The Pig and the Skyscraper: Chicago: A History of Our Future

Like a cross between Philip Marlowe and Walter Benjamin, Marco dEramo stalks the streets of Chicago, leaving no myth unturned. Maintaining a Europeans detached gaze, he slowly comes to recognize the familiar stink of modernity that blows across the Windy City, the origins of whose greatness (the slaughterhouses, the railroads, the lumber and cereal-crop trades) are by now ancient history, and where what rears its head today is already scheduled for tomorrows chopping block.

Chicago has been the stage for some of modernitys key episodes: the birth of the skyscraper, the rise of urban sociology, the worlds first atomic reactor, the hard-nosed monetarism of the Chicago School. Here in this postmodern Babel, where the contradictions of American society are writ large, dEramo bears witness to the revolutionary, subversive power of capitalism at its purest.