Image
Blair Kamin '79
PHOTO CREDIT
Nathan Keay
PLACE OF BIRTH
Red Bank, New Jersey
CURRENT HOME
Wilmette, Illinois
EDUCATION
Harvard University, Fellow, Nieman Foundation for Journalism, 2013
University of Chicago, Fellow, Franke Institute for the Humanities, 1999
Yale School of Architecture, Master of Environmental Design, 1984
Amherst College, Bachelor of Arts, cum laude, 1979
WHY DID YOU CHOOSE TO COME TO AMHERST?
The architecture had something to do with it, though it wasn’t the usual spot (Memorial Hill) that persuaded me. Instead, I remember saying “This is the place” while sitting at one of those big wood tables in the library of the music building and looking out the huge sheets of glass at (of all places) Pratt Quad. What spoke to me, in other words, wasn’t the vista but the bracing modernity of the structure that framed it. An adventurous building promised an adventurous education, a fresh way of looking at the world.
MOST MEMORABLE OR MOST INFLUENTIAL CLASS AT AMHERST
Leo Marx’s “Thought and Action” freshman seminar taught the virtues of intellectual honesty, an essential lesson for a future critic. Joel Upton’s illuminating lectures on the great French Gothic cathedrals—Notre-Dame of Paris, Chartres and Amiens--sparked my passion for architecture.
MOST MEMORABLE OR MOST INFLUENTIAL PROFESSOR
Leo Marx, Joel Upton, Hugh Hawkins, Barry O’Connell, Robert Gross, and (if I might) the students of Amherst. One of the revelations I had at the College was that you learned from your fellow students, not just from your professors.
RESEARCH INTERESTS
Not surprisingly, my primary research interest is exploring the impact of architecture and urban design on human experience. To paraphrase an often-quoted line from Winston Churchill, that interest centers on how we shape our buildings and how they, in turn, shape us. Chicago, which is often called the first city of American architecture, is an ideal place to study the relationship between how we build and how we live.
HONORS AND AWARDS
Pulitzer Prize for Criticism; George Polk Award for Criticism; National Magazine Award for General Excellence (part of an Architectural Record team); Peter Lisagor Award for Exemplary Journalism (15-time winner); Institute Honor for Collaborative Achievement, American Institute of Architects; Presidential Citation, American Institute of Architects; Award for Excellence in Architectural Criticism, Society of Architectural Historians; Engineering Journalism Award, American Association of Engineering Societies; Wright Spirit Award, Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy; Doctor of Fine Arts, North Central College; Doctor of Humanities, Monmouth University
FAVORITE BOOKS
American Architecture and Urbanism, Vincent Scully; Forever Open, Clear and Free: The Struggle for Chicago’s Lakefront, Lois Wille; The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, Robert Caro; The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs; The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, William H. Whyte.
FAVORITE AUTHOR
Robert Caro
TIPS FOR ASPIRING WRITERS?
1) Be passionate about your subject. If you don’t care, why should the reader?
2) Scrutinize every word. Does it smooth the reader’s path through the story or raise an obstacle? As a wise editor once told me, “The easiest thing for the reader is to quit reading.”
3) Pick a wise editor. He or she will bring out the best in you and prevent you from looking foolish.
4) Study the work of writers you admire and identify the qualities that make them powerful thinkers and elegant stylists. Then infuse those characteristics into your own work in your own way.
5) Get your facts straight. Feel free to challenge anything and everything your sources tell you. As the old Chicago journalism saying goes, “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.”
TELL US A BIT ABOUT YOUR PATH TO BECOMING AN AUTHOR
My path was anything but glamorous and, geographically speaking, quite circuitous. After Amherst, I bounced around the country, from Miami to my hometown of Fair Haven, New Jersey to San Francisco, New Haven, Houston, Des Moines and, finally, Chicago. Along the way came important discoveries, the most notable of which was that I would rather write about architecture than practice it. By 1999, after I’d been the Chicago Tribune’s architecture critic for seven years, I was toying with the idea of putting together a book that would collect my columns. Then, while I was on a fellowship at the University of Chicago, the Pulitzer gods smiled on me. That helped open the door for my first book, Why Architecture Matters: Lessons From Chicago, published by the University of Chicago Press.
BIOGRAPHY
Blair Kamin is the architecture critic of the Chicago Tribune and a contributing editor of Architectural Record. He has lectured widely, served as a visiting critic at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, and discussed architecture on programs such as NPR’s “All Things Considered.” The University of Chicago Press has published two collections of his columns: Why Architecture Matters: Lessons from Chicago (2001) and Terror and Wonder: Architecture in a Tumultuous Age (2010). Kamin also wrote the commentaries for Tribune Tower: American Landmark (2000), and edited Gates of Harvard Yard, published by Princeton Architectural Press in 2016. He is the recipient more than 40 awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, which he received in 1999 for a body of work highlighted by a series of articles about Chicago’s lakefront. He has twice served as a Pulitzer Prize juror. He and his wife, author and former Chicago Tribune writer Barbara Mahany, have two sons, Will (’15), a third-year student at Yale Law School, and Teddy, a first-year student at Kenyon College.