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Vincent L Michael, PhD

Born:
Pen Name: None

Connection to Illinois: Dr. Michael has served on the Illinois Historic Sites Advisory Council and the Oak Park Historic Preservation Commission. He was Director of the Historic Preservation program at SAIC from 1996 to 2010.

Biography: Dr. Vincent Michael has been a tour guide and lecturer since 1983, interpreting the landscape not only of Chicago and northeastern Illinois, but many other parts of the world. In the 1990s he worked for Michelin Travel Publications, authoring much of the Michelin Guide to Chicago. He also wrote two videos on Chicago architecture and developed tours based on geography, history, ethnicity, church architecture, and even literature. He continues to lead tours for the Art Institute of Chicago both in the Chicago region and internationally and is currently is Chief Conservation Officer for the Global Heritage Fund, in California. The Fund helps preserve World Heritage Sites in developing countries.


Awards:

Primary Literary Genre(s): Non-Fiction

Email: vmichael@globalheritagefund.org
Website: http://vincemichael.com
Vincent L Michael, Ph. D. on WorldCat : http://www.worldcat.org/search?q=vincent+l+michael%2C+ph.+d.


Selected Titles

  Chicago 2012 /
ISBN: 1907099395 OCLC: 712118684

Michelin Travel and Lifestyle, Greenville, SC. : 2012.

The architecture of Barry Byrne :
ISBN: 0252037537 OCLC: 814455410

"Barry Byrne (1883-1967) was a radical architect who sought basic principles as fervently as his mentor Frank Lloyd Wright and his inspiration Louis Sullivan, forging an individual style with taut planar skins enveloping modern space plans. In 1922 he designed the first modern Catholic church building, St. Thomas the Apostle in Chicago, and in 1924 he traveled to Europe where he met Mies, Mendelsohn, Oud, and other modernist architects there. He was the only Prairie School architect to build in Europe, designing the concrete Church of Christ the King, built in 1928-31 in Cork, Ireland. A dedicated modernist and progressive Catholic, Byrne concentrated for much of his career on Catholic churches and schools throughout North America, many of them now considered landmarks. This book charts the entire length of Byrne's work, highlighting its distinctive features while discussing the cultural conditions that kept Byrne in the shadows of his more famous contemporaries. Illustrated by more than one hundred photographs and drawings, this biography explores the interplay of influences and impulses--individualism and communalism, modernism and tradition, pragmatism and faith--enduring throughout Byrne's life and work."--

 

 

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