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Chicago Architecture North Shore Chicago: Houses of the Lakefront Suburbs, 1890 - 1940. By Stuart Cohen and Susan Benjamin. (New York: Acanthus Press, 2004. Pp. 336, illus. Cloth, $77.00).
Chicago Apartments: A Century of Lakefront Luxury. By Neil Harris. (New York: Acanthus Press, 2004. Pp. 352, illus. Cloth, $75.00).
The Charnley House: Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, and the Making Chicago's Gold Coast. Edited by Richard Longstreth. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004. Pp. xxi, 249, illus. Cloth, $55.00).
The Chicago Bungalow. Edited by Dominic Pacyga and Charles Shanabruch. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001. Pp. 261, illus. Cloth, $45.00).
Sprawl: A Compact History. By Robert Bruegmann. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005. Pp. 306, illus. Cloth, $27.50).
The American Skyscraper: Cultural Histories. Edited by Roberta Moudry. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. Xvi, 298, illus. Cloth, $75.00).
In the last few years, there have been a large number of substantial and interesting books devoted to the history of the architecture of various major cities and their environs. Some are devoted to single buildings by famous architects or large firms, others cover a location in the City or a particular suburb, some explore the range and impact of a particular building type, and some attempt to use architecture as the defining characteristic of an era. Many of these are monographs, others have essays by various experts, and an increasing number are the lasting record and analysis produced in conjunction with exhibitions at our major civic museums. The American Skyscraper fits several of these categories, being an edited book with essays by respected scholars that covers one particular architectural form, and which attempts to place the skyscraper as much in a cultural context as an historical one. Not only that, the rise of the American skyscraper helped define urban culture and had both deep and far-reaching implications for the growth of the city, the suburb, and many of the architectural forms spawned by that relationship. Thus, and with Chicago being the pre-eminent city in which many of these patterns took shape after-and because of-the Great Fire, this book suggests a form and even a forum to examine the development and growth of the urban apartment, the bungalow, suburban great houses, and urban...