[1] Gapp's stock in trade was reporting on and analyzing urban architecture, both as a design form and also as a political and social force in the life of Chicago.
"[1] "I do not challenge the integrity of any of these people, who will soon begin quietly stacking one informal decision on top of another," Gapp wrote about Navy Pier in 1989.
"I fear, however, that some of them have no comprehension of the old-fashioned value system that gave Chicago and other cities their great parks, waterfront promenades and other centers of summertime entertainment.
Furthermore, too many people have been brainwashed into believing that big business is unfailingly capable of enhancing urban life if it is allowed to build enough colorful bazaars offer fancy consumer goods and services.
"[4] However, he generally criticized Chicago's building boom of the 1980s, writing just before his death that "large numbers of nondescript, mediocre, and uncomely buildings dominated the rest of the boom, including most of the late additions to the banal Illinois Center complex east of Michigan Avenue....Reviewing the burst of downtown growth in the last decade, then, one can only declare that the unevenness of design quality has been sharply disappointing.
He called the then-new Marriott Hotel "a touch of crass" whose four-story atrium lobby contained "enough jammed-in furniture to accommodate the 82d Airborne Division in full battle dress.