Editor's Note, June 3, 2019: Stanley Tigerman has died at age 88. RECORD remembers the "Mr. Chicago," revisiting a 2015 interview with the architect about his hometown and its place in architectural culture.

The godfather of the Chicago architectural community, Stanley Tigerman, 85, has long played a historic role in the city’s practice, education, and culture. Although he went east to Yale University for his B.Arch (1960) and M.Arch (1961), Tigerman returned to his hometown in 1962 and established his office. In 1982, he and his wife, Margaret McCurry, merged their offices and renamed the firm Tigerman McCurry Architects. Through the years, Tigerman has helped connect Chicago to the architectural debates occurring in other parts of the country and internationally. In the 1970s, he began arranging exhibitions and conferences aimed at getting Chicago’s younger architects recognized in a city entrenched in the modernist legacy of Mies van der Rohe. He served as the director of the School of Architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago from 1985 to ’93, and cofounded Archeworks in 1994, a student design program with a public service mission. Tigerman’s own architecture has been characterized by a belief in technique, the role of humor and allegory, and a commitment to social concern. Now, with the Chicago Architecture Biennial 2015, organized by the city and the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, opening this month, Tigerman is getting renewed attention. An exhibition of his drawings, 821 Stanley Tigerman Sketches 821, is on view at the Volume Gallery from October 24 to Decem­ber 5. Last month, the architect was one of five Chicagoans in the arts singled out to receive the Fifth Star Awards from the city. Tigerman talked to Architectural Record’s editor in chief, Cathleen McGuigan, and deputy editor Suzanne Stephens about his favorite subject: Chicago.