A vividly illustrated collaboration between two of Chicago's most celebrated architecture critics casts a wise and unsparing eye on inequities in the built environment and attempts to rectify them. From his high-profile battles with Donald Trump to his insightful celebrations of Frank Lloyd Wright and front-page takedowns of Chicago mega-projects like Lincoln Yards, Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic Blair Kamin has long informed and delighted readers with his illuminating commentary. Kamin's newest collection, Who Is the City For?, does more than gather fifty-five of his most notable Chicago Tribune columns from the past decade: it pairs his words with striking new images by photographer and architecture critic Lee Bey, Kamin's former rival at the Chicago Sun-Times. Together, they paint a revealing portrait of Chicago that reaches beyond its glamorous downtown and dramatic buildings by renowned architects like Jeanne Gang to its culturally diverse neighborhoods, including modest structures associated with storied figures from the city's Black history, such as Emmett Till. At the book's heart is its expansive approach to a central concept in contemporary political and architectural discourse: equity. Kamin argues for a broad understanding of the term, one that prioritizes both the shared spaces of the public realm and the urgent need to rebuild Black and brown neighborhoods devastated by decades of discrimination and disinvestment. "At best," he writes in the book's introduction, "the public realm can serve as an equalizing force, a democratizing force. It can spread life's pleasures and confer dignity, irrespective of a person's race, income, creed, or gender. In doing so, the public realm can promote the social contract - the notion that we are more than our individual selves, that our common humanity is made manifest in common ground." Yet the reality in Chicago, as Who Is the City For? powerfully demonstrates, often falls painfully short of that ideal.

In an expanded and updated edition, photographer Eric Holubow captures the melancholy, haunting beauty of decaying structures across the US. Across the United States, decaying ruins of once-thriving structures lie dormant and forgotten as time and nature leave their melancholy mark. Yet through this deterioration is an undeniable and haunting beauty, which Holubow skillfully captures. In this second edition, additional photos bring new stories and stirring sights to life. Centered in the Rust Belt but spanning the entire country, this photographic journey evokes the erosion of important parts of history. From big cities to small towns, breathtaking images of over 100 sites recall the faded glory of factories, churches, theaters, prisons, and power plants. Arranged according to the functions these buildings servedworking, living, learning, healing, playing, prayingAbandoned is a memento mori for industries, communities, and empires. Through rubble and rot, broken glass and clinging ivy, long-forgotten and forsaken corners of the country emerge as reminders of the fate that theyand everything we knowwill eventually share.

Southern Exposure: The Overlooked Architecture of Chicago's South Side is the first book devoted to the South Side's rich and unfairly ignored architectural heritage. With lively, insightful text and gallery-quality color photographs by noted Chicago architecture expert Lee Bey, Southern Exposure documents the remarkable and largely unsung architecture of the South Side. The book features an array of landmarks-from a Space Age dry cleaners to a nineteenth-century lagoon that meanders down the middle of a working-class neighborhood street-that are largely absent from arts discourse, in no small part because they sit in a predominantly African American and Latino section of town that's better known as a place of disinvestment, abandonment, and violence. Inspired by Bey's 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial exhibition, Southern Exposure visits sixty sites, including lesser-known but important work by luminaries such as Jeanne Gang, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Eero Saarinen, as well as buildings by pioneering black architects such as Walter T. Bailey, John Moutoussamy, and Roger Margerum. Pushing against the popular narrative that depicts Chicago's South Side as an architectural wasteland, Bey shows beautiful and intact buildings and neighborhoods that reflect the value-and potential-of the area. Southern Exposure offers much to delight architecture aficionados and writers, native Chicagoans and guests to the city alike.