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What drew you to the arts and humanities as your life’s work?
My interest in architecture goes back to childhood visits to Chicago from our home in Urbana. I was fascinated by everything about the city, but especially its skyscrapers. I remember wanting to find out more about how they could be so tall, what made them work, and why people would build such huge structures there and not in other places. I would go home and draw skyscrapers in a graph paper notebook—all of them riffs on the John Hancock, my favorite. That interest in how things work, and how they express how they work, is still with me.
How does your creative or scholarly practice connect with the world beyond the university?
I research historic buildings and the technology that enabled them, which lets me unpack otherwise hidden narratives about how our cities got to be the way they are today. I’m grateful that there’s always been an interested audience for these stories—Chicagoans, in particular, who want to find out more about the buildings and city around them. But that knowledge can also be important when we’re making decisions about how and why to preserve old buildings. Sometimes structures are important because of their technical innovations, and I’m always glad when I can contribute knowledge to a debate over a historical structure.
What’s a project, performance, or piece of writing you’re especially excited about right now?
I’m finishing work on a history of Chicago’s airports, and it’s been a wild ride. What started as a paper about preserving some of the city’s aviation architecture has turned into a much broader look at how politics, finance, and technology all shaped O’Hare, Midway, and other airports and infrastructure projects in the city.
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Who or what has been a surprising influence or inspiration in your work?
I really believe that scholarly writing can be engaging, welcoming, and inviting to the general public, so I make it a habit to go back to writers who have been able to explain complex or obscure topics with well-crafted prose. No one has been better at this for longer than John McPhee, and I have well-worn copies of his essay collections on my office bookshelf for whenever I need a top-up.
What do you hope students (or audiences) experience or take away from your work?
I hope my students and readers all come away with a sense of how connected architecture is to culture and society at large. In my studios, I want young designers to understand that their work encompasses a continuum of care and attention, whether that’s a glazing detail or connections to the broader community. And I want readers to see how buildings—especially large ones—can be read as “fossil records” of the stakeholders that negotiated, funded, resisted, designed, and constructed them.
What role do you think the arts and humanities play in shaping community and culture today?
All of us who consider ourselves artists or humanists have the ability—and the responsibility—to hold a mirror up to society, reminding us of who we are and what we can be at our best and our worst.
Anything else you’d like to add or emphasize?
When Director Rodriguez-Suarez first talked with me about coming back to Illinois, he literally invited me “home.” On my morning walk to campus, I like to take an extra couple of minutes and detour down the Quad—it reminds me of how this place shaped me as an architect, as a thinker, and as a citizen, and how fortunate I am to be able to pay it forward.