ON THE BANKS of Lake Michigan some weeks ago, a scrum of international journalists huddled inside an open-air pavilion designed by the Providence, Rhode Island–based architecture office Ultramoderne. Constructed for the inaugural Chicago Architecture Biennial (CAB), and winner of the biennial’s competition for an off-site kiosk, Chicago Horizon consisted of a roof made from the largest commercially transportable unit of timber—a cross-laminated slab fully fifty-six feet square—hoisted atop slender, angled pilotis to produce a kind of lumberjack’s homage to Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona

The fabulist and inveterate drifter Joseph Yoakum was known to claim that he had traveled the world as a circus man, a soldier, and a train porter during the first six or so decades of his life. In 1962, at the age of seventy-one, he took up drawing and began working out of a storefront gallery on Chicago’s South Side, quickly becoming the self-taught paragon of the city’s art community. Yoakum’s visionary landscapes had an especially profound impact on the developing visual styles of the Chicago Imagists, who were rising to international prominence in the late ’60s (and who made him an honorary