Jean Guarino, Ph.D. has over twenty years of experience working as an independent architectural historian, a career that was sparked in 1996 when she was awarded the Sally Kress Tompkins Fellowship from the Society of Architectural Historians. This allowed her to spend a summer in Philadelphia where she served as project historian on a team preparing Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) documentation of the 1848 Church of St. James the Less.
She has extensive expertise in the preparation of landmark nomination reports, HABS reports, and architectural surveys and studies for buildings/structures/landscapes undertaken on behalf of a wide range of clients. Her experience exceeds the Secretary of the Interior’s Professional Qualifications Standards in Architectural History.
Jean has a B.A. from St. Mary’s College in Notre Dame Indiana and spent a year of her undergraduate studies living in Angers, France, where she attended the Universite Catholique de l’Ouest. She received both her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Chicago. The focus of her doctoral studies was twentieth-century architecture and urbanism. Jean has a deep understanding of the urban development of both large and mid-size cities as a result of research conducted for her dissertation, “Urban Renewal in the Interwar Era: The Remaking of Chicago’s Loop, 1918 to 1942.”
Jean co-authored a book with John Zukowsky titled, Benjamin H. Marshall, Chicago Architect (Acanthus Press, 2016), which profiles a prolific early twentieth-century architect/developer, whose notable buildings include Chicago’s Drake Hotel and luxury apartment buildings along adjacent East Lake Shore Drive. For the book, Art Deco Chicago: Designing Modern America (Yale University Press, 2018), she contributed essays on the following 1920s skyscrapers: Palmolive Building, Chicago Motor Club, Merchandise Mart, Carbide and Carbon Building, Civic Opera Building, Field Building.
Jean served as a lecturer at The School of the Art Institute from 2004 to 2009, where she taught the required Archival Documentation course in the Historic Preservation Program. She later taught a Survey of Design History course in the SAIC’s Art History Department from 2016-18, which provided a chronological review of major movements and themes in the history of modern design from the late nineteenth-century to the present. She has given lectures on a variety of topics related to urban environment on behalf of Landmarks Illinois, the Chicago Architecture Foundation, the Union League Club, and the University Club of Chicago.
Consulting work has also included serving as a researcher and sole fact-checker for 10 That Changed America, a series of television documentary films about the buildings, homes, parks, towns, streets, monuments, and engineering marvels that reflect our nation’s history. The series was produced by WTTW Channel 11 in Chicago from 2013 to 2018 and aired on Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) stations. Information on the series, presented by Geoffrey Baer and produced by Dan Protess, can be found via this link: https://interactive.wttw.com/ten