Southern Exposure: The Overlooked Architecture of Chicago’s South Side

Southern Exposure: The Overlooked Architecture of Chicago’s South Side is the first book devoted to the South Side’s rich and unfairly ignored architectural heritage. With lively, insightful text and gallery-quality color photographs by noted Chicago architecture expert Lee Bey, Southern Exposure documents the remarkable and largely unsung architecture of the South Side. The book features an array of landmarks-from a Space Age dry cleaners to a nineteenth-century lagoon that meanders down the middle of a working-class neighborhood street-that are largely absent from arts discourse, in no small part because they sit in a predominantly African American and Latino section of town that’s better known as a place of disinvestment, abandonment, and violence.

Inspired by Bey’s 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial exhibition, Southern Exposure visits sixty sites, including lesser-known but important work by luminaries such as Jeanne Gang, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Eero Saarinen, as well as buildings by pioneering black architects such as Walter T. Bailey, John Moutoussamy, and Roger Margerum.

Pushing against the popular narrative that depicts Chicago’s South Side as an architectural wasteland, Bey shows beautiful and intact buildings and neighborhoods that reflect the value-and potential-of the area. Southern Exposure offers much to delight architecture aficionados and writers, native Chicagoans and guests to the city alike.