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Christian Narkiewicz-Laine


Christian Narkiewicz-Laine (June 3, 1952) is a Finnish / Lithuanian / American architect, architecture critic, journalist, painter, sculptor, writer, poet, human and civil rights activist and fierce advocate of for peace and social justice.

He is the Founding President of the Chicago Athenaeum Museum of Architecture and Design based in Chicago, Illinois.

Christian was born in Colorado Springs, Colorado, USA. He is of Finnish and Lithuanian descent-also holding a triple citizenship status- and grew up in Europe and the United States while his mother Charlotte-Narkiewicz Laine, who came from one of Eastern Europe's leading aristocratic families: Jodko-Narkiewicz, Kaciuciewicz, and Radziwill, had been a social activist who made continuous efforts towards societal growth and justice. His grandmother was a student of medicine in St. Petersburg and lived in the Imperial household of Czar Nicholas II where her sister was the Imperial nurse to the czarevich. The family produced a multitude of army generals, doctors, scientists, writers, revolutionaries, and artists during the Russian Empire. At birth, Narkiewicz-Laine was registered as a citizen of Finland. Christian Narkiewicz-Laine studied architecture at the University of Strasbourg in France and later archaeology at the American School of Archaeology in Athens, Greece. In 1973, he returned to the States and studied art history at Lake Forest College, Illinois. In addition, in 1977, he enrolled at the Evanston Art Center, where he studied printing techniques, engraving, and etching.

After finishing his studies, he engaged in spreading the word on good design and to never building anything larger than a shoebox. To this end, his early career since 1977 involved being an editor, journalist, critic, consultant, teacher, curator working at various times for the American Institute of Architects, New Art Examiner, Crit magazine, Inland Architect and the Illinois Institute of Technology.

Christian Narkiewicz-Laine was the first architecture critic to be hired at the Chicago Sun-Times where he wrote a weekly column on national architecture, design, preservation and art. At that time, Bertrand Goldberg, the famous Chicago Architect wrote a letter to James Hoge, then publisher of the Chicago Sun-Times, to hire him as the newspaper’s first architecture critic. Narkiewicz-Laine agreed to the position in 1978. Goldberg later told the Chicago Tribune: “Christian is a strange combination of architectural historian, urban moralist and urban philosopher.”

At the Chicago Sun-Times, Narkiewicz-Laine stirred up criticism with controversy. He panned the new buildings by Chicago's leading modernists: Bruce Graham, Myron Goldsmith, and Walter Netsch, stating their works were rigid, brutal, and void of any humanism or context. Narkiewicz-Laine complained that the Sears Tower did not have a front door (ten years later, a front door was added). In the new Addition to the Art Institute of Chicago, Narkiewicz-Laine wrote that Walter Netsch's staircases, set a diagonal, "gave me vertigo" (the staircases were subsequently ripped out). When I.M. Pei's New National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. opened, Narkiewicz-Laine wrote an article that compared the new Washington art museum to the also recently opened Georges Pompidou in Beaubourg, Paris. Narkiewiz-Laine wrote: The French got a People's Palace; we got an airport".


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