Fra Noi Embrace Your Inner Italian
Carla Bruni, a professor at the School of the Art Institute Chicago and preservation specialist for the Chicago Bungalow Association, loves everyday stuff that people don’t notice or find particularly interesting.
That’s why she wanted to celebrate “everyday” architecture in the book “Chicago Homes: A Portrait of the City’s Everyday Architecture,” which she co-authored with illustrator Phil Thompson.
Published last year, the book features nearly 200 illustrations by Thompson, an artist and owner of Wonder City Studio, who also wrote the first four chapters of the book.
A preservation and sustainability consultant specializing in community engagement and resiliency, Bruni teaches architecture and historic preservation at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
In writing the book, Bruni explains, she wanted to fill a void, because no comprehensive tome existed about Chicago homes. “You can find a book on bungalows or about a famous architect, but nothing about our collection of everyday architecture, which I love with my big, whole heart,” she says.
Bruni and Thompson met at a gallery show, and she was thrilled when he reached out a few months later about teaming up for the book, she recalls. The project took about three years from idea to completion, with Thompson writing the chapters covering 1780-1892, and Bruni taking up 1893 to modern times.
“The book explores the idea of what makes a home a Chicago home, specifically, and the answer to that is that, in addition to more obvious things like zoning and fire codes, a lot of social, political, ethnic, racial and economic factors are responsible for the look and styles of our homes,” Bruni says. “As a result, there are countless themes that we explore in the book—everything from why we have wooden back porches to the role that tenement reforms had in creating the Chicago courtyard apartment building.”
Bruni grew up in suburban Wheeling and Buffalo Grove, and has lived in Chicago since age 17. She has a master’s in historic preservation from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she has taught for the last seven years.
Bruni’s professional background includes environmental work, such as working with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to plan preservation-focused symposia, producing environmental justice reports, and working with the salvage industry. She has also participated in hands-on disaster relief projects.
In her free time, Bruni likes to do ceramics after having done welding and forging in the past. “I like that both of these mediums are malleable — you can work and rework them and as a tinkerer, I love that process,” she explains.
Bruni also runs the monthly repair clinic, Community Glue Workshop, in the Lathrop Homes complex in Chicago. “I started the clinic 14 years ago — it was the first of its kind in Chicago and we’re still going strong!”
An avid traveler, Bruni goes to Italy once a year and has also visited Spain, France, Greece, Ireland, Holland, Tunisia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Republic of Georgia, Ecuador, Mexico and Abu Dhabi.
Bruni shares her name with the famous fashion model and singer Carla Bruni, which earned her some double-takes when she studied in Italy as an undergraduate.
“I also regularly get angry or sycophantic emails in French intended for my famous counterpart, as well as some wild LinkedIn requests from Catholic institutions in Italy and Russian banks,” she says. “Mostly, I’ve just been working hard to overtake her on Google if you look up our name.”
