The Highs and Lows of “Inland Architect”

“A true test of success for a company, a project, a marriage and yes, even a city or a magazine, is the ability to withstand the test of time—adapting to changes but still remaining true to yourself and your original concept of belief.” It was 1999, and the editors of Inland Architect were introducing an issue inspired (or so they said) by the philosophy of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown’s Learning from Las Vegas. The editors were also speaking about the changes to the publication. After a 116-year history full of complicated iterations, the publication was changing again after a few years under the ownership of the Real Estate News Corporation, publishers of New Accountant and Chicago Bride. “Although we will continue to include floor plans and critical reviews, we will now include more photo spreads and features—ones that will spark your imagination to create your own dreamhouse, workspace or garden,” continued editor Margaret Guzek in Volume 116, Number 1. The issue included plentiful photo spreads for bathroom fixtures, ads for luxury swimming pool design companies, and an unironic feature on celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck’s new upscale restaurant inside the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas. Inland Architect, it seemed, was slipping into the full capitalist gloss of a trade publication.

The adaptation that Inland Architect had announced it would embark upon in 1999 would not stand the test of time. Only two more issues would go to print before the publication disappeared. Twenty-seven years later, in 2026, Real Estate News Corporation continues to maintain Inland Architect’s nameplate on an outdated website. The company is headquartered within a nondescript West Peterson Avenue office building on Chicago’s Far Northwest Side, sharing the structure with a home health care company called Divine Providence. The phone number listed for Real Estate News Corporation is disconnected, and current and former emails to Inland Architect’s last publisher, Steven Polydoris, have gone unanswered.

For those who have watched the quality of daily newspapers flounder under the ownership of hedge funds, or vital, discipline-shaping specialty publications be cannibalized by global mass media companies, the dive that Inland Architect took is both sad and familiar. Inland Architect established sharp critical writing as a way in which architecture was understood in Chicago and the Midwest. The publication provided a runway for architects, journalists, historians, and critics to write about projects in their communities and the work of their peers, and to clarify their values and beliefs on the profession. Inland Architect—architecture journalism’s versions of both Divine Providence and Divine Intervention—was resurrected by institutional support, thanks to the likes of the Chicago Chapter of the American Institute of Architects, bankrolled by the influential architect Harry Weese, and then reimagined through the creation of a nonprofit, which turned the publication into a mighty force. Under financial duress, it was sold to a publisher heavy on arrogance and low on experience before slipping away quietly after existing in various forms within the regional zeitgeist since 1883. For most of its lives, Inland Architect embraced the provocative longform essay, tart critique, and keen analysis that Chicago architecture and the Midwest deserved.

“Architects and Builders throughout the West will confer a great favor on the Editor of this Journal by sending him news pertaining to the craft in their section of the country, particularly items of new buildings,” wrote the publishers of a new monthly periodical, called Inland Architect and Builder, in 1883. The editor, Robert Craik McLean, put out what amounted to a search for press releases; as Chicago was rebuilding after the Great Fire of 1871, and cities like Detroit, Des Moines, and Milwaukee were growing, Inland Architect found no shortage of new architecture projects to cover.

Within the pages of the first year’s issues were articles written by some of Chicago and the Midwest’s most well-known architects, as well as pieces on the art, science, and business of architecture. It also cast a special eye towards Chicago as the center and capital of the Inland of the Midwest, or just simply “West,” as the region was called in the late nineteenth century. The inaugural issues feature a multipart essay on the history of Chicago architecture by William Le Baron Jenney and published Irving K. Pond’s detailed observations during a trip to Seville, Spain, complete with field sketches of the Moorish architecture he visited. Plates of illustrations of the newest designs for architecture across the Midwest were also published, alongside a “personal gossip” section completely lacking salaciousness, and with all of the restraint of the 1880s: “Architect J.M. Van Osdel has left the city to spend a few days in Pennsylvania, and will visit the beautiful lake of Chatauqua, in Chatauqua County, N.Y., the birthplace of his wife,” reported the August 1883 issue of the Inland Architect and Builder.¹ Innovations in material applications and use were also covered, like in the section “Lumber Notes.” Inland Architect published a list of patents related to the architecture profession—everything from window sash balances to toilets. Architects like W.W. Boyington submitted drawings of proposed or completed projects, as did Chicago Workers Cottage-designer Cicero Hine. The resulting published images provide a window into the era’s design trends, but also how buildings and places—both new and old—were communicated through the practice of hand-drawn elevations and floorplans. This emphasis on the visual aspects of architecture lead to the publication of drawings created by members of the Chicago Architectural Sketch Club, which would later be renamed The Chicago Architectural Club.

In 1884, Inland Architect issued a call to form a Western association of architects. Separate from the American Institute of Architects (AIA) and established in 1857, the professional organization that formed, the Western Association of Architects (WAA), would provide an alternative to the AIA for architects practicing in the western and southern states who felt snubbed by the AIA’s focus on the East Coast. Inland Architect then became the “official organ” of the WAA, reporting on the organization’s discussions about the profession, including a push to regulate architecture as a matter of public safety. In February 1887, Inland Architect adjusted its nameplate, becoming The Inland Architect and News Record. In 1904 McLean turned over publishing to Porter, Taylor & Company, who operated out of an office in the Pontiac Building at 542 South Dearborn Street in Chicago. Porter, Taylor & Company broadened Inland Architect’s coverage to focus on architecture outside of the Midwest.

By 1908, Inland Architect and News Record was a monthly publication, boosted by the availability of photography as a means to document architecture. The December 1908 issue featured exterior and interior photos of Frank Lloyd Wright’s brand-new Unity Temple in Oak Park, Illinois. This issue also featured an article titled “Business System for Architects” by architect Emory Stanford Hall, which considered the economics of running a small architecture firm. The December 1908 issue of Inland Architect and News Record would be the last, as an announcement on the title page stated that the publication would be merged with The American Architect, a publication founded in 1876 that reported on architecture stories nationwide.

Inland Architect’s first twenty-five years captured and recorded Chicago’s legacy as a center for American architecture, including the development and refinement of the skyscraper, the building occurring around the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition, and the integration of modern technology, like fireproofing and electrification into the building arts. The 1883–1908 iteration of Inland Architect provided a wealth of information for historians to draw from as they researched the architecture of the Chicago School, whether from the perspective of broadening an understanding of its importance or advocating for its preservation.

Then, after a nearly fifty-year hiatus, Inland Architect miraculously returned in September 1957 with Volume 1, Number 1. Inland Architect, “The magazine of inland area building and planning,” was published by the Chicago Chapter of the American Institute of Architects (CCAIA). On the cover of the issue, titled “Chicago builds 1893 and today,” was an illustration of Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler’s Transportation Building alongside a brand-new building: Harry Weese’s “Chicago Style” apartments at 227 East Walton Place. The first issue of the resurrected publication included an essay on Inland Architect’s roots. “In the Inland Architect and Builder the Midwest had a voice to build by, and a guide post past the dictates of taste. It was many things. It was chatty and pointed. Sparkling, salient samples came from the pens of the local famed and not-so-famed. Jenny, Adler, Root, Sullivan, Pond, and even the grand old man of the local scene Van Osdel wrote copiously on history, interior decorating, building costs or new developments, all with appropriate familiarity.”² History and familiarity seemed to be the primary driver regarding resurrecting the name. The first issue featured a photo spread of new buildings by A. Epstein & Sons, Perkins & Will, and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, an essay on city planning in the Chicago metropolitan region, and descriptions of new products, including an intercommunication system called the “Talk-A-Phone.” Included in the issue was a letter from then-Mayor Richard J. Daley, congratulating CCAIA. “Inland Architect will carry on in a great Chicago architectural tradition.”³

The CCAIA iteration of Inland Architect, which replaced the chapter’s own internal publication, reported on current events in architecture and covered new buildings. Architects like Bruce Graham wrote critical essays, as did Harry Weese, who wrote regularly, and over time, would take on a bigger role. Because of its affiliation with the Chicago AIA chapter, Inland Architect was influenced by the AIA, and the publication naturally devoted a lot of space towards chapter meetings, events, and member news. In 1971, the CCAIA and Inland Architect moved from their office at 221 North LaSalle Street into the John Jacob Glessner House, which had been acquired by the Chicago School of Architecture Foundation (now the Chicago Architecture Center) in 1966. In 1972, Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois (now Landmarks Illinois) moved into the Glessner House, and a year later, the National Trust for Historic Preservation established a Midwest office within the building. The joining of these organizations under one roof allowed information to be shared generously between them and likely gave Inland Architect access to individuals with complex and nuanced opinions about architecture in Chicago, particularly in terms of preservation. In-depth articles on subjects related to architectural advocacy, including the effort to preserve Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan’s Auditorium Theater in 1973, were covered from both the perspective of those in support of preservation, and those opposed as a matter of impeding urban progress.

By 1975, Inland Architect had lessened its relationship with the Chicago Chapter of the AIA, in part through the establishment of a board of trustees, and financial assistance from Harry Weese, who sat on the publication’s board.

The masthead for the September 1975, Volume 19, Number 9 issue of Inland Architect indicates the editor as Mortan William Newman, who was then an urban affairs reporter for the Chicago Daily News. Among the contributing editors were Chicago Tribune architecture critic Paul Gapp and Linda Legner, who wrote landmark designations for the Commission on Chicago Landmarks in the 1970s and 1980s. These editors and writers provided support for the publication’s reportage on innovations in solar design, establishment shakers like the Chicago Seven, and the design and construction of iconic Chicago buildings like Lake Point Tower.

In 1978, Harry Weese assumed financial responsibility for Inland Architect, taking the publication over from the Chicago Chapter of the AIA. In 1979 Inland Architect began publication under a new nonprofit called Inland Architect Press. Speaking to Betty Bloom in an oral history interview for the Chicago Architects Oral History Project in 2001, Weese spoke on the acquisition of Inland Architect: “I used to believe that–at least I pretended to believe–those that can, do. So that’s one of the reasons that I picked up Inland Architect when it was about to become an orphan.”⁴

In 1982, Inland Architect pivoted yet again. The publication lessened its frequency, evolving into a bimonthly magazine. Inland Architect moved from the Glessner House to 10 West Hubbard Street, where the publication shared space with Harry Weese Associates. Inland Architect, now “the Midwestern Magazine of the Building Arts,” expanded in page count, and the publication would now feature more photos, plans, elevations, and advertisements for regional businesses.

Under Weese’s management and patronage, Inland Architect, now arguably in its hundredth year, began to flourish like never before. The publication began embracing more women in writing and design roles and added to its board of directors architect Gertrude Lempp Kerbis. The writing also took a bigger, spicier bite out of architecture. Liberated from institutional support, the publication took shots—both cheap and expensive—at the architectural establishment. The work of individual architects and designers was considered more critically, as were academic appointments at architecture schools and hiring decisions within municipal departments. A regular section, Inlandscape, provided short articles on architecture news and opinions, while long-form essays unrolled complex issues. Preservation was a priority in Inland Architect, and the pages were filled with it. As the City of Chicago embarked on the Chicago Historic Resources Survey—a citywide survey for potential landmarks—Kevin Lee Sarring, an architect in the office of Harry Weese & Associates, covered the work.

In 1983, a hundred years to the month since the first issue of Inland Architect had been published, writer and critic Cynthia Davidson was hired as editor. To determine a path forward for this new position, Davidson went to Chicago’s Newberry Library, which had in its collections the bound 1883–1908 iteration of Inland Architect. “I started looking at them,” shares Davidson in a phone interview, “and I said, ‘look at this, it’s just the architects themselves who were writing.’”⁵ Hired by Harry Weese himself, who fired the previous editor to hire Davidson, Davidson gave Weese the last page of the magazine to write about whatever he wished. Davidson would encourage other architects, of firms both large and small, to write articles, to write about their colleague’s projects, and to collaborate with each other.

During the height of the Modern versus Postmodern debate, Inland Architect played off of the factions. “We had a real exchange going on in the magazine,” says Davidson. Differences of opinions were often printed within the same issue.

“We couldn’t have known it at the time, but Inland Architect occurred during this very fertile period of architectural discourse,” shares Philip Bess, a former contributor, now Professor of Architecture and Department Chair of the Architecture Program at Judson University, in a phone interview.⁶ Bess, then an architect early in his career, teamed up with fellow architect Howard Decker to write a column called the “Chicago Architecture Police.” Together, their column interrogated buildings, exhibits, and even the critique process at architecture schools. Howard Decker describes Inland Architect as providing an opportunity for younger professionals to engage with architects of an older generation, both in print and in person. Decker, who would later serve as Chief Curator of the National Building Museum in Washington D.C., elaborates in a phone interview, “there was not a lot of precedent for that before the 1980s, and Inland Architect was a part of the vehicle for that.”⁷

During Davidson’s eight-year tenure, Inland Architect’s circulation would grow. “By the time I left, [circulation] was almost 10,000. People were subscribing from New York, from Canada. Suddenly Inland Architect was something.” Yet Davidson kept the magazine focused and contained on the Midwest. “The only way I would cover the work of New York architects, or LA architects, is if they were building in the Great Lakes States,” Davidson continues. When a Loeb Fellowship necessitated Cynthia Davidson to temporarily step away from her position as editor in 1988, architect Anders Nereim stepped in. In a phone interview, Nereim illustrates the importance of the format of Inland Architect during the heyday of the magazine, prior to the prevalence of the internet, which had the ability to cover topical subjects.⁸ “Magazines were where all of the intellectual stuff was,” shares Nereim. “Books were there, of course, but books came out slowly.” The founding director of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Master of Architecture program, Nereim saw Chicago as a place where the practice of architecture and writing about it could flourish simultaneously, with Inland Architect as the vehicle to make that exchange happen. “Build and talk,” shares Nereim, referencing a saying attributed to Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, “not Build, don’t talk.”

While the writing in Inland Architect increased in quality as the publication gained institutional autonomy, the publication relied heavily on the support of Harry Weese. According to his brother Ben, Harry Weese spent “about forty grand a year on [Inland Architect]; it was his hobbyhorse.”⁹

In 1991 Inland Architect celebrated thirty-five years of continuous publication—its longest run yet—as Harry Weese detached himself financially and concluded his yearslong stint as board chairman. The hiring of Richard Solomon, a Chicago-based architect who had written for the magazine, as editor in 1991 ushered in another era for Inland Architect as a critical journal. Inland Architect, however, would have to work harder without financial backing, relying on grantmaking institutions, fundraising, and its nearly hundred-year-old name. Despite the financial challenges, the next three year’s worth of issues were superb. Inland Architect had reached a confluence of forward movement, creativity, and the right personnel to write, edit, and design the magazine, along with compelling topics.

While Inland Architect had always looked at its readership as one of architecture insiders, a combination of attractive graphic design and a writing style that both focused on and reflected architecture for a broader audience made it more accessible, and less of a niche publication. The Inland Architect of the 1980s and 1990s was not unlike the way in which publications like Vogue or Rolling Stone are not exclusively for people who are in the fashion industry or musicians, but for people who are interested in these topics because they are intriguing and are looking for content that is descriptive and smart. While readers including architecture offices, schools, and institutions subscribed to Inland Architect, it was also available at local architecture bookstores, including the Chicago Architecture Foundation and Prairie Avenue Bookshop, and at Kroch’s & Brentano’s, a local Chicago bookstore. Inland Architect’s vernacular characteristics and high quality made it easy to find not only in the office of some of the biggest architecture firms in the Midwest, but also in the waiting room of your doctor or dentist’s office.

The Inland Architect of the 1980s and 1990s provides a document of how Chicago, and much of the Midwest, was building with an eye towards the new millennium. Writers and editors provided criticism of not only the design of some of Chicago’s highest profile new projects, like the James R. Thompson Center, the conception of a 1992 World’s Fair in Chicago, the Harold Washington Library, the Museum of Contemporary Art, and the design for new sports stadiums, but each essay took its time to provide a historical perspective, strengthening its argument. During the peak of Postmodernism, Inland Architect considered the style’s historical context and the resulting buildings. Trends like the commercialization of River North were examined, and interrogated. “What we do is to try to treat architecture as not a fad or fashion. It’s a substantial and enduring fine art, and we take seriously our mission of marking building development and its consequences in in-depth, thoughtful reviews,” shared Richard Solomon in a 1992 article on Inland Architect for the Chicago Tribune.¹⁰

The writers of this era were practicing architects, subject matter experts, and insiders of the discipline who would continue their careers in architecture as journalists, critics, educators, and designers. Architecture critic Blair Kamin would write for Inland Architect as a contributor beginning in 1988, when he was reporting for the Chicago Tribune’s suburban Hinsdale Bureau. “Cynthia Davidson needed people to write feature stories, news stories and critiques, and I was thrilled to have the opportunity to jump in at a publication like that,” shares Kamin in a phone interview.¹¹ Like many of the contributors of Inland Architect, Kamin wrote about what was in his own backyard—projects that would have otherwise not been given a critical viewpoint. Kamin points to his own coverage of Helmut Jahn’s Oakbrook Terrace Tower, in Oakbrook Terrace, Illinois, as one example of this, and a feature on the installation of Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen’s sculpture Spoonbridge and Cherry in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden in Minneapolis as another. “The East Coast publications simply didn’t have the bandwidth to write about the Midwest as much as Inland Architect did,” shares Kamin. “So you would get stories about Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Minneapolis, and they would be written by very well-informed, sophisticated architecture critics from those cities.”

Inland Architect was able to withstand the test of time, and the editorial quality remained sharp, but a recession in the architecture and building trades beginning in the early 1990s diminished the ability for subscribers like architecture and engineering offices to continue paying for the magazine. In October 1993, Inland Architect announced that it would suspend publication, placing the September-October issue on hold indefinitely until the publication could find a buyer that would be able to manage its debt. Blair Kamin, then the architecture critic for the Chicago Tribune, covered this troubling time in the life of the magazine, reporting its debts in 1994 to be around $150,000.¹² Earlier that year, McGraw-Hill Inc., publisher of Architectural Record, had been in discussion with Inland Architect’s board of trustees to purchase the publication, but ultimately ruled the purchase out. While the Illinois Institute of Technology was interested in acquiring Inland Architect to continue its legacy, the university ultimately decided against it, having no experience in magazine publishing. Other universities with architecture schools, including the University of Illinois and Washington University in St. Louis, expressed interest, but were ultimately unable to manage the publication logistically, or carry the debt.

In January 1994, Real Estate News Corporation, owned by Steven Polydoris, reached a deal to buy Inland Architect. Real Estate News Corporation would assume Inland Architect’s debt; a last resort decision to save the magazine.¹³ The publication’s staff did not stay on, but the board remained to advise the publication as it embarked on yet another adaptation.

Inland Architect 3.0, or perhaps even 4.0, had excessive complications. Polydoris didn’t see the value of the magazine’s long-form essays, believing them to be too academic for the version of the magazine that he would now be running. The board and Polydoris clashed on editorial content, and despite the board’s pleas that Polydoris hire someone with experience in architectural journalism, he allowed the editor of Real Estate News Corporation’s four other publications to also serve as editor of Inland Architect, resulting in editorial content that relied heavily on advertisements and the regurgitation of press releases.¹⁴ The delayed September-October 1993 issue of the magazine, a special on affordable housing compiled by the previous team, became a January-February 1994 issue. By June 1994, a tentatively titled “Spring” issue had not been released, and Polydoris was keeping the board in the dark on what was next. In 1995, Inland Architect Press was dissolved as a nonprofit, and the board was no more. A year earlier, board member Stanley Allan snarled at Polydoris in an article in the Chicago Reader: “It’s his bloody magazine now.”¹⁵

According to reporting in the Chicago Tribune from 1994, the contract transferring ownership of the magazine from Inland Architect Press to Real Estate News Corporation contained a provision stipulating that Inland Architect and its assets, including its subscription list, will revert to Inland Architect Press if Real Estate News Corporation decided to stop publishing the magazine. Yet, today, Inland Architect Press no longer exists, and Real Estate News Corporation has not published Inland Architect since 1999. Whether the publication ceased to produce new issues due to challenges internally or externally is one that can only be answered by Steven Polydoris—who remains out of reach.

Remaining true to yourself includes much more than carrying on a name. Inland Architect’s end is a reprehensible rejection of the effort put forth by significant individuals in architecture who continued its heritage, name, and commitment to regional architecture. The end of Inland Architect is also reprehensible in terms of its content. Inland Architect stated clearly that the things that Chicago and the Midwest was building, thinking about, and writing about, mattered in the past, like they matter in the present. During its first iteration, from 1883 until 1908, it chronicled the rise of the Chicago School and its architects as a force within American architecture and positioned Chicago as one of its most important cities. During its second iteration, from 1957 to 1978, it documented architecture as a profession in the mid-twentieth century, as the discipline was beginning to consider how policies and the civic realm influenced everything from design to construction. From 1979 to 1993—its most impactful years—Inland Architect provided a blueprint for other independent architectural magazines, journals, and platforms to follow in terms of reportage and criticism. The magazine proved that regional long-form architectural journalism, a typology that daily newspapers, regurgitated press releases, and artificial intelligence cannot ever provide with meaning, had value to people in the profession of architecture, those that are outside of it or adjacent to it, and those who are interested in architecture as a hobby or diversion. Inland Architect is a historic model for contemporary platforms as a way in which those platforms have the ability to create a legacy of topical thought and content in the virtual realm, but its physical appeal—a publication you can pick up, thumb through and read at your own pace without the distractions of your phone, computer or tablet, reflecting ambient light from its pages—is one that has value in the tech anxiety of our contemporary era.

Yet in physical or digital form, it is not easy to get one’s hands on the complete Inland Architect. While the 1883 to 1908 iteration of Inland Architect is digitized and available online on various websites, including the Smithsonian Libraries, the publication’s later iterations are harder to come by. The Internet Archive contains a cache of issues from 1957 to 1961—the meatier years of the publication under the management of the Chicago Chapter of the American Institute of Architects—but later issues, including those from the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s are not digitized in any open access archive. Later news articles on Inland Architect date from the era when Real Estate News Corporation purchased the publication, but the investigation does not continue, even to cover the end of the publication in 1999. The internet is largely devoid of content on Inland Architect generally as a topic or by individual issues, and the more recent an issue is, the less of a digital trail it has—a pattern that often mirrors information on architectural history of the same era. Inland Architect’s lack of a digital presence might be the result of Real Estate News Corporation’s disinterest in making the publication’s archive available online as a free resource. It is worth questioning how much of that archive is even the property of Real Estate News Corporation when the publication under its name had so many iterations, including a nonprofit no longer in existence.

It’s impossible to know if this disinterest is due to a lack of compensation offered by those who believe that Inland Architect has a value to the discipline of architecture if available digitally, or the kind of resource hoarding that is all too prevalent in terms of primary or secondary source research, or archives of information that do not belong to collecting institution, but one unreachable individual. This lack of digitization has led to an absence of awareness of the significance of Inland Architect, but also the lack of availability of the publication as a research tool for architectural historians and scholars.

Inland Architect remains most accessible in its analog state. The publication is available in its entirety within the Art Institute of Chicago’s Ryerson & Burnham Archives, yet accessing it requires an awareness of the archive’s procedures. The most comprehensive archive of Inland Architect, luckily, belongs to the civic realm—and the people of Chicago. The Chicago Public Library’s main branch has the earliest issues on their shelves, but in 1957, the branch paid for a subscription of Inland Architect and continued to receive the magazine for the next fifty years, until it was no longer published. On the eighth floor, within the closed stacks of the architecture section, each issue is bound by year. Seeing the physical publication of Inland Architect transform from a twenty-five-page black and white periodical to a colorful, bound magazine of over a hundred pages is an experience in time, and the history of architectural journalism. While the physical copies lack the searchability of an online database, they are all there, in every iteration.

The legacy of Inland Architect is one that is twofold. It is a publication that documented not only what was being built in a region during a critical period, but how what was being built was understood by the culture around it. Yet Inland Architect’s quiet ending, coupled with the era in which it ended—just before the internet would proliferate—has led to Inland Architect being overlooked. It is a historical record that narrowly missed the digital age that has not yet had the opportunity to be embraced by it or by differing generations of practitioners across architecture. Providing the broadest possible access to Inland Architect would allow its content to be democratized. In the process, it could invigorate research and appreciation of an era of architecture—and architectural criticism and journalism—that flourished on the page.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Philip Bess, Howard Decker, Cynthia Davidson, Blair Kamin, Anders Nereim, and Jonathan Solomon for sharing their perspectives.