Journalism may be the first rough draft of history, but some drafts are less rough than others. Critics, for example, render early verdicts on the worthiness of new movies and other artistic forms that sometimes prove to be poor indicators of popular and later critical sentiment. Yet critics seldom change their minds about the objects of their reviews and rarely write as incisively and honestly about them as in that first, unvarnished context, which perhaps explains why their original columns can be collected in book form with minimal revision. Can be—but increasingly aren’t, as such collections have lately come up against a new threat: the first drafts themselves, residing indefinitely in online archives.

Such was my concern when Chicago Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin approached me two years ago about a sequel to his 2001 collection, Why Architecture Matters: Lessons from Chicago, which featured his best columns from nearly a decade of covering America’s foremost architectural city. That book included the series “Reinventing the Lakefront” and other pieces
that had earned him the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, and it succeeded both commercially and critically. But it was also published in the last moments of another era: Kamin’s inscription in the copy that sits on my bookshelf is dated September 10, 2001. So history had provided an indisputable beginning for a new collection; the rest was up to us.

The key, we knew, lay in arranging eight (eventually nine) years’ worth of columns into a compelling story. What the individual pieces, lingering online or in readers’ memories, could not provide was a context for understanding how the architectural developments Kamin had chronicled reflected the broader historical currents of a memorable era. But a simple chronological organization would not do; we needed to look for themes. We needed to ransack the archives for Kamin’s best pieces, dump them on the floor, begin sorting them into groups, and ruthlessly toss aside those that didn’t contribute to the emerging story.

We had done this before, on the first book, when the Internet was not yet a threat and I was a relatively inexperienced editor. I remembered the polite shock on Kamin’s face when I presented my revision of his initial outline, declaring, for example, that his piece trashing new Comiskey Park made the same points as the one praising Jacobs Field in Cleveland, so one of them (preferably the latter) had to go. In the negotiations that followed, I yielded on a few columns but held firm on most, my legs secretly trembling under the table. Several outlines later we had our book, and the day Kamin told me I’d been right on nearly everything was the day I first considered myself an editor. That dynamic resumed as we began our new collaboration.

Kamin’s first outline for the book that would become Terror and Wonder: Architecture in a Tumultuous Age arrived in my in-box even as a Chicagoan who had once contemplated becoming an architect was delivering his inaugural address. Already the book was slated to end with a piece on Barack Obama’s proposed efforts to repair the nation’s infrastructure. But the columns were organized less by theme than by category: cities; types of buildings (skyscrapers, museums); “the past” (preservation); “the future.” I dumped them on the floor and began resorting. “Architecture and terrorism” became the first pile. Economic excess; environmental consciousness; technology; infrastructure—nearly all the major issues of the decade lurked in these first drafts of history. Eventually I proposed a new outline organized around these themes; a day later, Kamin refined it further, and we were on our way.

Fitting the original columns into the “final” outline yielded additional insights into the book’s broader story. The brief contextual introductions Kamin wrote for each of the five parts and their further subsections sometimes exposed flaws in the organization and selection of the pieces. Part 1, “The Urban Drama,” for example, featured Kamin’s impassioned columns on the disasters
and rebuilding in New York City and New Orleans and was scheduled to end with a group of pieces on Millennium Park and Navy Pier subtitled “Postindustrial Playground and Theme-Park Battleground.” I had puzzled over this section of the outline, but once I saw the pieces in place, I understood Kamin’s instinct to position Millennium Park—which had lured people en masse back into a public space—as a counterpoint to 9/11. We dropped the Navy Pier column and retitled the section “Reclaiming the Public Realm,” an idea that Kamin later incorporated prominently into the volume’s introduction.

The columns themselves, true to form, largely withstood our scrutiny. Kamin did trim several of the longer pieces considerably to tighten his arguments; elsewhere, we clarified ambiguous statements and fixed small errors of fact (in one instance I substituted “fear of heights” for “vertigo,” having suffered from both maladies). But in no case did Kamin change his mind about the object of his review, and only rarely—as with the heat-radiating Disney Hall in Los Angeles—did he qualify his original judgment in a postscript to the piece. New reporting for other postscripts added depth to the story that had taken shape, none more so than Kamin’s discovery that the high hopes for attendance at many of the era’s iconic new museums had proved as illusory as those for Obama’s infrastructure plan.

As in the first outline, the book ends with that plan, though not on the optimistic note we had once envisioned. Late last spring, just before the volume went to press, Kamin revised the final postscript to reflect the dimming prospects for genuine restoration of the nation’s crumbling bridges and rail lines. “We began with ruins, and we end with ruins,” he wrote, lamenting the contrast of “private splendor and public squalor” that had ultimately marked the decade’s architecture. When I read those words, I knew he had found just the right ending to his story.

Mary E. Laur is senior project editor at the University of Chicago Press.