Edward Keegan Joins the ‘Chicago Tribune’ as Architecture Columnist

Rendering of the SOM-designed 400 Lake Shore Drive. In his first dispatch for the Chicago Tribune's newly launched biweekly architecture column, Edward Keegan wonders if both planned residential towers will ultimately come to fruition. Image courtesy Related Midwest

The mighty Chicago Tribune, which has been without a regular architecture column since the January 2021 departure of longtime critic Blair Kamin, has debuted a new column dedicated to the topic penned by multihyphenate Chicago architect-journalist-educator-broadcaster-curator, Edward Keegan. The column will appear in the paper’s Opinion section every Sunday on a biweekly basis. Keegan, a Brooklyn native, recently wrote about the Boys & Girls Clubs of Chicago’s new Rusu-McCartin Club—designed by Latent, it is the organization’s first new-construction facility in decades—for RECORD.

Published this past Sunday, Keegan’s inaugural column for the Tribune focuses on the 400 Lake Shore Drive project, where the first of two planned residential skyscrapers designed by SOM is now under-construction at the same infamous site where Santiago Calatrava’s scrapped Chicago Spire project left a superlatively large whole in the ground for nearly two decades. Keegan wonders if the second south tower will ever ultimately be realized by developer Related Midwest, considering the “more than a handful of buildings in Chicago that represent only a portion of their designer’s initial conception.”

Photo courtesy Edward Keegan

Notably, the Tribune’s new Keegan-bylined column is supported by a grant from Kamin that is administered by the non-profit Journalism Funding Partners. Pulitzer Prize–winning Kamin, a contributing editor at RECORD, was with the Tribune for 33 years, 28 of them spent as the paper’s chief architecture critic. His departure, prompted by a buyout offer from parent company Tribune Publishing, left Tribune readers and the larger Chicago architecture community to wonder who would fill the vacancy left by Kamin—and when—in a city where the practice of architecture is so deeply ingrained in its history … and future.

Keegan relayed to RECORD in a statement:

“It is a unique honor to write regularly about architecture for the Chicago Tribune. I came to Chicago in 1984, so I’ve read both of my predecessors, Paul Gapp and Blair Kamin. As the media landscape evolves, this opportunity wouldn’t have happened without Blair’s generous funding of the position. I’m humbled by his generosity and determination to see that he is not the last Chicago Tribune architecture critic. I look forward to continuing this legacy.”

As for the Windy City’s other major daily newspaper, the Chicago Sun-Times, former critic Lee Bey—also a RECORD contributor—rejoined the paper as a monthly architecture columnist in 2022 after his departure in 2001 to work in the administration of former mayor Richard M. Daley.

With Bey returning to the Sun-Times as a critic and the addition of Keegan’s biweekly column at the Tribune, it appears that architecture criticism regularly published in the pages of Chicago’s two largest daily newspapers, albeit more limited than in the past, is back—no small feat during an era when other major papers have forgone dedicated architecture columns altogether.

Matt Hickman is Senior News/Digital Editor at Architectural Record. Previously, he served as Senior Editor at The Architect’s Newspaper and has over a decade of experience as a freelance writer and editor specializing in historic preservation, public space, and the intersection of the natural world and built environment. A native of the Pacific Northwest, Matt holds an MFA in creative nonfiction writing from The New School.