Will Quam: Brick of Chicago
Architecture photographer Will Quam explores how Chicago's billion-bricks-a-year peak transformed brick from fireproofing material into the defining element of the city's architectural identity.
Why we picked this
At its peak, Chicago was producing and consuming over two billion bricks a year. The city's bones are literally this material—and Quam has spent years photographing what that actually looks like.
By the late 1920s, at the height of the construction boom, Chicago was making and importing over two billion bricks annually. The Great Fire of 1871 had made fireproof building materials a civic obsession, and brick became the answer—first for structural necessity, then for aesthetic ambition. The result is a city whose architectural identity is built literally from the ground up in clay and mortar.
Will Quam is an architecture photographer known for his popular walking tours of Chicago’s built environment. His book Fire and Clay: How Bricks Reveal the Hidden History of Chicago traces how this most utilitarian of materials became beautiful—and how reading the city’s brickwork means reading its economic history, its labor history, and its changing ideas about what a city should look like.
Part of the Chicago Humanities Festival’s Lakeview festival day at the Athenaeum Center for Thought & Culture.