2017: the year of documenting downtown chicago's 19th & early 20th century architectural ornament at feverish pace

this year's season of teardowns hasn't been anywhere near as bad as last year, when one demolition alert after another brought me closer and closer to a breaking point, and where seemingly inescapable mental exhaustion was always looming over me. i need serious "down time" to  mentally process frantically criss-crossing the city to document and salvage bits and pieces of 19th century chicago before being entirely wiped from the map.

last year's efforts was brutally exhausting and unforgiving, both to my body and to my mind. quite frankly, i haven't quite recovered from it...and i seriously question whether or not i can handle another year where so much could be lost in such a short period of time. since then, i've spent most of my energy attempting to digest all the data i collected last year in order to eventually disseminate it through a series of blog posts. however, i view much of that as "filler" in between a start and stop stream of projects documenting chicago theaters - both interior and exterior architectural ornament - along with traveling outside of the city to photograph building ornament designed by the architects that mentored louis sullivan (e.g., frank furness in philadelphia and john edelman in cleveland, oh).

a look at the past, present, and future...

2014-2016: a rigid routine and/or inescapable cycle of extensive documentation, deconstruction, digging, demolitions, and weekly virtual exhibitions.

2017: burnout. slowly reemerge, documenting existing buildings, reevaluating the museum collection, establishing connections towards collaboration, lecturing and completing book projects.

2018: a continuation of 2017 dialed back further; perhaps even a full-fledged sabbatical where i return to graduate school, pursing a ph.d. in architectural history and theory at mit.

photographing buildings at such a feverish pace this year has been incredibly therapeutic to body and mind. it as also given me ample time to freely explore my next move outside of urban remains and the bldg. 51 museum. capturing images of building ornament will continue, uninterrupted, through the remainder of 2017. the images below offer a glimpse of this work; i suspect several more blog entries will continue to showcase chicago's 19th century buildings as well as those in the cities i plan to visit before the end of the year.