AIA Historic Resources Committee luncheon will be held Thursday, 23 June, from 11:00-1:00 at the historic Glessner House.

Thomas Leslie, FAIA, Morrill Professor in Architecture, of Iowa State University will be guest speaker and talk about

"Chicago Skyscrapers Between the Great Fire and the Great Depression: How Technology, Finance, and Politics Built the City."

Prof. Leslie has taught building design, history, and technology at Iowa State University since 2000. He has degrees from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1989) and Columbia University (1992). Prior to teaching he spent seven years with Norman Foster and Partners, London, where he worked on the extension to the Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska, the Al Faisaliah tower complex in Riyadh, and the Center for Clinical Sciences Research at Stanford University.

Leslie is the author of Louis I. Kahn: Building Art, Building Science (Braziller, 2005), Chicago Skyscrapers, 1871-1934 (University of Illinois, 2013), and Beauty’s Rigor: Patterns of Production in the Work of Pier Luigi Nervi(University of Illinois, 2017).

He has held visiting positions at the University of Technology-Sydney, Australia, the Bauhaus-Universität in Weimar, Germany, the Università di Bologna, and the McCormick School of Engineering at Northwestern University, where he currently holds an adjunct position.

In 2013-2014, Leslie was the Booth Family Rome Prize Fellow in Historic Preservation at the American Academy in Rome, and in 2018 he was elevated to Fellowship in the American Institute of Architects for his contributions to architectural education and research. In 2022-2023 he will be a Visiting Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

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