Even before I finished reading Will Quam’s new book, “Fire and Clay: How Bricks Reveal the Hidden History of Chicago,” I noticed a change in the way I walk around familiar neighborhoods. I’ve always been prone to look up and take in the city’s architecture, but Quam’s deep-dive into one of its quintessential building blocks encouraged me to zoom in and appreciate the great variety of colors and textures that clothe Chicago’s schools, churches, businesses, two-flats and bungalows.
An architecture historian and photographer, Quam leads award-winning walking tours and is the creator of the Brick of Chicago social media accounts. In “Fire and Clay,” he recounts nearly two centuries of Chicago’s architectural history through the lens of the seemingly simple yet amazingly versatile brick. Since the founding of the first local brickyard in 1833, Chicago has proved to be “unique, a city-sized case study in the way architects and everyday people have used brick as a design material,” Quam argues. “Several factors—history, geology, timing and chance—make it the best place to observe the part brick plays in architecture.”
Featuring thorough research and more than one hundred of Quam’s own photographs, the book encompasses the brick-dominated rebuilding period after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, the booming local brickmaking industry of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the visual excess of the 1920s, the austerity invoked by the Great Depression and World War II and the continuing diversity of brick architecture into the twenty-first century. Buildings highlighted range from famous Frank Lloyd Wright designs to everyday apartment complexes and public schools that illustrate specific styles. As I read, I often referenced the street view on Google Maps to look up additional buildings that are mentioned by address but not pictured.
Though brick architecture and design remain the primary focus—perhaps more so than the book’s subtitle implies—Quam’s narrative also touches on related topics such as the history of labor, education and environmentalism. Some of these elements seem underexplored. For example, the author devotes a short section to the Brotherhood Club of Bricklayers, a social and advocacy organization founded in 1931 by and for Black members of a local bricklayers’ union. Beyond this, the book offers little context about the racial and gender dynamics within the bricklaying profession—something I had specifically wondered about after seeing a photo in an earlier chapter of the 1912 apprentice class from that same union, which appears to comprise nearly all young white men.
For lay readers like me, Quam’s prose style is largely accessible, with the exception of a few technical terms and visual descriptions that went over my head. “Fire and Clay”’s level of detail may be best suited to true architecture buffs, but the full-color photographs and attractive layout make for a pleasant reading experience regardless. While I certainly won’t retain all the facts I learned, the book’s overall effect—a deeper and more detail-oriented appreciation for Chicago’s distinctive beauty—will stay with me.
In addition, I found reassurance in Quam’s long view of the ebb and flow of architectural trends. Over the past half decade, I’ve grown increasingly grumpy about the local rise of boxy condos and apartment buildings entirely clad in black or dark gray bricks, which look singularly dour in the context of leafy residential streets. Thankfully, if the history outlined in “Fire and Clay” is any indication, the pendulum will eventually swing in another direction at some point, as surely as the city’s twentieth-century architecture moved through wildly different styles, from elaborate terra-cotta facades to crisp uniformity to colorful patterns of glazed brick. Who’s to say what will come next?
“Fire and Clay: How Bricks Reveal the Hidden History of Chicago“
By Will Quam
University of Chicago Press, 320 pages
