The Field Guide to Chicago Buildings was developed as a collaborative effort between the City Design Center at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the Chicago Teachers' Center of Northeastern Illinios University with funding from the National Endowment of the Humanities and the United States Department of Education.

 

Building Elements

One good place to begin an analysis of any building is with an analysis of the building elements. This includes the materials, component parts and methods of construction that go into making a building. For information about materials and elements you might start with:

• Herbert Gottfried and Jan Jennings, American Vernacular Design 1870-1940. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold,1985. This book has a very good section on materials and elements used in ordinary American buildings. It is probably the best single source for information that might relate to ordinary buildings in Chicago or other American cities.

  

• Charles George Ramsey, and Harold Reeve Sleeper. Architectural Graphic Standards. New York, Wiley ; London, Chapman & Hall, [c1941]. This is another excellent source of information on building practice can be found in the volumes of Architectural Graphic Standards, for example Architectural graphic standards for architects, engineers, decorators, builders and draftsmen.

 

  
Also valuable for this purpose are the dictionaries of architecture and building. Good recent examples include:
• John Fleming, Hugh Honour and Nikolaus Pevsner, The Penguin Dictionary of Architecture, Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1966.  
• Cyril M. Harris, ed. Historic Architecture Sourcebook, New York: McGraw Hill Book Co. 1977  
 

• Henry M. Saylor, Dictionary of Architecture, New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1952

 

  
For older construction it is often useful to look at older works including:
  • Joseph Gwilt, Encyclopedia of Architecture, Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1902  
• Russell Sturgis, A Dictionary of Architecture and Building, New York: MacMillan Co. 1902. This 3-volume set is an excellent source for terms and descriptions on American buildings at the turn of the century.  
• Talbot Hamlin, Ed. Forms and Functions of Twentieth-Century Architecture, New York: Columbia University Press, 1952. This 4-volume set is perhaps the best source for information about building methods and building types at mid-century in the United States.