet despot Stalin adored a Classical cake-topper, and weird art lefties at the Bauhaus came up with Modernism, and yet a few decades later it was the face of global capital. Style and aesthetics mean different things over time and space, and context matters. Style is a product, an outcome. How buildings work and function over time, which consumed Perkins for almost all of his days, is a process: iterative, messy, and unfinished, Gray says, just like democracy itself.