The history of Chicago architecture is fascinating. The history of the history of Chicago architecture is even more fascinating. “This book grew out of an effort to understand the vast and varied man-made landscape that constitutes the Chicago metropolitan area and its hinterland.” So begins Robert Bruegmann’s study of the Chicago architectural firm of Holabird & Roche. The Architects and the City: Holabird & Roche of Chicago, 1880–1918 will, the author says, be supplemented by a second volume, covering the architects’ works in the 1920s and 1930s, when the firm became Holabird & Root. The author, a professor of architectural history at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is part of a revisionist band of interpreters of Chicago’s architectural heritage. These historians have done much to rekindle interest in relatively neglected facets of the city’s built environment, in particular the “Art Deco” or “modernistic” towers of the 1920s and 1930s, perhaps best exemplified by such Holabird & Root creations as the Palmolive Building on North Michigan Avenue.

Though never considered the pace setters or form givers that Chicagoans Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright were, Holabird and Roche have been seen as embodying the mainstream of the so-called “Chicago school of architecture” of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Chicago school, for better or worse, has an honored place in the history of modernist architecture, a place accorded by giants no less than Sir Nikolaus Pevsner and Sigfried Giedion. These were the historians who were eager