I attach some images of Chicago, rather arbitrarily selected from a couple of days wandering round with the AIA Guide to Chicago in hand or back in the hotel for reference.
The Newberry Library by Henry Ives Cobb, which is only half as large as it was intended to be, so is truncated at the back:-
After the discussion about the role of ornament in architecture, I was pleased to discover that the Art Institute of Chicago displays fragments of historic ornament on the walls of its entrance staircase, including a capital from H.H. Richardson’s Marshall Field Wholesale Store (1885-6):-
A grille from the interior of Burnham and Root’s Rookery:-
Last stop was the Robie House, built by Frank Lloyd Wright for Frederick C. Robie, the assistant manager of the Excelsior Supply Company, and his wife, Lora Hieronymus Robie, and stuffed full of new technology, including multiple bathrooms, an automatic vacuum system and a three-car garage. It seemed a curious mixture of functional efficiency and ornate, highly decorated opulence, with dividing walls removed and unexpectedly low ceilings to maintain the vigorous horizontality of the overall, low-slung, Prairie School design, Frank Lloyd Wright’s last work in Chicago, immortalised in his Wasmuth Portfolio:-
We spent the afternoon wandering round the campus of the University of Chicago campus – an unexpected experience of ivy-clad Gothic given that it is known for its right-wing economics and pioneering social science research:-
We had lunch next door to the Currency Exchange Café, one of Theaster Gates’s projects in Washington Park, in what had been a secondhand bookshop. He spoke over jambalaya of his extraordinary work of art, social activism and urban regeneration, pouring the money he makes from his art back into local projects in Dorchester:-
Chicago is not an easy place to see and appreciate out of the windows of a tour bus or wandering early in the morning round its streets, looking up at the skyscrapers. So, it was a pleasure to visit an apartment in the Four Seasons building which gave us an apocalyptic view straight down Michigan Avenue:-
The comment by Oliver Domeisen on my blog about the Charnley House has made me realise the extent to which the role and function of ornament is a live topic in Schools of Architecture. Domeisen himself has taught the history of ornament at the AA and now at the Bartlett, based on Owen Jones’s The Grammar of Ornament (1856) and Louis Sullivan’s A System of Architectural Ornament (1924), as well as doing an exhibition ‘Re-sampling Ornament’ at the Swiss Architecture Museum in Basel and then at the Arkitekturmuseet in Stockholm. Of course, I was aware that ornament was creeping back into architecture, as in Caruso St. John’s new façade to the Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood and the façade of their Nottingham Art Gallery and in the work of Farshid Moussavi. But I wasn’t aware that the debate goes back to whether or not one interprets the Charnley House as an example of Louis Sullivan’s approach to ornament or as a proto-modernist composition.
The best 0f the houses on Astor Street is the James Charnley House, designed by a combination of Louis Sullivan (‘form follows function’) and Frank Lloyd Wright, who from 1887 was a draughtsman in the office of Adler and Sullivan, for Charnley, a prosperous lumberman:-
I spent the afternoon walking up Astor Street, the grander part of Chicago, where there is a wealth of individual houses in a medley of architectural styles with correspondingly eclectic detailing, beginning with two houses on Schiller Street:-
Before leaving Boston, I thought I would try and find out about my Bostonian step-grandmother, Ethel Moors, whom I never met because she died ten days after marrying my grandfather in the year of my birth (in fact, she was dead before my parents met her off the boat at Southampton). Thanks to the glories of the internet, I have been able to find out much more than I have ever known previously. That she came of an old Boston family, I knew. She married John Cabot Moors, who was a nonconformist banker and member of the Harvard Corporation. Both were liberal progressives and worshipped at Trinity Church. When they were not in Back Bay, they summered either in a house on the South Shore at Cohasset or in a farmhouse out in Heath in the Berkshires, where she encouraged fellow radicals to settle. ‘Unconventional iconoclasm and a radical devotion to social justice were the unspoken requirements’. On this day of all days, I am pleased to discover that they were vigorously internationalist and hostile to the ‘bigoted isolationism of so much of America’s political classes’.
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 
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