Stanley Tigerman, Career Collage, 1983

Biased, passionate, and unabashedly opinionated, Stanley Tigerman is both sharply critical and idealistic—all traits that surface in his new book Schlepping Through Ambivalence: Essays on an American Architectural Condition. In this collection of essays, most previously unpublished, Tigerman reveals himself to be witty, iconoclastic, and anything but ambivalent.

One of the founding members of the Chicago Seven, Tigerman has spent most of his long career working in the city of his birth. Like one of the cartoons for which he is best-known, “Career Collage” (1983), his work can be playful, colorful, and proudly symbolic, set far apart from the Bauhausian glass boxes seen along Chicago’s famous skyline. Tigerman’s writing documents his thoughts on Mies’s legacy in Chicago; architectural theory; figures including Louis Kahn, Vincent Scully, and Robert A.M. Stern; and Archeworks, the school he founded in 1994 with the goal of advancing socially responsible and environmentally conscious design solutions.