By Christian Narkiewicz-Laine
“Good riddance to bad rubbish,” as the Irish saying goes.
One of the worst, most trite, mediocre voices in architecture finally departed after 28 years as being the so-called “architecture critic” at The Chicago Tribune.
Promoted from the basement of the Tribune’s real-estate want ads department, Blair Kamin took the place of noted critic Paul Gapp, who was a soft writer, but nonetheless a man of great courage, noble integrity, and fortitude.
Not Kamin.
And Kamin was no Ada Louise Huxtable by any stretch of the imagination.
Hard-hitting; not. Sophomoric, milk-toast; yes.
As any left-leaning journalist in Chicago knows, and in the last decades there had been many at the competitor newspaper, The Chicago Sun-Times, the Tribune is notorious never to offend any its potential advertisers, and Kamin played solid by those rules, so his judgements were never to be trusted and whatever “praise” he might extend was always tarnished in light of his newspaper’s profits.
That was never the case at competitor working-class newspaper, the Sun-Times.
“Schlock developers and hack architects would welcome the lack of scrutiny,” Kamin writes on Twitter about this self-lauded retirement from the newspaper in 2021.
What schlock developers?
What hack architects?
Kamin has never mentioned any names. Never.
Like “poor and Black,” these are just words for Kamin; he has never risen to any occasion to take any journalistic action to remedy any social injustice.
Although, Kamin has never offended, he still managed somehow to win a Pulitzer Prize in 1992.
Pushed politically by his newspaper—and it is political—it’s not a hard feat to accomplish, since Pulitzers only go to journalists working for newspapers; and in the United States, there are only three newspapers with architecture critics: The Chicago Tribune, The New York Times, and The Washington Post.
The odds are not being more likely than being struck by lightning.
During Kamin’s long, dull 28 years at the Tribune, The City of Chicago, with all its despicable racism, slums, social inequity, brutal violence, Kamin never uttered a word.
Not one word of protest.
Of course, much of that silence can be also attributed to the newspaper for which he wrote—a newspaper that for years only endorsed only far-right Republican politicians such as Richard Nixon, Ronald Regan, and the Bushes.
The newspaper’s cronyism is nationally and internationally notorious.
Architecture and urban planning are intrinsically wedded to the social issues in which any building or urban plan is to be built and destined.
Ada Louise Huxtable knew that; Paul Goldberger knows, too.
Not Kamin; not even a clue.
Kamin, on the other hand, never drifted or ventured into the nitty-gritty of Chicago; never strayed from his ivory Tribune Tower on North Michigan Avenue. He never got his hands or feet dirty.
But he did once get into a surprising brawl with Donald Trump.
Kamin’s only real claim to fame came during a dispute over a gigantic sign on top of SOM’s Trump Tower in Chicago, when Donald Trump called Kamin a “second-rate” critic.
But, I think Trump was way, way too kind. Fifth-rate?
And then, there was Kamin’s incestuous relationship with the vitriolic, megalomaniac Chicago architect Stanley Tigerman.
Now, if you want “schlock” or “hack,” you need not look any further.
Take for example, Tigerman’s flop for Walgreens on North Avenue and Wells Street, or better, the hideous parking garage with its pathetic, under-scaled Rolls-Royce-like statue at 60 East Lake Street.
Only two of the many unremarkable “masterpieces” of Tigerman in Chicago.
In 2019, Kamin actually defended the atrocious garage stating it was one of his personal “favorites” and that it needed historic “protection.” Really?
Maybe Kamin needs another Pulitzer.
Kamin-Tigerman became a twisted cabal. The two of them formed an alliance propping each other up—tied to the waist.
If Kamin needed a quotation about anything in Chicago, be sure it was Tigerman’s mouth that spoke. And a big mouth it was, too.
Over and over, it was one Tigermanism after another that Kamin used for quotations, boring month after month. As if there were no other opinions in Chicago that mattered, only the gospel according to Tigerman.
And it was no secret that Tigerman hated—no maliciously loathed—this writer.
Only I had the courage to stand up to him and his sick antics and crap designs.
In 1980, The Chicago Sun-Times sent me as its architecture critic to report on a Graham Foundation lecture where Tigerman presented his dark and sinister scheme for the Anti-Cruelity Society’s new building on Wells Street where Tigerman played a hideously creepy game moving dogs and cats around the building, calling it a “Dog Killing Machine.”
After that story broke, vitriolic Tigerman followed me on a crusade for decades like a COVID-19 virus, sabotaging anything I did; any position I had where he demanded that I be immediately fired.
In 1993, when Tigerman was rightly sacked as Director of the School of Art and Architecture by the University of Illinois for the same dirty tricks he played with its faculty, you think that would be headline news over at the Tribune. Not a word.
So much for Kamin’s “scrutiny” as he wrote in this Twitter about “hacks and schlocks.”
Narcissist Tigerman found a very useful ally in Kamin for his revenge campaign.
During the 30 years I was the Director of The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design, Blair Kamin never wrote one story or reported on the hundreds of exhibitions by the Museum, none of its hundreds of public outreach programs or lectures, nothing about the Museum’s unique collections on architecture and design; none of its children’s programs, none of it major efforts like a 1980’s citywide design charrette to “Green the City.” Nothing. Not a word.
In 2015, fed up with Kamin, I wrote a letter to Gerould W. Kern, Editor of the Chicago Tribune complaining about Kamin’s blacklisting of the Museum, his lack of any journalistic integrity, and his all too cozy relationship with Tigerman and Tigerman’s malicious axe-to-grind.
I wrote: “The fact is that Kamin panders to Tigerman in the most banal and sopping milk toast manner.”
“I have read many namby-pamby stories by Kamin about Tigerman; one after another—to the point of nausea.”
“If Mr. Tigerman passed gas, Mr. Kamin would unabashedly and pathetically put that into glowing Chicago Tribune headlines.”
“Mr. Kamin’s silent indifference toward this institution is nothing more than subversive and vengeful censorship.”
No answer from Kern.
Months ago, I was at a newspaper stand in Chicago, and a copy of the Tribune caught my eye.
It was barely recognizable. It looked like one of those abysmal junk 20-page neighborhood flyers, shrunk totally from its imperial, Noblesse standing of only 20 years ago.
How that newspaper had been reduced to nothing. There was really nothing left of it. Just a yawn…a big Zero.
Faded into an abysmal obscurity along with dinosaurs and its former “architecture critic,” which the Tribune has not replaced.