Joanna Merwood-Salisbury

On her book Chicago 1890: The Skyscraper and the Modern City

Cover Interview of January 03, 2010

Editor’s note

Originally, this interview ran on the Rorotoko cover page under the headline

“An architectural history of contention about the future of the industrial city.”

We highlighted two quotes.

On the first page:

“As much as architects justified the skyscraper as the finest product of the city, socialists and anarchists denounced it as a symbol of class oppression and economic inequality.”

On the second:

“John Wellborn Root imagined an entirely new aesthetic for crowded Chicago streets. He discussed the possibility of an architecture whose effect depended on color rather than ornament. The business block should be monolithic and plain, he said, since metropolitan dwellers were too busy to appreciate fine detail.”

history / ideology / 19th century / 20th century / architecture / urbanism / ecology / whistler james mcneill / root john wellborn / monadnock building /

[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.

Carolyn J. Dean,
Interview of February 01, 2011

The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.

Jerome Kagan,
Interview of September 17, 2009