Gregory Dreicer: Hidden Histories of Skyscrapers and Infrastructure
Architectural historian Gregory Dreicer exposes the untold story of how a new way of building transformed the modern world — and why you've never heard it.
Why we picked this
Chicago invented the skyscraper, and this lecture promises to tell that story from an angle most architectural history ignores — the hidden systems and labor that made the buildings possible. Worth it for the city context alone.
Gregory Dreicer is an architectural historian and curator whose work focuses on infrastructure, construction technology, and the hidden systems that shape the built environment. His research has explored how structural innovations — in steel, concrete, and engineering — transformed not just buildings but cities, economies, and social organization in ways that rarely make it into conventional architectural history.
This lecture at Lakeview Day makes the case that a new way of building genuinely transformed the modern world — and that the story of how it happened, including whose labor and whose ideas made it possible, remains largely untold. The Athenaeum Center for Thought & Culture, itself a piece of Chicago architectural history, makes for an appropriate setting.
Part of the Chicago Humanities Festival’s Lakeview Day.