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Robert Bruegmann, The Architects and the City: Holabird & Roche of Chicago, 18801918 (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997), xvi + 544 pp., $65.00 (cloth).
Robert Bruegmann's book breaks new ground in important ways. It is among the few detailed studies in print of a large, commercially-oriented architectural firm. Such offices have contributed in many ways to shaping the built enviroment for more than a century. Yet scholarly attention to this realm has been meager, in large part due to the persistent emphasis given to architects as artistic personalities at the expense of all other facets of the profession. Bruegmann provides an...