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This Thursday, March 22, is logjam day, with Gustavo Araoz, president of the International Council on Monuments and Sites, lecturing on The 20th Century and Other Gaps in the World Heritage List: A Unique Opportunity for the U.S., at Lightology, while over at the Chicago Yacht Club, the Institute of Classical Architecture and Art Chicago-Midwest is sponsoring a lecture by classicist scholar David Watkin, Emeritus Professor of the History of Architecture at the University of Cambridge, who will discuss Classical Language Past and Present.
Meanwhile, at Frank Lloyd Wright's Unity Temple in Oak Park, Richard Cahan will be discussing his splendid new book, The Lost Panoramas, taken from a massive collection of glass-plate negatives taken between 1894 and 1928 documenting the effects, from the Loop to rural Illinois, of reversing the flow of the Chicago River.
On Wednesday the 21st, Chicago Commissioner of Transportation Gabe Klein talks about Chicago's Transportation Innovations for Lamba Alpha International, Ely Chapter at Petterino's, while over at CAF at lunchtime, Gordon Gill discusses Smith+Gill's design for the new National Museum of Health and Medicine Chicago in what was Rolling Stone Records on Randolph, while at Holy Name Cathedral, APT Western Great Lakes Chapter is sponsoring a discussion of The Collaborative Approach Used to Restore Cluster Columns at the cathedral. Sunday the 25th the Glessner House Museum celebrates the 134th birthday of Frances Glessner Lee with the local premiere of Of Dolls and Murder, a new documentary narrated by John Waters on the pioneering criminologist and her famous Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death.
Starting Tuesday over at Willis Tower, there's a new exhibition, American City: St. Louis Architecture: Three Centuries of Classic Design, featuring 80 photos from the striking book of the same name that we previously wrote about here.
Mies Birthday Party, the Birth of the New East Side, The History of the South Loop, Sam Jacob, Liza Fior and Damon Rich at the Graham, and Juan Herreros at UIC - the hits just keep coming - nearly three dozen still to go - on the March 2012 Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.
Lee Bey is reporting the current owners have decided to give up the fight to save the century-old building from demolition. So, stop by in a week or so and see another monument of Chicago history be ground into dust.
Chicago's St. Patrick's celebration this year will be something we haven't seen for quite some time.
Firstly, it will actually take place on St. Patrick's Day. This year, the 17th falls on a Saturday. The ceremony of the speedboats, turning orange dye to a green river, has an official start time of 10:00 a.m., March 17th, 2012, but arrive early. Best viewing along the river from Columbus Drive to Michigan Avenue. The annual parade kicks off at Columbus and Balbo at noon.
Secondly, for the first time I can remember, it won't be cold and damp. It'll be warm and windy, with a good chance that the all-time record high of 74 will be eclipsed.
We hope to get pictures of this year's edition of all the annual rituals - dyeing the Chicago river green, drinking green beer, wearing green hats, and placing flowers at the statue of Greene Vardiman Black, the father of modern dentistry.
For now, a photo essay from last year. We really liked some of these pictures, although we were the only ones.
Created with flickr slideshow from softsea. move your mouse over the image area to hide and display menus. click on individual images for more options
Booth Hansen's Joffrey Tower (aka MOMO), at State and Randolph, has always struck me as a bit slippery. To be sure, there is some articulation in the center-bay notch, but with the White Chiclet embroidery of the cladding, you get the feeling that without that huge hole in the middle where the base meets the tower, your eyes would simply slide off the building as you try to take it in visually.
This is especially true on the four-story podium, retail on the bottom two floors, the Joffrey Ballet on the top. It's flat, flat, flat, save for the pegs at the top of the first and third floors for securing banners.
What you see above is space with its original tenant Loehmann's. The black color of the banners, loosely strung, clearly read as fabric ribbons hanging from the facade.
Now, Loehmann's has been replaced with sushi-bar Walgreens, and the banners have changed. Wider, more taut and, despite blue tips, mostly white, they now seem an extension of the white cladding, fins emphasizing the vertical. And, for a while at least, it's all topped off with a classical cornice consisting of temporary netting extending out from the fourth-floor roof.
The Hallidie Building, it's not, and the effect will be fleeting, but for the moment, in spite of itself, MOMO has gone a bit retro.
This week, we've got EMA's (and Yale's) Edward Mitchell today, Monday the 12th at UIC, Redesigning Logan Square at AIA Chicago and John Edel at Access Living for Archeworks, tomorrow, Tuesday, the 12th.
On Wednesday, the 13th, the Metropolitan Planning Council has a lunchtime session on Making Fun and Functional Transit Centers, while over at CAF it's museum director Louise Lincoln and Antonovich Associates architect Jeffry P. Mason serving up the new DePaul Art Museum on the menu.
Thursday the 14th is logjam day, with CNU Illinois offering up an all-day conference with three separate workshops on the subject of Redefining Convenience, Landmarks Illinois goes on Strike! with a lunchtime lecture at the Cultural Center on the topic of Chicago's early commercial bowling and billiard halls (please: no wagering), while at 6:00 p.m. at the Art Institute, Barbara Barletta ponders The Parthenon--How Innovative Is It?, and also at 6:00 p.m. at the Columbus Auditorium of the School of the Art Institute, there's an appearance by Berlin-based designer and conceptual artist Jerszy Seymour.
On Friday, Carlos Leite's lecture on Sao Paolo Sustainability Indicators has been cancelled, but author Megan Born will be talking about and signing copies of her new book, Dirt at the Graham Foundation. No, it's not a consideration of the journalistic proclivities of Rupert Murdoch, but "a selection of works that share dirty attitudes: essays, interviews, excavations, and projects that view dirt not as filth but as a medium, a metaphor, a material, a process, a design tool, a narrative, a system."
New Legal Team Could Spare Historic Shepherd's Temple from the Wrecker's Ball
Abundant Life World Outreach, the church's owner, has hired K&L Gates LLC as their new legal team and they are diligently working to vacate the demolition order of the building. One of the conditions of the court is to clean and board up the church.
Join community residents and other stakeholders for:
Shepherd's Temple
Community Clean up Day
Sunday, March 12, 2012
2:00 PM
3411 W. Douglas Boulevard
Chicago, IL
Bring your boots, work gloves, rakes and shovels and help save Shepherd's Temple from the wrecker's ball. Join your friends and neighbors in helping to preserve one of the jewels of North Lawndale. Built in 1913 as Anshe Kenesses Synogogue, the building has served as a church since 1962. In 1965 Martin Luther King spoke on its steps.
We've written before about the this North Lawndale building, forgotten until a city demolition order was issued late last year. That spurred Chicago architect Carey Wintergreen, Lawndale activist Valerie F. Leonard and others to launch an eleventh-hour campaign to save the building, including a petition drive and trips to court to have the order stayed, as a solution to saving the structure can be saved. A detailed analysis report from Hasbrouck, Peterson, Zimoch Sirirattumrong refutes city claims that the structure is any danger of collapse.
photograph: Eric Allix Rogers
In an excellent article by Sharon Lurye in the Chicago Weekly online, historian Robb Packer recounts that Anshe Kanesses was built by Russian Jews as the first and largest of dozen of synagogues that would eventually be constructed on to the west side to serve Lawndale's 125,000 Jewish residents. Lurye's story also has a great set of images by Eric Allix Rogers, so it's worth checking out. Rogers has an even more exhaustive photographic documentation on the current state of building here on his excellent blog reallyboring.net which, despite its title, is a wonderfully interesting personal journal of his photographic journey through Chicago architecture.
As you can see from the photos, the structure is in a very grave state of disappear, but it still offers up remnants that speak eloquently of its former beauty. The memorial tablets you see in the photo were found by Wintergreen and his associates "jammed behind a steel ladder leading to the roof." They've since found a new home at Adas Yeshurun Anshe Kanesses Israel in West Rogers Park.
Much of the heritage of North Lawndale has already been lost. This is the graceful former home to the Hebrew Theological College at 3448 West Douglas Boulevard.
Abandoned for years, it was demolished in 2010.
Wintergreen has talked about making Good Shepherd's a museum documenting the Chicago campaigns of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, who lived in at a nearby building at 1550 South Hamlin - now also demolished - in 1966, and often spoke at Good Shepherd's.
A true city is a continuity, a history carried through its buildings into the current day, where the present the and future can continue to draw on a vibrant legacy of the past, of a continuous chronicle of how previous generations thought, act and built to meet the challenges of their time. The building at 3411 West Douglas embodies that continuity to the highest degree. Golda Meir attended services there when it was Anshe Kanesses Israel. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke there when it was Shepherd's Temple. If it's allowed to vanish, it's not just the record of the city's past that will be diminished, but the richness of the Chicago's future.
I love poetry, just not in the station.- the Station Inspector
As
I've written before, Martin Scorsese's film Hugo has captured my
imagination more than any film I've seen in a very long time. Although
it had more Academy Award nominations - 11 - than any other film this
year, and won 5 in technical categories, it's been written off as a
visually sumptuous, charming fairy tale. And that it is.
But I think Hugo is much more. I think it will eventually be seen in the same category as such films as Vertigo, North by Northwest, and Bringing up Baby,
perceived as little more than well-crafted entertainments at the time
of their release, but now recognized as work of arts with exceptional
thematic depth.
I find Hugo to be an astonishing film, far richer and far more complex than the press coverage would indicate. To me, Hugo
is an incredible meditation, asking more questions than it answers, on
the relationship between time and art, imagination and the everyday, and
the manufactures of man and how they redefine and reshape our humanity.
Judge for yourself. Hugo has just been released on video, but this week - perhaps for the last time - you can still see Hugo
as it's meant to be seen, in 3D and on a big screen - at the AMC River
East and a handful of other multiplexes throughout Chicago. Try to
catch it while you still can, and feel free to write an abusive comment
if you're disappointed. In any event, I'd recommend that if you intend
to see the film, you hold off reading the following discussion until
afterward. You have been warned!, as says the Lorax.
I've been wrestling with the meaning of Hugo since I first saw it last November. It's time to lay out my cards. It's almost midnight, so I won't finish tonight, but let's at least start . . .
"Time
. . .," mutters the shambling drunkard Uncle Claude, as he contemplates
his stopwatch, ". . . my time is . . . 60 seconds in a minute, 60
minutes in an hour. Time is everything . . . everything", he says as
he stands with Hugo beside the grave of his father.
You
can't mistake time as the overriding theme of Hugo. Young Hugo Cabret's face is first seen
from behind the great clock of the Gare Montparnasse, watching the
goings-on of the great railroad station through the empty space where he has removed the numeral "four". We first see the old man at the
toy booth as Hugo observes him from behind another clock. When the old
man - we'll eventually learn he's actually the famed French film pioneer
Georges Méliès - looks
up, the reflection of the round clock face briefly replaces the iris of
his eye. Time is everywhere. Even during the climatic scene at the
old man's apartment, if you listen closely, you'll hear a clock quietly
ticking throughout.
Time as we know it today is largely a creation of the railroads so central to Hugo.
Setting departures and arrivals down to the very minute, and the
creation of standard time zones, were essential to publishing dependable
train schedules, the literature of a new age. It brought a new
level of precision to a conception of time that, down to our own time,
has become a pervasive bedrock to experiencing our lives.
Time is Hugo's job. He lives behind the walls of the great station,
in a forgotten apartment and steampunkt maze of passageways, ladders that includes a corkscrew chute straight out of Lady from Shanghai.
In
flashback, we see a scrubbed-clean Hugo living a modest middle class
life with his widowed clockmaker father, Jude Law, who one day brings
home an incredible automaton, a mechanical figure shaped in human form,
such as the "Draughtsman-Writer"
built by Henri Mailardet in 1800. In the 19th century such mechanisms were a
mainstay of many of the best magician's acts. The special trick of the
automaton in Hugo, with its metallic, humanoid head reminiscent of the
robot in Fritz Lang's Metropolis, is the ability to write, but
its incredibly complex internal clockworks is in shambles. Hugo's
father promises that together they can fix it, solve it. He
contemplates a heart-shaped keyhole at the base of the automaton's
neck. "Another complication," he says, ". . . another mystery."
"That makes you happy," observes Hugo.
Hugo is polishing the automaton when Uncle Claude (Ray Winstone)
bursts into the apartment. "There's been a fire. Your father's dead,"
he announces
unceremoniously, sweeping Hugo away so quickly that the only thing he
takes with him is the automaton, the last link to his father. After
training Hugo to help him wind the station's many clocks, Uncle Claude
disappears, and that job becomes Hugo's alone. Hugo is completely
alone. He steals food from the cafe,
and clockwork parts from the old man in the toy booth to help bring the
automaton back to life.
Waiting room, Union Station, Chicago
Railroad stations - like airports - are best known as places of
anonymity, but out of the anonymous, cattle-like stream of commuters,
Hugo (Asa
Butterfield) lives vicariously, an orphan flaneur, by observing his impromptu "family" of the station's permanent
residents: the faithful doberman Maximillian, sidekick to the menacing
Station Inspector (Sascha Baron Cohen), who papers his office
walls with mug shots of the orphans he's captured in the station, who pines from afar for the flower seller Lisette (Emily Mortimer),
the cafe keeper Madame Emillie (Frances de la Tour), the News agent
Monsieur Frick (Richard Griffiths) who pines for Madame Emillie, the
stern but kindly bookseller Monsieur Labisse (Christopher Lee), the old
man at the toy booth, and his young godniece Isabelle (Chloë Grace
Moretz), who soon becomes Hugo's comrade in arms.
Inevitably,
time marries to motion. Orson Welles once famously described making a
motion picture as "the biggest electric train set a boy ever had."
Nowhere has this been more dramatically demonstrated than in Hugo's
spectacular opening shot, created by Industrial Light and Magic. The
first sound we hear, over the Paramount logo, is the chugging of a
locomotive, followed by the faint sound of ticking clockwork. The first
thing we see is the movement of that clockwork, a massive and intricate
interlocking collection of giant gears around a central drive shaft.
The drive shaft morphs into the Arc de Triomphe, and the clockwork into
Paris itself, the headlights of traffic on the boulevards radiating out
from the sun - Place de l'Étoile,- soon abstracting into sheer pulses
of light streaming through the city like corpuscles of blood through
the arteries of the human body. Motion is the measure of life.
A blogger unimpressed with Hugo
cited the fact that, despite the story being set in Paris, the major
players almost all speak with British accents, and that in Hugo the art form is
referred to as "movies" - an American term - rather than "film", the
appropriate European counterpart.
Really, though, which is most appropriate? "Film" refers to the physical medium. "Movies" refers to the most central characteristic of the form - it moves. It moves continuously.
For the first time in history, the seamlessness of human consciousness
is replicated in art. Suitably, the book from which Hugo and Isabelle
first learn the origin of the drawing made by the repaired automaton has
as its title The Invention of Dreams, by René
Tabard (Michael Stuhlbarg). "If you've ever wondered where your dreams
come from," Méliès , in a flashback, tells Stuhlberg as a child transfixed as he watches the production of a film set beneath the sea,
"you look around. This is where they're made."
Might the way we dream today actually be different from the way we dreamed before the movies? Could our prolonged exposure to cinematic montage affected how our unconscious parses out the experience of life during our sleeping hours?
Midnight strikes. Time, Time . . . More later . . .
focus: Sharon Hayes, the first museum-based exhibition of the New York based performance artist, closes this Sunday, March 11th at the Modern Wing of the Art Institute.
click images for larger view
It consists of three parts. An Ear to the Sounds of Our History, from 2011, is a series of visual "sentences" drawing from a huge collection of album covers from the "Spoken Word" genre centered around the 60's and 70's. In the Near Future, from 2005-2009, uses 13 projectors covering all four walls of the gallery with a rotation of over 300 images of a single protester holding a sign for causes mostly already lost, such as the ERA and Vietnam War, in public spaces in cities from New York to Warsaw to Paris.
Sharon Hayes's work, as you might imagine, is overtly political, but its greatest interest, at least to me, is in the intersection of individual expression amidst the anonymity of public space. In Parole, shown through multiple video screens of varying size, actress Becca Blackwell, mute but with an incredibly expressive and empathetic face, is the listener, the reflection of the expression, whether it be sitting at a desk in a small office, or walking through great public spaces such as London's Trafalgar Square with a boom microphone capturing Hayes declaiming a passionate letter to an absent lover.
In another, office-based video, U of C Professor Lauren Berlant analyzes the low status of sentimentality among academics. Exhibition curator Lisa Doring writes that Hayes's inclusion of Berlant's analysis "is a reminder that politics, history, and even academia are inextricable from desire and love, a nation that lies at the crux of the artist's practice . . . "
What interested me in Parole above all else, however, is the exploration of the relationship between public (and private) space and the emotional potency of the individual. In that small office, Blackwell mutely coaxes a man, back is to the camera, into reading an intensely impassioned text, but in the context of that small room, sitting only inches away from Blackwell's inquiring face, the man defuses the power of the text by speaking the words in a flat, measured tone, as if reading a recipe. This is his defense. This is how defends himself from the possibility of being swept up - manipulated? - into a visceral, emotional expression.
In Trafalgar Square, Hayes is dealing with a huge public space, one made for rallies and mass congregations, where protesters grab a microphone to amplify their voice to the true scales of their passion, but where, on a common day, the massive square serves to deaden people much as dispersed, immobilized atoms push the cold towards absolute zero. People come and go, or loiter lazily, largely oblivious to the architectural pretensions of their surroundings. Even as they pretend to ignore it, the sound of Hayes's voice cuts like a knife through the miasma of neutered feeling.
All the more so in a constricted shopping street in Istanbul: a woman declaims Hayes's text in Turkish with such blazing intensity that it spills out beyond the usual unseen, apostrophizing frame of art, into an energy field engulfing, by chance, those randomly passing, emotion coursing like an electrocution through a circuit of complete strangers.
The human body moves through the public space in several ways. Primarily, we are moving ourselves to an intended destination, led almost without thinking through the furrows of the urban fabric, closed off and in our own thoughts, as are most of those around us, the cell phone increasingly the virtual world walling us off from the one we actually inhabit.
Then there are those who are with others, talking, laughing as they walk together, providing a parallel soundtrack to the stream. And there are those that actually distort the boundaries of the public space of pedestrian movement, shouting to someone in the distance, or even chasing each other playfully (let's hope) down the street.
There are those who consciously choose that urban fabric as a backdrop for their ceremonies, creating a collateral street theater.
Then there are those who choose to bear witness by making themselves a nest in the architecture, both as groups engaged in a social action . . .
. . . and, lastly, as lone voices, declarations of private psyches into a public realm where the standard response is to avert one's eyes . . .
. . . the content a product of conscience, the obsession the manifestation of an inner wound. In this time of the Internet and social media, where the confessional is but a keystroke away, is it bravery or insanity to assert an individual human body, its exhaled speech or expectant silence, against an unhearing streetscape and the unending stream of human animals, minds vacantly insisting on being somewhere else?
focus: Sharon Hayes runs through this Sunday, March 11th in Galleries 182-184 of the Modern Wing of the Art Institute of Chicago, 111 South Michigan.
Monday the 5th brings opening day of the two-day conference Getting it Done II - Building Strong Communities in a Changing World, at the Sheraton, while Tuesday the 6th brings a cornucopia includingCraig Dykers of Snøhetta at the Art Institute . . .
. . . Pecha Kucha Chicago observing its 5th Anniversary with Volume 21 at , including Luftwerk, the creators of the recent dazzling Luminous Field at the Cloud Gate sculpture . . .
. . . and SOM's Eric Long discussing The Cathedral of Christ the Light in Oakland at the Structural Engineers Association of Illinois dinner meeting at the Cliff Dwellers. On Wednesday the 7th, Matt Wylie of Eckenhoff and Saunders and founder/President Bruce DuMont discuss the new home of the Museum of Broadcast Communications lunchtime at CAF.
We're just beginning, but we've already got nearly two dozen items on the March Calendar. Check' em out, and then come back Tuesday for a lot more.
Today, Sunday, March 4th, is the 175th birthday of Chicago, incorporated on this day in 1837. If you hurry, there's a celebration at the Chicago History Museum from noon to 4:00 p.m. Cake from Bleeding Heart Bakery at 1:00, and at 3:30 a panel discussion with Rick Kogan, Ed Burke, Laura Washington and Bill Savage. And at dusk, such landmarks as the Willis Tower, Hancock Center, Merchandise Mart, Union Station and Trump Tower will have special lighting. Look for "Chicago 175" at the slope-toped 150 North Michigan, and "175" at Blue Cross/Blue Shield.
As for us, we thought we'd trace a bit of Chicago's history from just one corner, Dearborn and Lake.
The 1875 Lakeside annual directory of the City of Chicago includes an Chicago Business Directory of 1839. It takes up only nine pages, and on the second we find of name of
Couch, Ira, hotel keeper, corner of dearborn and lake streets
His name lives on in Couch Place, a former street that is now an alley between Lake and Randolph. Couch, born in New York, moved to Chicago the year before incorporation, in 1836. A licensed tailor, he soon sold his shop on Lake Street and leased the Tremont House, on the northwest corner of Dearborn and Lake, filled today by the residential tower 200 North Dearborn (formerly also the site of the Commercial Hotel.) Across the street was the shop of Lewis Isbel, Chicago's second
Afro-American barber, whose clientele included such luminaries as Abraham
Lincoln, U.S Grant, and Stephen Douglas.
The Tremont House was Chicago's first freestanding hotel, an upgrade from the previous lodging options at one of the city's three inns - Billy Caldwell's Tavern, Miller's Tavern, and the Sauganash, in and around Wolf Point, where a parking lot for the building formerly known as the Apparel Center stands today, and where the Kennedy family plans to build three new skyscraper towers.
Within three years, the Tremont House burned down in Chicago's first major fire, on October 27th, 1839, which destroyed 17 buildings on Lake
Street valued at $65,000. "This naturally awakened the people to
the advantage of insurance, and the business for that year increased
very rapidly." So, by the time the replacement hotel, built across the
street on the southeast corner, burned down again, in 1849, there were
hopefully insurance proceeds to help rebuild. The Tremont soon became known as the leading hotel in the West.
courtesy Chicago History Museum
"The second floor of the first Tremont House because home to Chicago's first billiard hall in 1836, and was the favorite hangout of an itinerant criminal named John Stone, who in 1840 became the city's first executed criminal, having been convicted of the rape and murder of a Mrs. Lucretia Thompson." In it's early days, sportsmen would set themselves on the hotel's steps and shoot ducks on the surrounding marshland.
Raising the Briggs House, courtesy Chicago History Museum
A young George Pullman secured his fortune in February and March of 1861 by raising the Tremont six feet higher, out of Chicago's muck, using five hundred men to raise five thousand jackscrews, inch by inch, so that none of the Tremont's guests, including U.S. Senator from Wisconsin Timothy O. Howe, realized the building the inhabitated was moving with them in it, unless they noticed that the number of steps to the entrance kept increasing. Pullman would make the Tremont home to the first offices of the Pullman Sleeping Car Company, which would go on to revolutionize long-distance travel, leading Pullman to create one of the world's foremost communities in the town of
Pullman, and instigate one of America's most contentious and violent
periods of labor strike with the 1894 Pullman strike.
It was from the balcony of the third Tremont House, in 1858, that Stephen Douglas announced his campaign for the United States Senate. According to the Chicago History Museum's excellent The Great Chicago Fire: Web of Memory website. . .
In Lincoln, Douglas, and Slavery: In the Crucible of Public Debate,
David Zarefsky describes the evening of July 9, when Douglas launched
his campaign with a speech from the hotel’s balcony. Lincoln, in
Chicago for the opening session of the United States District Court, was
in attendance. When he heard Douglas attack his “House Divided” speech
as endorsing radical abolitionism, Lincoln announced that he would
appear at the hotel the following evening, as he did, to respond.
And it was at the Tremont that the defeated Presidential candidate Douglas, who often stayed at the hotel, died suddenly on June 3rd, 1861, less than three weeks after the attack on Fort Sumter that marked the beginning of the great Civil War.
In 1855, hotelier John Drake, whose son built the Blakestone and
Drake hotels we know today, had secured a one-quarter interest in the
Tremont, and soon owned it outright. When the structure burned to the ground in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, Drake made the Michigan Avenue Hotel, at Congress and Michigan, the only hotel on the near South Side not destroyed by the flames, the temporary Tremont.
image courtesy Chicago History Museum
The last Tremont House, six stories tall and designed by Chicago's first architect John Van Osdel, opened in 1873 In 1902, it became home to Northwestern University's law, dental and business chools. The structure was demolished in 1937, replaced by a parking garage that was itself replaced in 1987 with the Theatre District Self-Park, where every floor was named after a Broadway musical. Sportsmen no longer congregate: the only ducks to be found in the environs Tremont's former site are when the Goodman programs Ibsen.
And Ira Couch? He's still around, although he died of "complications of disease caused from sudden cold" while on winter sojourn among "Cuba's sunny isle of fruits and flowers". The balconies of the Tremont were draped in black. Eighteen months later, his remains were interred in the $7,000 family tomb, designed by Van Osdel, in the City Cemetery. Weighing one hundred tons, it required eight horses to set into place. When the graves in the cemetery were removed in the 1870's to create Lincoln Park, it was estimated it would cost $3,000 in 1877 dollars to move the Couch Tomb, and so it remains there - with the remains of Ira Couch - to this day.
Ira Couch was here a year before Chicago's 1837 incorporation. Maybe he'll be one of the few things left after the glass towers crumble, the raised streets collapse to the terrain's normal level, and Chicago otherwise disappears from memory.
. . . writings on architecture have appeared in the Chicago Reader, Metropolis Magazine, the Harvard Design Magazine, and the backs of discarded gum wrappers.
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