One long, bright August evening in 2006, Michael Rakowitz and I met on the South Side of Chicago to watch the Yankees play the White Sox. It seemed the most fitting way to celebrate Rakowitz's move to Chicago after a life largely spent in New York, since both of us love baseball and he is a lifelong Yankees fan. From our seats high above home plate we had a great view of the whole field. We relished the aesthetics of the game - not just the moments of athletic grace but also the poetry within minutiae: the awkward stances of some batters; the fielders' strategic shifts of position over the course of an inning; the perfect wrist-flick that seals the double play. Those upper-deck seats also gave us a view out to the urban surroundings that butt up against the perfectly manicured world of the stadium. Just past the bleachers and scoreboard we could glimpse the Robert Taylor Homes, a block of high-rise flats that was being demolished as part of a controversial plan to relocate the impoverished residents of Chicago's publichousing projects to mixed-income sites around the city. One of the largest projects built during the mid-century public-housing boom in the US, the Taylor Homes were meant to provide access to pleasant, affordable apartments within a stable community. They now typify both the promise and the collapse of that particular utopian vision.

It may seem odd to begin a text on drawing by juxtaposing baseball and public housing, but all three are crucial to Rakowitz's work. Sports stadiums and housing projects express an impulse toward societal self-improvement on a grand scale, so it makes sense