Scholar’s Convocation: Pulitzer Prize-winner Blair Kamin

Blair Kamin, the Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic at the Chicago Tribune, will present the Scholar’s Convocation at Grinnell College at 11 a.m. Thursday, Sept. 22.

Kamin, who was a reporter for the Des Moines Register from 1984-87, has been widely praised for the authoritative and accessible tone of his criticism. While at the Register, Kamin wrote about the Louis Sullivan-designed “jewel box” bank in downtown Grinnell, referring to it as “Iowa’s Architectural Jewel.”

He gained national attention in 2014 when he criticized the giant “TRUMP” logo on the side of Donald Trump’s 96-story tower on Chicago’s Michigan Avenue. Kamin described the sign as a “wart” on the skyline while Chicago Mayor Rham Emanuel called it “tasteless.” Trump defended it, saying it was “in the highest level of taste.”

Kamin presented his side of the story and responded to Trump’s insults in an interview on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Trump had called  Kamin a “third-rate architectural critic” who had been fired from the Tribune since he was absent from the Tribune for several months. Kamin, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1999, set the record straight, noting that he spent the 2012-13 academic year as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University.

Kamin will give a free, public talk about the significance of the gates around Harvard Yard. “Unlocking the Beauty of Gates,” will start at 11 a.m. Thursday, Sept. 22, in Joe Rosenfield ’25 Center, Room 101.

Kamin, editor of Gates of Harvard Yard, will discuss how gates throughout history have been used as both instruments of control and symbols of the identities and visions of their builders. He also will contend that the 25 gates in Harvard Yard symbolize something more than exclusion: that they are used to delineate space and mark the elemental transitions between ignorance and wisdom, freedom and captivity, and life and death.

Since becoming the Tribune’s architecture critic in 1992, Kamin has written about the full range of the built environment-from skyscrapers to museums to parks to public housing. He also has lectured widely, with audiences including the American Institute of Architects’ National Convention, the annual meeting of the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy, the Ravinia Festival, and Steppenwolf Theatre.

Kamin also is a contributing editor at Architectural Record magazine and was part of a team of editors, writers, photographers, and critics for the magazine, which in 2003 won the National Magazine Award for General Excellence.

The University of Chicago Press has published two collections of his columns: Why Architecture Matters: Lessons from Chicago and Terror and Wonder: Architecture in a Tumultuous Age. He also wrote the commentaries for Tribune Tower: American Landmark.

The recipient of more than 35 awards including a Pulitzer Prize, Kamin won the George Polk Award for Criticism in 1996. In 2004 the American Institute of Architects’ presented him with its Presidential Citation, conferred in appreciation of the “rhapsodies and scoldings” that have brought architecture to the attention of Chicago’s public.

Grinnell College welcomes the participation of people with disabilities. Room 101 in the Rosenfield Center is equipped with an induction hearing loop system, which enables individuals with hearing aids set to T-Coil to hear the program. Make accommodation requests to Conference Operations, 641-269-3235.