An expansive take on American Art Deco that explores Chicago's pivotal role in developing the architecture, graphic design, and product design that came to define middle-class style in the twentieth century Frank Lloyd Wright’s lost Midway Gardens, the iconic Sunbeam Mixmaster, and Marshall Field’s famed window displays: despite the differences in scale and medium, each belongs to the broad current of an Art Deco style that developed in Chicago in the first half of the twentieth century. This ambitious overview of the city’s architectural, product, industrial, and graphic design between 1910 and 1950 offers a fresh perspective on a style that would come to represent the dominant mode of modernism for the American middle class. Lavishly illustrated with 325 images, the book narrates Art Deco’s evolution in 101 key works, carefully curated and chronologically organized to tell the story of not just a style but a set of sensibilities. Critical essays from leading figures in the field discuss the ways in which Art Deco created an entire visual universe that extended to architecture, advertising, household objects, clothing, and even food design. Through this comprehensive approach to one of the 20th century’s most pervasive modes of expression in America, Art Deco Chicago provides an essential overview of both this influential style and the metropolis that came to embody it.

Arnold Schwartzman's stunning photographs of the finest examples of Art Deco from all over the world are collected here as a celebration of one of the world's most popular decorative styles. Art deco is the 20th century's most glamorous architectural style, and the one that shaped popular ideas of modern luxury. With over 200 photographs, this is a visual celebration of this very popular style. Unlike most other books on the subject that tend to be regionally specific, this book highlights Art Deco buildings from all over the world, from Australia to South America, with an emphasis on London, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Miami, and Paris. Art Deco features much careful and exacting detail, and of special interest in this book are photos that zoom in on murals, mosaics, flooring, ironwork, and other ornamental flourishes. Art Deco began in 1925 and quickly swept the globe becoming the style epitomizing Jazz Age glamor and sophistication. It drew from a variety of influences including ancient Egyptian, Moorish, and Mayan motifs but also modernist movements like Cubism, Fauvism, and De Stijl. Its influence was felt everywhere, from the skylines of New York to Shanghai, and it gained prominence not only with architects and designers but enjoyed a passionate following among the public as well.

The true story of a German-Jewish love that overcame the burdens of the past. Finalist for the 2017 Book of the Year Award by the Chicago Writers Association “A book that is hard to put down.” —Jerusalem Post “This book confirms Annette Gendler as an indispensable Jewish voice for our time." —Yossi Klein Halevi, author of Like Dreamers "The ghosts of the past haunt a woman’s search for herself in this thoughtful, poignant memoir about the transformative power of love and faith.” —Hillary Jordan, author of Mudbound, now a Netflix movie “An exquisitely written conversion story which expounds upon personal and collective identity.” —Washington Independent Review of Books “A compelling, gracefully written memoir about the impact of the past on the present.” —Michael Steinberg, author of Still Pitching History was repeating itself when Annette fell in love with Harry, a Jewish man, the son of Holocaust survivors, in Germany in 1985. Her Great-Aunt Resi had been married to a Jew in Czechoslovakia before World War II―a marriage that, while happy, put the entire family in mortal danger once the Nazis took over their hometown in 1938. Annette and Harry’s love, meanwhile, was the ultimate nightmare for Harry’s family. Not only was their son considering marrying a non-Jew, but a German. Weighed down by the burdens of their family histories, Annette and Harry kept their relationship secret for three years, until they could forge a path into the future and create a new life in Chicago. Annette found a spiritual home in Judaism―a choice that paved the way toward acceptance by Harry’s family, and redemption for some of the wounds of her own family’s past.

Southern Exposure is the definitive guide to the often overlooked architectural riches of Chicago's South Side by architecture expert and former Chicago Sun-Times architecture writer Lee Bey.

The City of Big Shoulders has always been our most quintessentially American—and world-class—architectural metropolis. In the wake of the Great Fire of 1871, a great building boom—still the largest in the history of the nation—introduced the first modern skyscrapers to the Chicago skyline and began what would become a legacy of diverse, influential, and iconoclastic contributions to the city’s built environment. Though this trend continued well into the twentieth century, sour city finances and unnecessary acts of demolishment left many previous cultural attractions abandoned and then destroyed. Lost Chicago explores the architectural and cultural history of this great American city, a city whose architectural heritage was recklessly squandered during the second half of the twentieth century. David Garrard Lowe’s crisp, lively prose and over 270 rare photographs and prints, illuminate the decades when Gustavus Swift and Philip D. Armour ruled the greatest stockyards in the world; when industrialists and entrepreneurs such as Cyrus McCormick, Potter Palmer, George Pullman, and Marshall Field made Prairie Avenue and State Street the rivals of New York City’s Fifth Avenue; and when Louis Sullivan, Daniel Burnham, and Frank Lloyd Wright were designing buildings of incomparable excellence. Here are the mansions and grand hotels, the office buildings that met technical perfection (including the first skyscraper), and the stores, trains, movie palaces, parks, and racetracks that thrilled residents and tourists alike before falling victim to the wrecking ball of progress. “Lost Chicago is more than just another coffee table gift, more than merely a history of the city’s architecture; it is a history of the whole city as a cultural creation.”—New York Times Book Review

The first guidebook devoted exclusively to New York City’s Art Deco treasures. Winner of a 2017–2018 New York City Book Award presented by the New York Society Library Of all the world’s great cities, perhaps none is so defined by its Art Deco architecture as New York. Lively and informative, New York Art Deco leads readers step-by-step past the monuments of the 1920s and ’30s that recast New York as the world’s modern metropolis. Anthony W. Robins, New York’s best-known Art Deco guide, includes an introductory essay describing the Art Deco phenomenon, followed by eleven walking tour itineraries in Manhattan—each accompanied by a map designed by legendary New York cartographer John Tauranac—and a survey of Deco sites across the four other boroughs. Also included is a photo gallery of sixteen color plates by nationally acclaimed Art Deco photographer Randy Juster. In New York Art Deco, Robins has distilled thirty years’ worth of experience into a guidebook for all to enjoy at their own pace. A native New Yorker and twenty-year veteran of the New York City Landmarks Commission, Anthony W. Robins is the author of books on Grand Central Terminal, the World Trade Center, and the art and architecture of the New York subway system. A popular leader of walking tours all over New York City, he is best known for Art Deco, and organized the city’s first regularly scheduled series of Art Deco tours, sponsored by the Art Deco Society of New York. He is the recipient of the 2017 Guiding Spirit Award from the Guides Association of New York City.

This thoroughly illustrated classic study traces the history of the world-famous Chicago school of architecture from its beginnings with the functional innovations of William Le Baron Jenney and others to their imaginative development by Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright. The Chicago School of Architecture places the Chicago school in its historical setting, showing it at once to be the culmination of an iron and concrete construction and the chief pioneer in the evolution of modern architecture. It also assesses the achievements of the school in terms of the economic, social, and cultural growth of Chicago at the turn of the century, and it shows the ultimate meaning of the Chicago work for contemporary architecture. "A major contribution [by] one of the world's master-historians of building technique."—Reyner Banham, Arts Magazine "A rich, organized record of the distinguished architecture with which Chicago lives and influences the world."—Ruth Moore, Chicago Sun-Times