Upcoming Events

The Chicago Summer School focuses on the American roots of Modernism. After the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, progressive architects and patrons moved the city to the forefront of technological and aesthetic experimentation. Through expert lectures and tours, course directors Tina Strauss ad John Waters lead a survey of 19th and early 20th century architecture, design, art, landscape and preservation.

Historians that have studied the experience of modernity have often looked to periods of industrialisation and urbanisation in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many approaches and definitions of modernity co-exist, but, in general, an element of rupture – a distinctive and often conscious break with the past – has dominated. Yet ‘the past’ did not necessarily disappear with urban transformations. Both the historic environment, and civic understandings of history within that space, could be used as a way to…