Chicago Skyscrapers, 1934–1986: How Technology, Politics, Finance, and Race Reshaped the City
University of Illinois Press, 2023
Winner of the Pattis Family Foundation Chicago Book Award. From skyline-defining icons to wonders of the world, the second period of the Chicago skyscraper transformed the way Chicagoans lived and worked. Thomas Leslie’s comprehensive look at the modern skyscraper era views the skyscraper idea, and the buildings themselves, within the broad expanse of city history. As construction emerged from the Great Depression, structural, mechanical, and cladding innovations evolved while continuing to influence designs. But the truly radical changes concerned the motivations that drove construction. While profit remained key in the Loop, developers elsewhere in Chicago worked with a Daley political regime that saw tall buildings as tools for a wholesale recasting of the city’s appearance, demography, and economy. Focusing on both the wider cityscape and specific buildings, Leslie reveals skyscrapers to be the physical results of negotiations between motivating and mechanical causes.
Beauty’s Rigor: Patterns of Production in the Work of Pier Luigi Nervi
University of Illinois Press, 2017
Born in Sondrio, Italy, in 1891, Pier Luigi Nervi was a pioneer in the engineering and architecture of reinforced concrete. His buildings showed how the use of reinforced concrete expanded the possibilities of form and structure. His methods, meanwhile, ingrained his structures with patterns that came directly out of his economical, manual construction processes. The results were buildings that matched awe-inspiring spans with surprisingly human scale. Drawing on the Nervi archives and a wealth of photographs and architectural drawings, Thomas Leslie explores celebrated buildings like Palazetto dello Sport built for the 1960 Rome Olympics, St. Mary’s Cathedral in San Francisco, and the UNESCO headquarters in Paris. He also sheds new light on unbuilt projects such as the Pavilion of Italian Civilization for the Universal Exposition of Rome E42.
Design-Tech: Building Science for Architects (3rd edition)
Routledge / Taylor & Francis, 2025. With Jason Alread and Rob Whitehead.
The third edition of Design-Tech provides an indispensable, holistic resource for integrating building technologies into critically designed, performance-based architectural projects. The book’s format follows the developmental stages of a typical architectural project, providing a step-by-step process for addressing and integrating building sciences from first principles of human comfort, materials, structures, and environmental systems to advanced construction systems and measures of building performance. Short chapters incorporate easy-to-understand information with hundreds of useful illustrations, tables, and references that explain the why as well as the how of building science.
Chicago Skyscrapers, 1871–1934
University of Illinois Press, 2013
This history of the Windy City’s skyscrapers begins in the key period of reconstruction after the Great Fire of 1871 and concludes in 1934 with the onset of the Great Depression, which brought architectural progress to a standstill. During this time, such iconic landmarks as the Chicago Tribune Tower, the Wrigley Building, the Marshall Field and Company Building, the Chicago Stock Exchange, the Palmolive Building, the Masonic Temple, the City Opera, and Merchandise Mart rose to impressive new heights, thanks to innovations in building methods and materials. Solid, earthbound edifices of iron, brick, and stone made way for towers of steel and plate glass, imparting a striking new appearance to the city’s skyline. Thomas Leslie reveals the daily struggles, technical breakthroughs, and negotiations that produced these magnificent buildings.
Louis I. Kahn: Building Art, Building Science
George Braziller, 2005
Philadelphia architect Louis I. Kahn (1901–1974) was one of the most influential American architects of the twentieth century. His work, widely recognized as a link between modern and classical traditions, is distinguished by its simple yet monumental design. In this book, Thomas Leslie shows that Kahn was also an extraordinarily gifted technologist and that his careful presentation of engineering principles set the stage for the high-tech movement in Europe and America. The examination of four major buildings—the Yale Art Gallery, the Richards Medical Laboratories, the Salk Institute, and the Kimbell Art Museum—and several smaller projects reveals an expressive integration of construction, structure, and services into buildings that dramatically highlight the processes involved in their making and function.
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