The influence of Frank Lloyd Wright was strong on Tom Beeby as he grew up in Oak Park near Chicago, also that of Colin Rowe and John Hejduk when he was an undergraduate at Cornell, of Vincent Scully when he went to Yale, and of Gene Summers during the six years when he worked for C.F. Murphy Associates in Chicago. In 1971 he formed a practice with Jim Hammond, and in 1977 they were joined by Bernard Babka. In 1975 he became a founder member of the Chicago Seven group, which sought to re-examine architectural thinking and to free it from the standard commercial basis of most architecture in Chicago. The group organised a number of exhibitions including "Late Entries To The Chicago Tribune Tower Competition" 1980. Architects worldwide were invited to do drawings which followed the format of the original 1923 competition.
In 1980 Beeby became Director of the School of Architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has written many articles and the work of the partnership has been widely published and has received many awards.
In his talk, Beeby maintains that though architects today are still part of the Modern era in terms of materials and techniques available for construction, they must learn to use these in a more evocative way than before, and he spells out scales of interpretation he has dealt with regarding images in his work in the northern climate.
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