“In this richly documented and broadly contextualized book, Wolner reasserts the centrality of a productive and influential Chicago architect. In so doing he not only establishes Henry Ives Cobb as a powerful force in this city’s cultural life, he reconstructs, with intelligence and imagination, the city as a whole in what may have been its most heroic era.”
Neil Harris, University of Chicago

“This is one of the best books on a single architect that I have ever read. Wolner traces Henry Ives Cobb’s career from his earliest training to his final years with carefully documented scholarship, originality, and exquisite architectural descriptions. Remarkably, when Wolner looks at the history of architecture through the lens of Cobb’s life, he sees connections other scholars have failed to notice, or finds new meanings in American building art. . . . As I read it I asked myself often, ‘How have we gotten along for so long without this book?’”
Sally A. Kitt-Chappell, DePaul University

Henry Ives Cobb’s Chicago
Architecture, Institutions, and the Making of a Modern Metropolis
by Edward W. Wolner