LANDMARK GALENA The Historic City and its Architecture By Christian K. Narkiewicz-Laine Photography by Lary L. Sommers

While Charleston and Savannah remain as important Colonial cities rich in late 17th and early 18th-Century European period architecture, Galena is one of the first modern American cities that was built and designed during the early part of the industrial revolution complete with unique functional warehouse architecture, main street storefronts, workers cottages, churches, civic buildings, and upper class residences. Most of the buildings are not distinctive or iconic, but simply as an ensemble become a masterpiece of early American urbanism. The City of Galena is unique in the sense that it has survived 150 years of over-development, over-growth, “urban renewal,” and decline that have demolished or disintegrated most American cities during the 20th-Century. The city survives simply as a beautiful, gentile time capsule from the early 1800s. It has a style and uniquely gentile quality that reminds us of more innocent times and the early founding of the American Republic. The landscape that surrounds the city, the Mississippi Valley, is serene and picturesque with ravines, bluffs, and hills most uncommon in the flattened American Midwest.

This book documents the history and architecture of Galena, Illinois from 1830 to the present in the favorite
styles from Italianate, Greek Revival, Queen Anne, and Victorian.

THE MISSISIPPI RIVER (In Four Seasons) By Christian K. Narkiewicz-Laine Introduction by George Beylerian

A study of The Mississippi River by the Finnish/Lithuanian architect, painter and poet.

The artists writes: “In these images of the Mississippi River, I have explored the process of photography from a painterly perspective and its effect of recording the atmospheric phenomena and the personal and collective memory of certain glimpses of this wondrous natural beauty gathered on several walks in the Mississippi River Valley beginning in 2005.”

“As a study, I am obsessed with seemingly-benign landscapes, anonymous-seeming fields, valleys, bluffs, and river bends—all of which are shown here in their ephemeral state—caught in that one fleeting second when light touches their surface or hidden colors illuminate—and collide—all of which are visually conveyed in a total dream sequence of time remembered or a place hurriedly described or defined like a sketch.”

“To interpret that these images are "atmospheric" would be an understatement. Here, the only concern about the composition of the photograph is its dream-like vision of the isolated parts of fractured time—a memory frozen within the photograph. Surrounding trees, objects, clouds, the sun, the Mississippi River seem fragmented, partial, incomplete. In my mind, these scenes are at once in the eternity of the universe, never to be repeated through their own separate and distinct uniqueness or occurrence, but nonetheless still, repeated endlessly and into nature's own birth-death-rebirth cycle.”

Hard Cover, 64 Pages

RECONSTRUCTING THE URBAN LANDSCAPE The 2010 International Architecture Awards By Christian K. Narkiewicz-Laine

The 2010 International Architecture Awards are bestowed to the world's most important new buildings, landscape architecture, and urban planning selected by a jury of Mexican Architects under the auspices of the Colegio de Arquitectos de la Cuidad de México, Sociedad de Arquitectos Méxicanos. Organized annually by The Chicago Athenaeum and The Urban Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies, the competition drew hundreds of submissions from over 45 countries around the world.

For 2010, ninety-five (95) new buildings and urban planning projects were selected and awarded from 38 nations including Austria, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Great Britain, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Korea, Latvia, Lithuania, Malaysia, Maldives, Mexico, Monaco, Morocco, The Netherlands, Norway, Palestine Territories, Portugal, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Spain, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, United States, Uruguay, and Vietnam.

This year’s Awards represent the largest cross-section of building types from the world’s tallest skyscrapers to new corporate headquarters, office buildings, museums and cultural facilities, art galleries, sport stadiums, hospitals and healthcare centres, transportation centres, bridges, banks, urban plans, retail environments, historic renovations and restorations, theatres, airports, pavilions, schools and universities, social housing, churches and chapels, conservatories, passenger terminals, fitness centres, gardens, club houses, libraries, government and civic buildings, community centers, urban planning and renewal, monuments and memorials, masterplans, factories, sustainable design, resorts, consulates, multi-family housing, and the private home—from the built to the to be built—by the world’s most visionary architects and design firms.

Soft Cover, Perfect Bound. 240 pages

NEW AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE Edited and Selected by Christian K. Narkiewicz-Laine

The best and newest bold experiments in architecture today defined by the leading-edge architecture offices in the United States are showcased in this catalogue from the results of The Chicago Athenaeum's American Architecture Awards from 2004 and 2005 as selected by juries from The Royal Institute of Architects of Ireland (RIAI) in Dublin and the Norske Arkitekters Landsforbund (The National Association of Norwegian Architects) in Oslo.

The book documents the latest designs for new commercial, institutional, and residential design for both built and unbuilt projects (2002-2005), showcasing the most important architecture firms in America and highlighting the rich diversity in American design thought and philosophical approach to design theory as practiced nationally today.

A total of 80 projects are richly illustrated including designs for skyscrapers, highrises, commercial buildings, corporate headquarters, healthcare facilities, airports, transportation centers, museums and cultural facilities, religious structures, institutional buildings, housing projects, urban planning, single family homes, residential designs, showrooms, retail stores, interiors, office environments, preservation and restoration, and multi-family housing in the United States and around the world. Soft Cover, Perfect Bound, 176 pages.

ISBN: 0-935119-14-0 $26.95 USA

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INSPIRATION: NATURE AND THE POET A COLLECTION OF POEMS BY CHICAGO ARCHITECT LOUIS H. SULLIVAN Edited, Selected, and Introducted by Christian K. Narkiewicz-Laine Additional Introduction by Frank Lloyd Wright

This first collection of poems by Louis H. Sullivan (1856-1924) summons the artist to a new light apart from his fame as a leading American Architect of the 19th-Century. The book elevates Louis Sullivan as a major American poet in his own right, deeply influenced by the classical literary traditions of the late 1800s and the highly intense American transcendentalist movement of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. The anthology contains Sullivan's major trilogy "Nature and the Poet," including "Inspiration" (written in 1886), and "The Master" and "Sympathy—A Romanza" (two previously unpublished works). Others poems and prosaic works such as "Wherefore the Poet," "Spring Song," "Autumn Glory," and "The Dance of Death," some unpublished and some previously published, remain an important metaphoric key in the understanding of Sullivan's architectural genius; his design process, and his creative theories. The collection starts with a work by Frank Lloyd Wright written as an obituary for Sullivan—a highly charged and emotional document that explains Sullivan's symbolist, metaphysical communion with nature, art, and the divine power. Approximately 180 pages.

ZONE OF SORROW WORKS OF ART BY THE CHILDREN OF CHERNOBYL Edited, Selected, and Introducted by Christian K. Narkiewicz-Laine and Charlotte Narkiewicz-Laine Additional Essay "A Day Inside the Apocalpyse" by Christian K. Narkiewicz-Laine

In the wake of this worst environmental disaster ever recorded in human history, over 800,000 Belarussian children (2.2 million total Belarussians) have been exposed to various degrees of radiation poisoning. Almost two decades later, those numbers are still climbing. The radioactive nuclides—iodine, cesium, plutonium, strontium— released after the explosion of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor's core was nearly 200 times that of the combined releases from the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

Thousands of children and adults have died or remain permanently hospitalized and critically ill with severe Leukemia, hyper plasma of the thyroid, and other cancer sicknesses. There are also mysterious illnesses that have not been diagnosed. They call it Chernobyl AIDS. This compounded with the storage of housing, jobs, alcoholism, poverty, and the continuing political havoc that continues to plague these parts of Eastern Europe is more than just devastation. It equals, perhaps, the most abysmal human tragedy of our time.

In an effort to increase a greater public awareness for Chernobyl, The Chicago Athenaeum and The Radziwill/jodko-Narkiewicz Foundation has organized this catalogue and this exhibition for travel in the United States and Europe. These is no profounder way to document this tragedy than through the eyes of its most innocent victims: The Children of Chernobyl.

The works of art published here originate from therapy programs designed to support the morale of the sick children confined to hospitals and orphanages while waiting for short-supply medical care. The art is particularly poignant and haunting—real-life images of what it is like to live in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. Other paintings record the emotional upheaval of abandoning the homes and villages of their families, often times leaving their elderly and pets behind. Other paintings document the Chernobyl Blast and the invisible danger surrounding radiation contamination.

ISBN: 0-935119-14-0 $26.95 USA

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NEW CHICAGO SKYSCRAPERS A FILM BY ANSSI BLOOMSTEDT (FINLAND) Produced and Co-Directed by Christian K. Narkiewicz-Laine English/VHS/29 Minutes

A documentary on the continuing development of Chicago's revolutionary design for the high-rise and its impact on the city.
The documentary includes interviews with Cesar Pelli, John Burgee, William Petersen, Adrian Smith, and Helmut Jahn.
The film studies five of Chicago's most innovative and celebrated new high-rise buildings built in the 1990s.

English/VHS/29minutes

$29.95 USA

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THE CITY AND THE WORLD New International Architecture 2009-2010 Edited and Selected by Christian K. Narkiewicz-Laine

This book serves as the catalogue for the annual Awards Program, “The International Architecture Awards” for 2009 and documents the latest designs for new skyscrapers, corporate headquarters, museums and cultural facilities, banks, commercial interiors, hotels, schools, colleges and educational buildings, residential architecture, research centers, vineyards, multi-family housing, libraries, recycling centers, churches and religious spaces, urban planning, hospitals and medical centers, and landscape architecture by the most prominent architecture firms in over 30 nations.