WBEZ 91.5 Chicago

There have been times I've walked past downtown's Chase Tower and thought the building to be magnificent. Other days, I'm less impressed.  

I've passed by the Printer's Row corner of Polk St., and Plymouth Ct., countless times on foot and by car.

The working class Chicago neighborhood went a bit go-go in the 1950s and 1960s, and the result is some unexpectedly modern buildings turning up here and there in the mainly pre-War landscape.

Oak Park native Thomas H. Beeby will be awarded the Richard H. Driehaus Prize at the University of Notre Dame this weekend.

I'd passed the corner of Clark and North countless times without noticing--really noticing--the Diamond Bank building on the intersection's northwest corner. Built in 1961 as North Federal Savings & Loan, the two-story modernist building is visually overshadowed by the huge, Byzanti

It's worth celebrating when good design occurs in Chicago, as is the case with La Casa Student Housing and Resource Center, a college dorm that opened last fall in the Pilsen neighborhood.

In 2010 Goes left, moved 92 miles north to the town of Delavan, WI.  And now within days, the company's 109-year-old former--a beautiful example of early 20th century industrial architecture--will be demolished.