Frank Gehry died recently. Obituaries celebrated the architect behind the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, and the Pritzker Pavilion in Chicago’s Millennium Park — those sweeping stainless-steel ribbons that have become as inseparable from the city’s identity as the skyline they overlook. Most obituaries noted that Gehry was Jewish. Fewer mentioned that he was born Ephraim Owen Goldberg, the son of Jewish immigrants from Russia and Poland, and that in 1954 he legally changed his name — at his first wife’s urging, out of fear that an overtly Jewish surname would cost him clients. He expressed regret about that decision late in life.

I learned that story while developing the Jewish Builders of Chicago walking tour as a volunteer docent with the Chicago Architecture Center. I work professionally in commercial real estate and have spent my career reading buildings as economic artifacts — expressions of capital, market conditions, and structural technology. For years as a docent, I did what docents do: I recited dates, styles, and architects’ names. It took more than a year of research into this tour to realize how much I was leaving out — that behind every date and every name was a life. Researching this tour taught me to read buildings as something else entirely: biography.

Buildings tell us about the art, technology, and economics of the eras that produced them. But they also carry human stories — the architects, engineers, entrepreneurs, patrons, and communities who imagined and built them. Scholars have never identified a Jewish style of architecture. Stanley Tigerman, a generation later and the grandchild of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, broke directly into Chicago’s top firms without needing that workaround. He spent a career trying to find a Jewish style of architecture, tracing lines all the way back to Solomon’s Temple in his 1988 book Architecture of Exile — and admitted the connection was “a real stretch.” There isn’t one. What there is instead is something more interesting: Jews living across different eras who helped shape the urban landscape around them while navigating questions of identity, opportunity, community, and belonging. This column will explore those stories.

The Buildings They Built — For the City and for Themselves

What strikes me most about the first generation of Jewish........

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