For more than 30 years Prairie Avenue Bookshop had been a staple of the architectural and design community. It also had a global outreach with its vast online catalog of books on architecture and design. As of September the largest architectural bookstore in the world closed its doors due to the high cost of doing business in Downtown Chicago and poor sales. The story of the beloved bookstore began when the owners Marylin and Wilbert Hasbrouck founded the Prairie Avenue School Press in 1961 to reprint Louis Sullivan’s “A System of Architectural Ornament.”
In the early 1980s, Prairie Avenue Bookshop was one of the first independent bookstores to adopt computers, shipping books around the globe, thus establishing itself as the premier architectural bookstore in the world. By the late 1980s, Prairie Avenue became a meeting place for avante garde and mainstream architects as well as architectural historians. The bookshop includes furniture designed by Frank Loyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, and Joseph Hoffman. The closing of this venerable bookshop is symptomatic of the way this digital age has affected and transformed the publishing business. Prairie Avenue Bookshop shall be sadly missed.
Add your comment below, or trackback from your own site.
Subscribe to these comments.