Thanks to a session at AIA, now I know who designed that cool-looking condo on Broadway in Edgewater. Add one more to the rather short list of cool architects doing small multifamily in Chicago. You’d think that the infill boom (~70,000 units in 10 years!) would have generated a new Chicago School by now, just as the 1880s boom brought a host of talents (from Sullivan to Wright) from the countryside to try their hand here.

Or, one would at least expect the local architects and developers to draw on the city’s rich history of stamping out perfectly good versions of our vernacular housing types: cottage, bungalow, rowhouse, two-flat, three-flat (with or without stores), corner six- or twelve-flat, courtyard, or palazzo high-rise. (As Dennis McClendon says, Chicago is a city of mass production: the same twelve buildings copied ten thousand times over; only the details ever changed.)

But no; 90% of the competent buildings I see are by a few firms: Brininstool + Lynch, Landon Bone Baker, Pappageorge Haymes (on their good days), or Sullivan Goulette.

Others have pointed out to me that Chicago’s matchbox three-flats are still a damn sight better than the equivalent ones sprouting in almost similar numbers elsewhere — say, in Lubavitcher neighborhoods of Brooklyn. Well, yeah, but mediocrity is not its own excuse.