building Chicago: industry, capital, politics, and construction in America’s ‘Second City’ | Tom LESLIE

            The StadsSalonsUrbains lecture series returns with an impressive line-up of speakers hailing from Europe and beyond! In this edition, experts spanning architecture, urban planning, archaeology, landscape architecture, heritage, and history delve into how our physical surroundings encapsulate the culture, values, and norms of past societies, and shape our identities and experiences. By treating the city as a repository of material, political, economic, environmental, technological, and cultural history, this lecture series uncovers the city's relationship with its landscapes, the persistence of power dynamics and social inequalities in our built heritage.
          

Lecture #4 | Tom LESLIE | building Chicago: industry, capital, politics, and construction in America’s ‘Second City’

Chicago’s location at the crossroads of water, rail, and later air transportation has always made it a place of exchange: in the late 19th century, it funneled the wealth of an agricultural hinterland the size of Western Europe through its grain elevators, riverfront piers, and—ultimately—its financial institutions. In the 20th, infrastructural and residential construction nourished its better known downtown skyscrapers with flows of labor and wealth to reshape and rebuild the city. Looking at the arc of Chicago’s building history reveals changing politics and economics that allow us to see a broader narrative of construction—as both an end result and a lever of political and financial power.

Thomas LESLIE

University of Illinois

Thomas Leslie, FAIA is a Professor in the School of Architecture at the University of Illinois, where he teaches building design, technology, and history. He has degrees from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Columbia University. Prior to teaching, he was an Associate with Norman Foster and Partners.

Leslie is the author of Louis I. Kahn: Building Art, Building Science (2005), Chicago Skyscrapers, 1871-1934 (2013), and Beauty’s Rigor: Patterns of Production in the Work of Pier Luigi Nervi (2017), and Chicago Skyscrapers, 1934-1986 (2023). He has held visiting positions at the University of Technology-Sydney, Australia, the Bauhaus-Universität in Weimar, Germany, the Università di Bologna Alma Mater Studorium, and the McCormick School of Engineering at Northwestern University.

In 2013-2014, Leslie was the Booth Family Rome Prize Fellow in Historic Preservation at the American Academy in Rome. In 2018 he was elevated to Fellowship in the American Institute of Architects for his contributions to architectural education and research, and in 2023 he was named an ACSA Distinguished Professor by the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture.

Organised and funded by Brussels Centre for Urban Studies and Brussels Academy.