Carl W. Condit - His Northwestern Career

His Northwestern Career

In 1945, while still working in Cincinnati, Condit applied for faculty positions and got 12 offers; he accepted from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, having decided he was interested in learning more about Chicago architecture. He briefly took a job at Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1947, but returned to Northwestern after a year there.

Although he was initially in the English Department at Northwestern, Condit's interests migrated more and more toward urban and architectural history. In fact, after his dissertation, he never pursued academic work in literature, although he maintained a deep interest in it throughout his life. He eventually left the English Department, and was subsequently professor of history, art history, and urban affairs at Northwestern. He pursued his interest in intellectual history by spending a 1951-52 sabbatical at the University of Wisconsin studying the history of science; he then founded the program in History of Science at Northwestern in the fall of 1952. But his main academic interest became architectural history and urban building, and beside teaching courses in urban history, development, and building, he began detailed research into the development of commercial architecture and urban planning in the United States, especially Chicago.

In 1952, he published his first book on Chicago skyscrapers (Condit, 1952), a book he later reworked into The Chicago School of Architecture (Condit, 1964). These works identified Chicago's leading architects and the challenges to building and planning they faced after the great fire of 1871. Then Condit produced a two-volume history of Chicago (Condit, 1973, 1974), books whose prime foci were architectural and technological, but which included a broad range of urban history as well. Many of the architectural masterpieces of the 1890s and 1920s were dilapidated or threatened by the 1950s, and Condit joined battles for their preservation where possible, often testifying at hearings on decisions about protecting landmark buildings. He also gave architectural tours of Chicago and frequently wrote newspaper and magazine pieces about the city's buildings.

Besides the Chicago books, Condit wrote about both New York and Cincinnati. His lifelong love for railroads and railroad history were worked into his research with two books (Condit, 1977, 1981) on urban railroads and buildings. He also completed three books on American building styles (Condit, 1960, 1961, 1983). He began research on the history of the New York skyscraper later in his career, but with his official retirement from Northwestern in 1982, he decided he had tired of writing and would never complete this book. But Sarah Bradford Landau picked up the research from him, and the two collaborated for many years until Landau finished The Rise of the New York Skyscraper (Landau & Condit, 1996).

Besides the books, Condit wrote numerous technical articles in scholarly journals and contributed to photographic books on Chicago buildings. D. Mancoff prepared a complete bibliography of his work in a special issue of the journal Technology and Culture devoted to essays in Condit's honor. Condit received numerous other awards and honorary degrees, including the Leonardo da Vinci Medal, which is the Society for the History of Technology's highest honor. He spent 1966-1967 as a Research Associate at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, and served on the Smithsonian advisory council from 1973-1978.