Global Architecture Brigades, CAF Patron of the Year, Shanghai x 3 at MoCP - new additions to November Calendar

That's right, we're still adding stuff to the November calender, and if the past is any indication, there'll be even more by the time last turkey emerges from hiding on the 30th.

Global Architecture Brigades: Student-:Led Design Build - Monday at noon in the lower core of Crown Hall at IIT, director John Cunningham will be talking about the Global Architecture Brigades, a "volunteer student-led collaborative dedicated to the design and construction of socially responsible solutions to architectural problems in rural Panama. A think tank design approach utilizes extensive community dialogue and independent research to create efficient, appropriate, and elegant structures to be embraced and utilized by those for whom they were built."

Chicago Architecture Foundation Patron of the Year Awards - there's still time to buy tickets for this annual event, held at a midday luncheon at the University Club on November 19. The announced winners will come from a pool of 31 nominees that range from the Wit Hotel, the rehab of the Chicago & Northwestern Railroad Powerhouse, to the restoration of the dome in Preston Bradley Hall, the Chicago Riverwalk, and the new Modern Wing at the Art Institute.

Film Screening: Works by Mathieu Borysevicz, Shu Haolun, and Sylvie Levey - also on the 19th, at 6:00 p.m., this is a screening of works currently part of still another absolutely first-rate Columbia College Museum of Contemporary Photography exhibition, Reversed Images: Representations of Shanghai Contemporary Material Culture. I hope to be writing about this show later, but it's one you shouldn't miss. Since it runs 70 minutes, I saw only part of Shu Haolun's Nostalgia, a remarkable documentary that plays like a home movie of the directors childhood neighborhood, but actually is a vivid portrait of one of Shanghai's traditional Shikumen, named after the ornamental gateways to what was once one of the city's dominant residential types, now disappearing under the bulldozers in the rush to modernity.



Just this week, there's almost a dozen and a half events, from Landmarks Illinois own 2009 Real Estate & Building Industries Council Award at the Sullivan center, Ruth J. Abram's, John Wasik, Chris Poland, Jorge Pardo, David Woodhouse, Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss. Jaume Plensa and more. Check it all out here.

First Jerry Lewis. Now Steve Jobs. Parisians mob new Apple Store in Paris.

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Microsoft Cafe opens at 47 Boulevard Sebastopol. Apple Store opens at Carousel du Louvre, beneath the famous museum and in clear sight of I.M. Pei's iconic glass pyramid. The acolytes gather, en masse.

Three Cats Sleeping; one dog dancing

And now for something completely different: the Sliwinska of dancing dogs - wearing more clothing than usually found on Edyta:



(thanks to Scott Rench for bringing this artist to our attention.)

Exit Zaha - au Plus Vite

It's completion was six weeks late, but it's left the stage with the speed of a zephyr. Via our indefatigable correspondent Bob Johnson, here's a photo account of the quick departure of the Burnham Pavilion designed by Zaha Hadid Architects.
After closing on the last day of October, tent fabric that had become streaked with grime only days after its opening was quickly stripped away, leaving the pavilion to be seen, however briefly, at its best: a beautiful, intricate aluminum shell.
. . . which construction crews made quick work of dismantling . . .
. . . leaving only a grimy sidewalk shadow behind.
Now the wrecking crew turns its attention to Ben van Berkel's UNStudio pavilion, the glossy white surface pried away to reveal the plywood guts beneath, with the underlying steel frame still to be revealed.

When we wrote about it this past April, the Hadid pavilion was touted as being "designed to be re-used, a 'giant erector set' whose structure can be dismantled, its fabric "zipped into bags" to live another day in a different location, for a new purpose." But like so much else with the wildly dysfunctional Hadid pavilion, the truth fell far beneath the claims. Like the van Berkel, it's now simply headed to the recycling bin, never to be seen again.

Tonight - One Night Only! at Schubas: Burnham Smackdown!

Yes. I know this is a shameless plug for an event I'm moderating, but there's a great panel, and beer - what more can anyone ask? It's tonight, November 4, 7:00 p.m., upstairs at Schubas Tavern, 3159 N. Southport at Belmont, a former tied house. Suggested information $5.00. Register on-line or take your chances.

And what is it?

Using the 1909 Plan of Chicago by Burnham and Bennett as a jumping-off point, a panel of local architects, landscape architects, and planners will take YOUR QUESTIONS about the future design of our city in this lively, fast-paced discussion,

Urban Habitat Chicago has assembled an amazing panel, pictured above, bios below:

Richard Avery, Architect, ALA, Principal, Hampton Avery Architects
Richard Avery is a Principal at Hampton Avery Architects in Chicago. The firm focuses on developing ideas, concepts, and design solutions at both the scale of the city and the house, to realize the opportunities for a better life presented by transitioning to a built environment that uses less energy and resources. Recent awards include the 2009 Chicago Landmark Award for Preservation Excellence, and an honorable mention in the "Flip-a-strip" design competition.

Nicholas Petty, MLA, Project Manager, Urban Habitat Chicago
Nick addressed vertical gardening technologies in urban locations in his master's thesis from the School of Environment and Design at the University of Georgia, and has since emerged as one of the leading experts on the subject. Winner of the UHC Achievement Award for Outstanding Service on the Joy Garden at Northside Preparatory High School, he is also responsible for design of the Sunlight of the Spirit Garden.

Rashmi Ramaswamy, LEED AP, AIA, Architect, SHED Studio
Rashmi has been working as an architect in Chicago for 14 years, and has a strong personal interest in public housing and environmental issues. She has served multiple not-for-profit clients, in projects including a campus for at-risk teen youth, a transitional shelter for women, HUD 202 senior housing and a daycare facility. She also serves on the boards of the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless, Faith in Place and ReBuilding Exchange, and is a member of USGBC, Chicago Chapter Programs Committee.

Mike Newman, AIA, Architect, SHED Studio
Mike has been an architect in Chicago for 16 years, and worked previously in Boston and Philadelphia. His work has focused on design innovation for sustainability and affordability in housing, and social justice projects, such as Tryon Farm in Michigan City, Indiana. He has also participated in community built projects with Madhousers, Habitat for Humanity, and Tryon. Mike has taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Illinois Institute of Technology, School of the Art Institute, and Archeworks.

Lesley Roth, AIA, LEED AP, Architect.
In her 10 year career, Lesley has been responsible for project management, project design and direction and client contact on architecture and planning projects. Her professional training and practice include both domestic and international experience with an emphasis on liveable communities and sustainable design.

Zoka Zola, Architect, AIA, RIBA, LEED AP,
Principal, Zoka Zola Architecture + Urban Design
Zola has received the UK's Young Architect of the Year Award, was awarded a Home of the Year Award by Architecture Magazine, and has taught at the Oxford Brookes University in Oxford, the Architectural Association in London, and The School of the Art Institute Chicago. Zola's work avoids "singularity" - whether in the design of a zero-energy single-family residence, green stock plans for 21st Century Chicago, the design of an open-source website, or affordable housing in Croatia.

Samuel Assefa, formerly of the Dept. of Planning and Development, City of Chicago
Assefa has served as Director of Land Use + Planning Policy for the Chicago Department of Planning and Development, where he helped oversee implementation of green planning and urban design policies. He also taught architecture at the California College of Arts, and has designed and implemented sustainable land use policies in various cities. As the senior urban designer for the City of San Francisco's Planning Department, he developed and directed land use policies for high-density, transit-oriented developments, industrial area design guidelines, and guidelines for high-rise mixed-use developments for San Francisco's downtown.

More info on-line. It should be a great evening, fun, invigorating and educational. And did I mention the beer?

Evicted Three Arts Club members may get to return - but only if they're very, very quiet

Somehow I doubt this what Holabird & Roche had in mind.

The current Crain's Chicago Business has a great report on the latest chapter in the saga of the Three Arts Club, the handsome 1914 building on Dearborn Parkway chartered "to provide a home and a club for young women engaged in the study of the arts in the City of Chicago." Which is exactly what it did for thousands of women, all the way up until 2003, when the money ran out, the building was sold, and the club tore up its charter to instead hand out $15,000 grants to six lucky artists a year. A proposal to convert the property to a hotel fell through, as did a proposal to take it condo, as did - well, there are many such stories in the wake of the great crash of '08.

Now an investors group led by architect Bill Bickford of Depree Bickford Associates LLC, whose funereal specialities include the restoration of the Palmer Mausoleum at Graceland Cemetery and Hotchkiss Chapel at Bellefontaine Cemetery in St. Louis, which also holds Louis Sullivan's Wainwright Tomb, has a new vision for the Three Arts as a columbarium for up to 15,000 urns.

On the plus side for it's chi-chi neighborhood, it would definitely hold down traffic and noise around the building, (except, perhaps, once a year on the 31st). And, of course, it would be something of a homecoming, a throwback to the good old days when what is now Lincoln Park, at the Gold Coast's northern boundary, was the city cemetery.

Still, it's seems a bit of a waste. Oh, I know, I'm the guy who rhapsodized over the prospect of turning the Old Main Post Office into a municipal mausoleum, but I would still suggest there's a significant difference. The Post Office, set atop an expressway and a rail line, doesn't have much of an adjacent residential population, and it's basically a huge warehouse, with immense, bare, loft-like floors. The Three Arts Club, on the other hand, was built as a residence and clubhouse. According to the AIA Guide to Chicago, it was the first - and accomplished - design by a young John A. Holabird after he joined his father's firm. There's a dining hall, a library, and a famously graceful courtyard.

To enable it to survive by having it turn to ash wouldn't be a tragedy, but a nagging sense persists that holding out for something with a bit more life would wind up being a whole lot better.

A badelynge of critics, a Burnham Smackdown, Jones, Pardo, Plensa, Peel, Kearns, Gang, Hadrian and more - over 50 events on the November calendar

It begins on Monday with Wes Jones at UIC, and continues with critics, critics, everywhere this week - first Joseph Rosa talking with Paul Goldberger on Wednesday, and then Goldberger again, plus Hawthorne, Goldhagen, Kamin and Lifson at a Chicago Architecture Foundation panel on Thursday. Me? I'll be at the bar, Schuba's Tavern, to be exact, this Wednesday, moderating Urban Habitat's Burnham Smackdown! with Sam Assefa, Richard Avery, Nicolas Petty, Rashmi Rasaswamy, Mike Newman and Zoka Zola discussing extending the lessons of the 1909 Plan of Chicago into the city's future while ducking beer bottles thrown by dissenting attendees.

Elsewhere on the architects front, there's Markus Miessen and Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss at separate events at the Graham, Jeanne Gang on MEP systems at Crown Hall, Jorge Pardo at the Art Institute, David Woodhouse discussing his Burnham memorial at AIA Chicago, where later in the month Larry Kearns will be discussing his firm's recent work. There's Bob Score, at the Cultural Center for Landmarks Illinois, talking about the restoration of Louis Sullivan's Carson Pirie Scott cast iron ornament, and Joseph Dolinar and Ken DeMuth lecturing on their Park Monroe at CAF.

Plus Hadrian's Rome, Infrastructures for Change, High-Speed Rail, the Mannahatta Project's Eric Sanderson, What is Archeworks?, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, the Cul-de-Sac Syndrome, Park District proposals for Northerly Island, the Wacker Manual, Jaume Plensa, Green Retrofit, Laurence Okrent on the Evolution of Grant Park, and, believe it or not, much, much more. Before things shut down for Thanksgiving on the 22nd, there are over 50 items on November calendar. Check them all out here.

halloween

Flaming maples, bleached pavilions

After Sunday night on the El Día de los Muertos, the Burnham pavilions will close. The green of the maples will return in spring; the Zaha and the Ben, only in memory. (This spectacular photo courtesy our indefatigable correspondent Bob Johnson. Click on it to see a larger version)

So much for memory

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw.

Already, the inscription had begun to be effaced by time, the loving gesture to create a place of healing, simple, open and eloquent, fresh air, stately trees, and beautiful plantings to ease illness's desolation, and nurture the convalescent.
Now it's dust. All of it. Grahm Balkany of the Gropius in Chicago Coalition reported yesterday that the Friend Pavilion at Michael Reese Hospital, one of the small handful of buildings in Chicago co-designed by the great architect Walter Gropius, has been demolished.

And it's just the appetizer. There's still 28 more, an irreplaceable storehouse of International Style architecture, the sister to Mies van der Rohe's IIT campus. Watch them all die. Watch the wonderful trees be uprooted, the breathtaking landscaping trashed. Two structures saved as cheap Disney souvenirs, and one of the most historic, characterful places in Chicago ground into nothingness.

And for what? The Athletes' Village that was supposed to rise on the site is as dead as Chicago's failed Olympic bid. City officials talk about a new housing complex with affordable housing. There's no plan, no developer, no money.

So why the rush? Plain and simple: to end an argument. To destroy Michael Reese lest more people discover its quality and begin asking uncomfortable questions. Scorched earth as an expression of raw power. Is Paris Burning?

The Chicago of Berman and Hannah Friend is dead. It's now the city of the hollow men, and women. People who have run out of ideas, just as the mayor told us he had "nothing up his sleeve" for securing the city's future other than a mad Olympic circus. People who are selling off the city's future at bargain basement prices, just to get through the day. Who cry poor while diverting billions into corrupt TIF's that shower money on the connected few. People who destroy, just because they can.

Michael Reese: the new Block 37. Chicago: the new Detroit.

Have I Got a Deal for You: Beethoven 1-9, Haitink, LSO: $15.99

Not that there aren't other bargains. (the 4 Brahms symphonies, with Rattle and the BPO, for $16.00), but for a penny less, iTunes is now offering Bernard Haitink's recent Beethoven cycle with the London Symphony - all nine symphonies plus the Leonore #2 and Triple Concerto, for $15.99. How could anyone resist? Check it out here:

Glass Aloft in revised designed for Three new River North Hotels

42nd ward Alderman Brendan Reilly on Tuesday sent out a link to a presentation with revised designs for the proposed 621 room complex of three new hotels to be built on the half-block in River North demarcated by Illinois, Clark, and Grand.

When compared to the earlier design, which we wrote about this past August, the elevations along Illinois Street and along a mid-block driveway are essentially unchanged. A major change has been made, however, in the design for the Aloft Hotel, at Grand and Clark, with a glass curtain wall replacing the previous windows set in a wall of precast brick. Here's the original Grand Avenue elevation:
and here's the revised version:
The vertical bracket that seemed a cheap rip-off of Jackie Koo's chartreuse lightning bolt on the Hotel Wit is gone, as are the brick pilasters with lighter insets that were reminiscent of the style of an old four-plus-one in Rogers Park. The stub of a curtain wall makes it kind of a pug, but the new brick wall design is much more attractive, and much more in harmony with the historic loft buildings in River North.

The change in the dominant Clark Street elevation is even more pronounced. Here's the original:
and here's the revised version:

Here, all the previous brick and insets are ditched for a glass curtain wall. The raised arcade along the roofline of the original design is now a slender glass cornice. This is certainly a more elegant solution.

The interesting thing is that the original two story lobby structure seems to have been left untouched. Here's the previous design:
And here's the revision: Against the curtain wall, that entrance structure now looks almost like a non sequitur. Not only does it have no visual relationship to the glass block behind it, it also retains that same bent bracket that mirrors a design element on the Grand Avenue elevation that now no longer exists. It's as if the workday whistle sounded and all the architects went home without really finishing their design.

This still isn't great architecture, but to me, it looks like a significant improvement. What do you think?

This Wednesday - Building the Burnham Pavilions, and the creation of Lake Point Tower

Still one more event for the October calendar that we missed. This Thursday, October 28, from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m., at the South Chase Promenade of Millennium Park, site of the two pavilions designed by Ben van Berkel UNStudio and Zaha Hadid Architects to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Daniel Burnham's Plan of Chicago, there'll be another of the Talks with the Burnham Pavilions Teams. An insider's look at their creation will be provided by two people deeply involved in the process - Julie Burros, Director of Cultural Planning for the City of Chicago, and Chris Rockey of Rockey Structures, LLC, the structural engineer for both pavilions.

And a reminder that earlier on Wednesday, at 12:15 p.m., in the John Buck lecture hall at the Chicago Architecture Foundation, 224 S. Michigan, there will be a great panel discussing Lake Point Tower: Back-story of an Icon - including the building's architect George Schipporeit, its developer William F. Hartnett, Jr., architectural historian Kevin Harrington, and architect Edward Windhorst, author of the excellent new book Lake Point Tower: A Design History.

October 31 deadline for schools to register for next Future City competition

October 31st is the deadline for schools to register to participate in the Chicago Regional of this year's Future City competition, to take place January 16, 2010 at UIC, where 7th and 8th graders will design future cities with simulation software, build scale models, write essays and give oral presentations on their city's design. This year's challenge, Providing An Affordable Living Space For People Who Have Lost Their Home Due to a Disaster, is about designing affordable housing while adhering to LEED standards. The Chicago Regional winning team travels to Washington, D.C. during Engineer's Week, February 15-17, 2010 for the national finals. Grand prize winners win a trip to Space Camp in Huntsville, Alabama. Second and third prize winners receive $5,000 and $2,000 scholarships for their schools’ technology programs.

As of Monday, there were 26 schools signed up for the Chicago Regional, with the North and Northwest suburbs as yet unrepresented. You can register your school by emailing Don Wittmer or on-line.

I know everyone hates waiting for the elevator, but this is ridiculous . . .

On this Sunday's edition of CBS' The Amazing Race, contestants were freaking out at having to ride down a nine-story-high water slide in Dubai, into a pool filled with docile (?) sharks.
Pikers! Also on Sunday, up to 100 brave individuals chose to rappel down the 27-story-high facade of the Wit hotel at State and Lake, the new Jackie Koo design with the chartreuse lightning bolt that's fast becoming one of Chicago's liveliest new landmarks.
The "Skyline Plunge" was a fundraiser for the Respiratory Health Association of Metropolitan Chicago. Each plunger - keep the toilet jokes to yourself, please - ponied up a $150 registration fee and was committed to raising at least $1,000 in pledges, for an overall take for the day projected to be in excess of $100,000.

Next up will be a special fundraiser where brave spelunkers commit themselves to raising $10,000 each just to see whether there's any bottom to the black hole of the Block 37 Superstation.

Prudential2 punches hole in night sky

. . . then moves to the side and stares straight ahead to try to look innocent.

Walk-in slots still available for this Saturday's one-time only CAF Emerging Chicago tour

If you're catching up with this blog late tonight or early tomorrow, a quick note that we're told there are still a few walk-in slots available for the Chicago Architecture Foundation's Emerging Chicago tour, which will take place only once, Saturday, October 24th, beginning at 10:30 a.m., and offer a rare look at such exceptional new Chicago architecture as Farr Associates' Yarnell Residence, Studio Gang's Brick Weave House, and Brininstool+Lynch's Claremot House, and more. Tickets are $45.00 for this four-hour tour. You can read more and reserve on-line here.

Mickey One: smoke and flame at Marina City

About a week ago, Cecil Adams The Straight Dope Chicago tackled why so few movies were filmed in Chicago during the reign of Richard J. Daley in the 60's and 70's. Adams cited the then Chicago mayor's antipathy to how productions such as the popular The Untouchables television series reinforced Al Capone gangster stereotypes. Still a few films slipped by, most prominently Haskell Wexler's extraordinary Medium Cool, filmed in the city during the tumultuous 1968 Democratic convention (although, ironically, Wexler finished up shooting just before the night riot at the Hilton.)

A far lesser known exception is 1965's Mickey One, starring a very young Warren Beatty as a mediocre comic, on the run from Detroit mobsters, hiding out in Chicago. It was an early film by Arthur Penn, who had come out of television drama to direct such films as The Miracle Worker. In the year before Mickey One, Penn had been fired by Burt Lancaster (who had also been the force behind his hiring) as the director of The Train, and had just directed a Broadway flop that closed after only two performances.

Penn made extensive use of Chicago locations - the dark side - from auto graveyards, to skid rows, back alleys and strip clubs. Yet, as shot by famed cinematographer Ghislain Cloquet , whose work includes some of the most seminal works of a mad mix of directors from Jacques Becker, to Francois Traffaut, to Robert Bresson, Roman Polanski and Woody Allen, there's a terrible beauty in the images. Cloquet captures the city with an extraordinarily vivid sense of place and time, using locations from the old Gate of Horn nightclub, to the briefly reborn Chez Paree. Here and there you'll notice a surviving building - the Mariano Park Pavilion at 1031 North State, designed in 1895 by Birch Burdette Long, one of Frank Lloyd Wright's first associates, the low building restaurant at the northwest corner of Dearborn and Chicago, the Woods theater on Randolph.
The most striking sequence, however, is one in the now lost skating rink of Marina City, where an assembled audience watches a rube-goldberg like construction created by a mysterious artist played by Kamatari Fujiwara, a famous Japanese actor who was one of Akira Kurasawa's stock company of players, from Ikiru to Kagemusha. Fujiwara's character is directed by Hiller to be, in the words of Village Voice critic J. Hoberman, "a cosmically annoying mime." He pushes a button and his Jean Tinguely inspired kinetic sculpture comes to life - rotating wheels, conveyor belts, gears, pulleys, beams banging at the keys of a piano.
And then, on cue, it starts to self-destruct, to the delight of the artist and the onlookers, until the fire and smoke bring out the Chicago Fire Department, which puts out the blaze to the jeers of the audience and the despair of the artist, with what seems to be a billion cubic meters of foam. How all that got past Mayor Daley I can scarcely imagine. (You can see the sequence on the excellent Marina City Online website here.)
Penn's next film would be a great one, the sensational Bonnie and Clyde. A Bonnie, Mickey's not - I certainly don't want to oversell it. It's pretentiously Kafkaky and often a bit clumsy, but there's great turns by people like Jeff Corey, Franchot Tone and Hurd Hatfield, as an urbane, vaguely menacing night club operator whose Marina City apartment we get to see, along with the original design of the elevator foyers. His all-white office (do you think he knew the young Renzo Piano?) is entered through a door like an airlock, and his monologue on organic foods plays as both amazingly prophetic and creepily satiric.

Mickey One is an amiably paranoid, shaggy dog of a movie that still manages to be entertaining and arresting. And for those of us who love it, there's all those images of Chicago that make you feel you've time-travelled back four decades. Although it's popped up on TCM, Mickey One is not available on video, but you can watch the entire film, complete with short, ten second commercials every reel or so, on Sony/Columbia's Crackle website here. See how many locations you can identify.

Demolition to begin this week on Gropius buildings at Michael Reese

The Sun-Times media group is reporting that demolition of the buildings on the former Michael Reese hospital site previously marked for the Athletes Village for the 2016 Olympics will begin this week. The city has now added the Singer Pavilion, one of many buildings on the campus co-designed by architect Walter Gropius, to the original 1905 hospital building as the only two structures that are to be saved. However, the city is also leaving open the option of backing out of the commitment to save Singer by the time the request for proposal process is finalized.

Chicago Streetscene: Lost in the Funhouse

Go Play on the Stairs!

A neat promotion from Volkswagen in which a Swedish subway stair was covered with a continuous keyboard just like the one in the movie Big, lowest notes at the bottom, highest at the top, so you can pop out your own composition on the way, or just immerse yourself in the melody of compositions for piano, two dozen feet. John Cage would have loved it. The claim is that it's cut use of the adjacent escalator 66%. Thanks to Andy Spyrison for posting this on Facebook, and to The Fun Theory.com, where Volkswagen has also posted a streetside bottle collector that lights up like a pinball machine, and a park trash bin that, when fed, makes it sound as if your trash were falling all the way down to somewhere near the center of the earth. Now that's entertainment.

What's black and white and Jung all over?

Today marked the arrival of The Red Book, Carl Jung's long secreted artifact of his journey into the dark night of the soul.

It came in a very big box (cat not included) . . .
That held another, slightly smaller box . . .
That coughed up the actual book, hermetically sealed in a thin plastic skin . . .
and the final object inside . . .
and, yes, it's really, really red.
as red as blood, as red as passion, as red as my bloodshot eyes by the time I finish it. If I disappear for the next month or two, you now know why.

On it's 50th anniversary, Hitchcock's North by Northwest reborn

The Chicago International Film Festival on Sunday screened a new print of a newly restored Alfred Hitchcock masterpiece, 1959's North by Northwest, which is not only one of the director's best, but in the minds of many, one of the most entertaining films ever made, a witty travelogue with menace, suspense and sex that starts in midtown Manhattan and ends atop Mount Rushmore, with intermediate stops in Chicago and a now immortal Indiana cornfield. The perfect cast included Cary Grant as an ad executive mistaken for a spy, James Mason as the suave villain, with a darkly ominous Martin Landau in his first major screen role as his henchman, and Eva Marie Saint as, Grace Kelly notwithstanding, the sexiest and most intelligent of Hitchcock's blond femme fatales. The film had it's world premiere at Chicago's United Artists theater, leveled to create Block 37.
The restoration involved an 8K scan of the original VistaVision elements. While the film was nowhere in as bad a shape as Hitchcock's 1958 Vertigo, meticulously restored by Robert Harris in 1996, all the prints I've seen have had a bad case of the fuzzies, colors bleeding at the edges.

This new version was remastered for a November 3rd video re-issue that will make NbN the first Hitchcock film to be released on Blu-Ray. Seen in the theater, the images are, with some exceptions, razor sharp, giving new weight to interplay of the characters and the backdrops in which they move, and revealing details perhaps never before seen, like the buildings at the far horizon of that Indiana cornfield. More to the point, you can't really experience NbN without seeing it on the big screen. So much of the film, when you come right down to it, is about people who fall into things much larger than themselves, expressed symbolically in such oversized settings as the United Nations, train stations teeming with people - any one of them who could be the one to recognize Cary Grant and betray him to the police - in New York (Grand Central) and Chicago (the late LaSalle), as well as the aforementioned festival of giant President heads in South Dakota. On a small screen, even a 50 inch HDTV, you simply don't get the same visceral sense of existential drama.
No one from Warner Brothers' technical team was at the Chicago Film Festival screening, but there was Hitchcock historian and biographer John Russel Taylor and, most importantly, Martin Landau who, in this clip from Sunday, discusses how he got the role:


Landau also talked about how he arrived at his conception of his character of Leonard. "When I read the script," he said on Sunday, "coming from the Actors Studio, I said this character wants to get rid of Eva Marie Saint with such a vengeance that it would be interesting if he were gay. Now we shot it 51 years ago, and I choose to do that. I thought it would be very subtle and Hitch liked it, obviously, because he didn't tell me not to do it, he encouraged me. And by saying encouragement, I'd ask him once in a while, because he would whisper something to Cary Grant or James or Eva Marie and he'd walk past me. So, coming from the theater, I asked him, "Is there anything you want to tell me?" "Martin, I'll only tell you if I don't like what you're doing."

Screenwriter Ernest Lehman actually picked up on Landau's concept after he watched the early filming, and added a famous line from late in the film when James Mason asks Landau's Leonard for the source of his suspicions about Saint's character, Eve Kendall. "Call it my women's intuition, if you will," says Leonard, "but I've never trusted neatness." James Mason dismisses Leonard's newly revealed crush on his boss. "Why Leonard, I do believe you're jealous! I'm actually very flattered." Pretty daring for 1959. If it were a film about being gay I'm sure it would never have passed the censors. Being just another Hitchcock potboiler probably gave it cover.

We usually think of films like War of the Worlds or X-Men when we think of special effects, but in his films, Hitchcock often showed an advanced mastery of the art. In NbN, this included the incredible, "trapped insect" shot, from the top of the UN Building, which was actually a painting on glass, showing Cary Grant as a small spec making his escape far below, to the climatic chase on a Mount Rushmore entirely reconstructed, complete with footholds that apparently don't exist on the real version, on MGM soundstages.

Add in Robert Burk's photography, the great Saul Bass title sequence, and another iconic score by Bernard Hermann, and you have one of greatest films of all time. Taylor told a story of how critics at the French film journal Positif. taking a cue from the way the title Northwest by Northwest cribs on a line from Hamlet, actually concluded the film was a retelling of Hamlet, with Jessie Royce Landis as Gertrude, etc. But NbN is no Shakespeare retread, nor was it ever meant to be. It's all American (with a British accent, to be sure), with a lot of very interesting ideas going on beneath it's shimmering surface.

Sunday was the only showing at the Chicago International Film Festival, which runs through October 22, but here's hoping there'll be a local theatrical booking to let people see this amazing film the way it was meant to be experienced.

Chicago Nightscene: Rear Windows

Bates, Bad granite, Beasts Mythical, a Big Balloon, and more - news notes from all over

Two more events for the October calendar - And in this corner, going up against Jason Payne at UIC and Christian Veddeler at the AIC, Roderick Bates will being talking about the work of his firm, Kieran Timberlake, at Archeworks, Monday, October 19 at 6:00 p.m. Then on Saturday, October 24th the Pleasant Home Foundation will offer a rare interior tour of Joseph Lyman Silsbee's May Chapel at Rosehill Cemetary, with a 10:00 a.m. tour of the historic cemetery.

Legends of the Fall(ing Granite) - following up on a story we broke about a month ago with the help of our indefatigable correspondent Bob Johnson, Blair Kamin had a report on how the 1,000 granite panels that make up the arcades and diminishing monoliths at Helmut Jahn's 1985 Thompson Center have come to be considered "attachedly challenged" and will all be removed, at a cost of a cool million, to avoid the prospect of falling panels making pancakes of passing pedestrians. According to the Sun-Times' David Roeder, the work will begin by the end of the month and take eight weeks, with no word yet of when or with what the panels will be replaced with, or how much that will cost.

Calatrava and the Unicorn - also on the Blair Kamin front from last Friday, an interview with Santiago Calatrava in which the architect speculated that Chicago Spire might still get built. Then again, this week Crain's Chicago Business reported that the Spire's developer Shelbourne Development, is about to be evicted from its $10 million sales center in the NBC Tower, where it hasn't paid rent since April. "My personal wish is that is not dead," was Calatrava's distinctive phrasing. My personal wish is that my intense personal relationship with Elīna Garanča is not dead, either, but, in both cases, I wouldn't recommend placing any big bets on it.

401-(k)0'ed - Time Magazine has a report on another toxic gift of the Reagan era, the 401(k), which encouraged large corporations to dump pensions for their employees, and the big financial firms to fleece them on the way out, leaving them holding the bag after the financial collapse. The average 401(k) balance in 1998: $47,000; by the end of 2008, $45,519. Inflation-adjusted, you're down 26%. Five-year return: - 0.5%. You think the Social Security crunch is scary? Wait until you start reading about the looming 401(k) washout, when millions of Americans find themselves having exhausted their unexpectedly diminished savings while still having decades left to live.

And now for something completely different.
In honor of Falcon(!) Heene, a really big balloon:

Chicago Streetscene: An Infinity of Bollards

More Mas, please. Stylish and informative Mas Context explores Work and the urban environment

The story goes that when Pope John XXIII was asked by a reporter how many people worked at the Vatican, he wryly replied, "About half of them."

I'm not quite sure what that has to do with anything, but Iker Gil of Mas Studio and his band of contributors have just brought out the latest version of Mas Context, an on-line quarterly journal on "issues that affect urban context." The Fall issue is a collection of eight essays that . . .

. . . explores how WORK is changing the landscape of our environment and determining the decisions that are affecting our cities. WORK diagrams economy, analyzes workplaces, studies appropriation of public space, interviews entrepreneurs, and portraits isolation.

It's not by accident that one of Andreas Larsson's photographs in Mas Context's Empty shows a chair holding a copy of S.M.L.XL, the iconic collaboration between architect Rem Koolhaas and graphic designer and futurist Bruce Mau. Mas Context captures that book's combination of inquiry and eye-catching graphics, leading off with Work Review, a snappily charted portrait in statistics of work worldwide.
The United States has a workforce of 154 million, Indian, 523 million, China 807 million. Overall, the world's workforce is put at about 3.2 billion, including 158,000,000 children aged 5 to 14. Koreans work an average of 2,316 hours a year; Americans 1,798. In 1968, there were 470 strikes and lockouts in the United States; in 2008, 15. Perhaps not coincidentally, in 2008, U.S. workers gave back $63 billion in vacation days.
Maria Moreno's Public Works: Reinventing Street Vending in Global Mexico City zeroes in on one of the poster children of the new global economy. Santa Fe, Mexico, just outside Mexico City. Not long ago, it was made up mostly of sand mines and a massive garbage dump, the principal population 2000 garbage pickers. What better place to convert to a home for transnational companies?

The new Santa Fe has 10,000 residents and 100,000 workers. No new urbanism here, just a Corbusian hellhole, shorn of the master's great parks and design genius: skyscrapers, a shopping mall, few pedestrian crossings, almost nothing within walking distance. The only vitality comes from a small guerrilla army of street vendors, creating the only the true urbanism in this arid landscape when the usually deserted streets fill with office workers fleeing their cubicles to buy snacks and hot lunches sold out of the trunks of cars, Maxwell Street redux, where the vendors, probably the only poor people still allowed in Santa Fe, will also take your order on their cell phones.
Elsewhere, David Schalliol's Isolated Buildings Study offers a photoessay on the last buildings standing in decaying order environments.
Iker Gil interviews Jessica Lybeck, co-founder of the layoff moveon.com website, a sort of Facebook for the laid-off, where they can advance their job search and forge bonds by creating a profile, chronicling the story of their layoff, and talking about their talents, job-seeking adventures, and ambitions.

In Farmer's Work architect Kathryn Clarke Albright looks at how farming and the city. Agricultural labor efficiency increased from 27.5 acres per worker in 1890 to 740 acres in 1990, but now the number of small farms is increasing by 2% a year, with an emphasis on organic farming and farmers markets, which have exploded in number from 1755 in 1994 to unofficial 4800 in 2009.

And there's more where that come from, including two videos available on the website. Work is a great read or you can just look at it for the pictures. The entire edition can be downloaded, free, in pdf form, here.

The next Mas Context promises a issue on Living with Winter. It's due out in December, but, boy, we could really use the help right now.

FOA's Farshid Moussavi, ACADIA '09, Lamda Ely's Burnham, Ross Barney, ARUP's Hamilton at CAC - Still MORE October events

It's getting to the point where you can exhaust yourself just reading about all the incredible architecture-related events going on in Chicago, and, believe it or not we've just added a bunch more to the October calendar.

Farshid Moussavi - Wednesday, October 21, 6:30 p.m., Fullerton Hall of the Art Institute. One half of the founding partner team of Foreign Office Architects, Moussavi's lecture: The Function of Form, shares the same name as her upcoming book, to be published in November. It's a follow-up volume to her 2006 The Function of Ornament, in which she talks about the twin towers of Bertrand Goldberg's Marina City as "fluted columns", apparently a: columns without capitals b: inverted columns, or c: columns with the world's tallest capitals. Just what I need: another two books added to my definitely-have-to-read pile. (Which, come to think of it, is increasingly beginning to resemble the illustration at the far right.)

ACADIA 09: reForm() - October 19 through the 25th, various locations. It's not enough that we have the Council on Tall Building and Urban Habitat's extraordinary conference, Evolution of the Skyscraper, taking place at IIT on the 23rd and the 24th, but at the same time Chicago is hosting the 2009 conference of the Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture.

We've already listed the conferences "public keynote lectures" - Herzog & de Meuron's Kai Strelkhe on the 22nd and Robert Aish on the 23rd (there's also an October 24th talk, Wired for War, by Peter W. Singer), but the full seven days offers up three days of workshops and four days of lectures by a battalion of Illuminati, such as William Baker, Julie Flohr and Neri Oxman, who promises to offer up a talk on tiling methods and their alternatives.

Although the names of the papers are often so clinical - Cultural Performance in robotic timber construction, Multiperformative Efficient Systems (MES) Toward System Thinking - that you might be forgiven for thinking that these are people unable - or uninterested - in talking to anyone but themselves, when you read the actual descriptions for the talks, you can tell this will be a fascinating event. Brady Peters' paper, for example, Parametric Acoustic Surfaces,is actually about how most architects ignore the importance of acoustics in any building that isn't a concert hall, and how acoustic qualities can be quantified and made part of a building's digital design and finished performance no less than a window, wall or column.

Odds are if you're in the target audience for this event, you knew about it long ago, but, if not, and if you've got deep pockets or a large expense account, there's amazing stuff here.

Burnham's Plan of Chicago: History or Inspiration - October 23rd, Lamba Alpha International Ely Chapter offers up a morning symposium with a panel that includes Carol Coletta, Howard Decker, David Roeder and others.

5 Concepts: Envisioning the Bloomingdale - October 27th, the Chicago Architectural Club offers up an event at the i-Space Gallery with architect Carol Ross Barney and Nancy Hamilton of ARUP, who, along with landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh, have been selected by the City of Chicago as the design team for the long-gestating Bloomingdale Trail, the abandoned raised railway that many see as Chicago's answer to New York's High Line. The event is a reception for the publication of CAC's Journal #14.

Make no Medium-Sized Plans - WORKac - October 29th at Madlener house, a presentation by the New York based firm in conjunction with the Graham Foundation's new exhibition, ACTIONS: What You Can Do With the City.

Yes, check out the full October calendar here, and watch that your head doesn't explode from contemplating all of the often competing possibilities.

Is This one of world's fourteen ugliest buildings?

Yes, you've got it right. The October Travel & Leisure features the illustrious Bunny Wong's list of The World's Ugliest Buildings, and, somehow, Hammond Beeby's Harold L. Washington Library comes in at Number 4.

What, does she have some lingering childhood fear of gigantic, flaming owls?
Readers will know I'm not the biggest fan of the giant brickpile on State Street, but come on. Then again, Ms. Wong starts out by describing her Number One, Michael Grave's Portland Building as "one of the most hated buildings in America." Most Hated. Most Ugly. Most Easy to Get Pictures Of. Same. Same. Same. Right?

With a couple of exceptions, the buildings on Wong's list are less ugly than loopy, often quite pleasantly so, as in the case of No. Six, the Longaberger Home Office building in Newark, Ohio.
(My God, all those people milling around the parking lot, they look just like ants.)

Seriously, how could anyone call any of the structures on Wong's list the world's ugliest once they've experienced something like this:What do you think is the ugliest building, if not in the world, then at least in Chicago? And why?

Marathon!

Ancient Rome, David Rockwell style - Nero's rotating dining hall found?

Via London Times, we bring you news on the possible discovery of the Emperor Nero's rotating dining room, described by Suetonius as part of a massive palace that would have put even Saddam Hussein to shame:

Its size and splendour will be sufficiently indicated by the following details. Its vestibule was large enough to contain a colossal statue of the emperor a hundred and twenty feet high; and it was so extensive that it had a triple colonnade a mile long. There was a pond too, like a sea, surrounded with buildings to represent cities, besides tracts of country, varied by tilled fields, vineyards, pastures and woods, with great numbers of wild and domestic animals. In the rest of the house all parts were overlaid with gold and adorned with gems and mother-of‑pearl. There were dining-rooms with fretted ceils of ivory, whose panels could turn and shower down flowers and were fitted with pipes for sprinkling the guests with perfumes. The main banquet hall was circular and constantly revolved day and night, like the heavens . . .

The supposed smoking guns of the recent discovery on the Palatine hill include a 50 foot diameter room, resting on a 13 foot in diameter pillar, with a rotating mechanism underneath - "four spherical mechanisms likely powered by a constant flow of water that would have rotated the structure."

Jerry Kleiner was reported to be on an early flight to the Eternal City.

Film documents architecture in new Forgotten Chicago feature

To me, much of best architectural photography is almost incidental - not the prettified, often impossibly abstracted images that have come to define the discipline- but shots where a city and its architecture are backdrops, stage sets for a narrative. The advantages are that this brings us much closer to how a building is actually inhabited and experienced by people in day-to-day-life.

Along these lines, the invaluable website Forgotten Chicago has added a page, Drama, Documentation & Discontinuity, that looks at fiction films shot in Chicago. There are stills from everything from The Hunter with Steve McQueen to two other Chicago films by famous directors in the at the beginning of their careers - Phillip Kaufman's Goldstein and Arthur Penn's extraordinary Mickey One.
One of the unsung services of Alfred Hitckcock's 1959 masterpiece, North by Northwest, which is being shown in a new restoration at the Chicago International Film Festival on October 18, is how cinematographer Robert Burks probably gives us the best documentation of the interior of the LaSalle Street Station waiting room, of how later modernizations meshed with the original 1903 design, and most importantly, how its space was actually experienced by a person moving through it.

And no, despite what you may have heard, I was not around in 1903 to see the station new. However, another snapshot on FC evoked a flood of personal memories.
In this shot from Goldstein, we see the late McVickers Theater, on Madison where One South Dearborn can now be found, with distinctive marquee art - panels of red plastic with black lettering and line drawings for It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, which I remember deeply and fondly. As a very young kid I went there to see that film several dozen times during its six month run in 1963-64. Along with Lawrence of Arabia, which my grandmother also took me to see, at the old Balmoral Theater near the Edgewater Beach Hotel, it was one of two movies that turned me on to both film and classical music. Chris MacNamara of the Trib reported on a new $100,000 screen at the Navy Pier IMAX, 60 feet high, 86 feet wide, but the screen at the McVicker's was even bigger, a massive three-part Cinerama screen on which Mad World was projected.

It actually marked the death of Cinerama, a process that revolutionized movie making by replacing the traditional squarish 1.37:1 aspect ratio with a 1: to up 2.85 widescreen ratio, made up of three separate strips film projected by three synchronized projectors on the tri-part Cinerama screen. The process reached its narrative peak with 1962's How the West Was the Won, the first fiction epic to be shot in Cinerama - and the last. Mad World was actually shot via the single-camera 70mm Ultra Panavision process, and projected on the curving Cinerama screen with a special lens. There would be other films billed as being shown in Cinerama - all the way up to Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey - but all of them were really regular 70mm shoots.

To a very young kid walking into the McVicker's and seeing that huge screen wrapped in a red curtain, watching the lights in the great dome above the balcony dim, and Ernst Gold's incredible score come pouring through the theater's state-of-art sound system, making it feel that you were in the front row of Orchestra Hall, then seeing those curtains part for Saul Bass's amazing title sequence - simple, witty line animations against deeply saturated backgrounds that jump-cut from red to green and back again - and watching those spectacular opening copter shots of cars racing down a thin strip of highway lost in the huge, hilly expanse of the California desert was - simply put - mind-blowing.

It's funny how many deep memories a single, blurry movie still, a celluloid madeleine, can evoke.

Chicago Streetscene: Molten Sky

High-Cultah Thursday: David Hockney Brushes off the iPhone

The October 22nd New York Review of Books contains a fascinating article by Lawrence Weschler on how famed British artist David Hockney has returned to painting - on his iPhone. He's had an iPhone for less than a year, but while using it as a research device, he stumbled across an app called Brushes, which allows an artist to create striking images using only his or her fingers. Except Hockney doesn't - he creates all his iPhone art using the pad of his thumb. "Only the thumb," says Hockney, "has the opposable joint which allows you to move over the screen with maximum speed and agility, and the screen is exactly the right size, you can easily reach every corner with your thumb." This is, of course, rank speciesism, discriminating again the thousands of other animals, doomed by their physical structure never to create great iPhone art.

Hockney is far from alone. Earlier this year, Jorge Colombo's cover for the June 1st issue of The New Yorker was entirely created on an iPhone using the Brushes app.



Are we at the dawn of a new age of art? No longer does the artist have to carry around notebooks, brushes and pastels, and hire a flunky or enlist a groupie to carry around an easel. Anytime, anywhere - just pull out the old iPhone and start creating. It can even come with its own tiny easel.

Andy Warhol mass produced pieces of arts that sold for millions. Will the iPhone usher in a more democratic replacement, where anyone can download an original piece of art from the App store? (Future news story: Apple Computer is in heated negotiations with a consortium of the world's most prominent artists over pricing on the iPhone Art Store. Artists are looking for a variable pricing based on differential value, up to a potential maximum of $14,000,000 for the most distinctive and coveted works. Apple is holding firm to its current standard price of $1.99.)

Hockney sees a continuity in iPhone art going all the way to prehistory. "People are always asking me" he tells Weschler, "about my ancestors, and I say, Well there must have been a cave painter back there somewhere. Him scratching away on his cave wall, me dragging my thumb over this iPhone's screen. All part of the same passion."

Read the full article here. And see a slide show of Hockey's iPhone work, shown with an equally fascinating Weschler podcast, here.

It's Big. It's Bold. It's sometimes delirious. Don't miss this Burnham Centennial exhibition of Chicago architects' visions for the city's future.

In our usually dilatory fashion, we're finally writing about Big.Bold.Visionary. Chicago Considers the Next Century, the great show that you have only four days to see until it ends its run at the Chicago Tourism Center, 72 E. Randolph, on Sunday, October 11th. It's a mix of new content and a "greatest hits" compilation drawing on various competitions, shows, and promotions going all the way back to least 2003, all jostling together, competing with and contradicting each other in a thought-provoking, challenging and entertaining way. Read a little bit about some of the entries that caught my eye - and my surprising pick for best of show - along with lots of pictures here.

Burnham Swedenborg Borg Borg, Epstein's Damore and John Buck - additions to October calendar

OK, I knew we'd have more to add to October calendar. I just didn't think it would be this quickly. At 5:30 p.m., Monday, October 19th, Michael Damore, Executive Managing Director of Epstein (sorry, we don't do all caps here) will talk about Architects and the Future of the Profession, at the Hafele America Chicago showroom. At 7:30 a.m. on Monday, October 28th, Thomas Corfman of Crain's Chicago Business will interview developer John Buck. On Thursday, October 29th, beginning with a 7:45 a.m registration, ULI Chicago will present a panel tackling the subject The State of the Chicago Hotel Market and Its Reflection of Economic Conditions at Wit, the hotel, which just got a great write-up in the Sunday New York Times.

This week, Daniel Burnham scholar Kristen Schaffer will mini-barnstorm her lecture, Finding Burnham in the Archives: Swedenborgian Revelations and the Plan of Chicag0, Thursday the 8th at noon at Crown Hall, IIT, and again Sunday the 11th at 3:00 p.m., at Fisk Hall at Northwestern in Evanston. Read our own take on the subject here.

Although Schaffer has been giving this lecture since 2005, the version she gave this past March at the Art Institute gave the impression she was still trying to get her hands around this fascinating topic, but her thought has surely continued to evolve.

Check out all the great events - now at 80+ and counting - on the October calendar - here.

Tall Buildings, Palleroni, Burnham, books, Metter, Valicenti, Lake Point Tower at 40, Poe, Poe, Poe, and more - 75+ events on October calendar

Why didn't I get the October calendar up until the 5th? Is that what you're asking me, Alice? Why didn't I get the October calendar up until the 5th? Well, I'll tell you why I didn't get the October calendar up until the 5th.

I'm a bit on the lazy side.

More to the point, I've been assembling an astonishing 75 great events for October, and I know I still don't have them all. There's CTBUH's two-day Evolution of the Skyscraper conference at IIT, with everyone from John Portman to Steven Holl, Arthur Gensler and Shangkar Nair, Adrian Smith and Mayor Richard M. Daley, to drop just a few of the names scheduled to appear.

Authors abound: Bradford Hunt on the Unraveling of Chicago Public Housing, Patrick F. Cannon on Unity Temple, Stuart Cohen and Julie Hacker on Transforming the Traditional , Joseph Schwieterman on Beyond Burnham, Barbara Isenberg on Conversations with Frank Gehry, and Janice Metzger on What Would Jane Say? (not Jacobs - Adams).

There are more showings on the excellent new documentary, Make No Little Plans: Daniel Burnham and the American City, and a reading of a new musical The White City: Daniel Burnham's Dream in Mies van der Rohe's Carr Chapel, newly restored at IIT.

UIC has restarted its lecture series with Vicente Guallart and Jason Payne, Sergio Palleroni of the Center for Sustainable Design lectures at the Graham Foundation, the School of the Art Institute's ambitious lecture series features Andrea Deplazes, Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba, Christian Veddeler, Liisa Roberts, Dr. Robert Aish and Kai Strelkhe. Kelvin MacDonald talks about planning in 1909 - in England, graphic designer Rick Valicenti lectures at Archeworks, Andrew Metter talks about his acclaimed new Serta headquarters for CAF, and conducts a tour for AIA Chicago.

On the 28th at CAF, there'll a panel with architect George Schipporeit, architect; William F. Hartnett, Jr.,Kevin Harrington, and Edward Windhorst marking the 40th anniversary of the iconic Lake Point Tower, and that night at CAF there's a panel on the future of Rail Travel in Chicago. And on Halloween, the most frightening thing won't be an appearance by Juan Antonio Samaranch, but the 23rd Annual Edgar Allan Poe Readings at Glessner House.

And, believe it or not, we're only scratching the surface. Check out all the great October events here.

Pics from Pecha Kucha

Here's a few of pictures from last Tuesday, when I the extreme pleasure of again struggling heroically to cram 30 minutes of material into 20 slides and under six minutes, the basic ground rules for the entertaining and informative Pecha Kucha Nights, which bring together people from all creative persuasions in a setting made even more congenial with happy beverages at popular prices. Last week was a special Burnham edition, held at the Chicago Tourist center, 72 E. Randolph, with the excellent exhibition, Big. Bold. Visionary. Chicago Considers the Next Century, in the background. Be sure not to miss Bold.Bold - it's a great exhibition, but only open through next Sunday.

Here you see me doing my best to hide behind the podium.
I talked about something I knew nothing about until a couple weeks ago, an incredibly fascinating and largely forgotten Chicago event, the 1948-49 Chicago Railroad Fair, which took place on a 50-acre site on the lakefront just about where McCormick Place is now, and was the largest assembly of equipment from throughout the history of railroads ever, an incredible show of confidence at the very time railroad passenger travel was entering its death throes. Walt Disney claimed it was his inspiration for Disneyland. I hope to be following up with an account of it here.
At the end of each Pecha Kucha Night, all the presenters are brought together for a group picture, both to give everyone a final bow and provide police a group mug shot should they still be looking for suspects. Architect Clare Lyster had to leave for another event, filmmaker Thomas Gray is behind someone, as is, most probably, Kyle Reynolds, but the other participants, all of whom gave fascinating presentations are, from left, architects Brad Lynch and Michael Wilkinson, cartographer, graphic designer and historian Dennis McClendon, Millennium Park impresario Ed Uhlir (it was his birthday, which was a good thing, as host Peter Exley - far right in the photo - had everyone in the house sing Happy Birthday to him. The bill from ASCAP will come later), Burnham Pavilion lighting designer Tracey Dear, your obedient slump-shouldered servant, to my left, co-host and Chicago Director of Cultural Planning Julie Burros, architect Elva Rubio, and the puckish Mr. Exley.

I want especially to thank all those attending who came up to me with kind comments about my various writings, and the very nice woman who thought I was the cocktail waiter and give me such a lovely tip.
For its next Chicago outing, on December 1st, Pecha Kucha returns to its usual stomping grounds at Martyr's, 3855 North Lincoln, where you not only will have access to drink, but to food, as well. Presenters have not yet been named, but you're guaranteed a great time.

Shocking! Landmark Commission shows some initiative

Although the smart money was that the wheels had been greased for denying landmark protection to the house the legendary preservation activist Richard Nickel made his home for the last three years of his life, before his 1972 death in the demolition rubble of Louis Sullivan's Stock Exchange Building, the Tribune's Blair Kamin reports that the Commission on Chicago Landmarks, by a vote of 7 to 3, yesterday actually overruled staff recommendations not, as usual, to water them down, but to landmark the Nickel House. However, as we learned from the case of the Farwell Building, there's nothing that can't be reversed when the right people tighten the screws, and the landmark designation won't become final until the City Council approves it. But with all the depressing news coming out of Michael Reese Hospital, where the city is frothing at the mouth to wipe out Walter Gropius's architectural legacy in Chicago, the pleasures, however transitory, of a small victory like Thursday's vote are too tempting not to savor. Just don't inhale.

(photograph by Karin Langer courtesy of Preservation Chicago.)
(did I mention we're in the home stretch on the October calendar?)

Has WFMT become completely hopeless?

Absolutely stunning. It's bad enough that the new Alec Baldwin fronted NY Phil broadcasts interrupt the Mahler 3rd symphony with a station break, but the once great WFMT, instead of minimizing the disruption, loads it up with a huge block of commercials. Shameful.

Can we throw in the Easter Bunny for good measure?

Damn, it's cold. And it's only going to get worse. Soon the palms will disappear from Marina City for the season. The trees will scream their fall death throe hues. Their leaves will lose their grip on the branches, waft briefly in the wind like grace note kites, drift gently to the ground and disintegrate into a brittle mulch. I'm not a fan.

And so I was bit heartened to come across a project that artist Joe Baldwin is trying to get off the ground and up onto the "L" tracks - the idea of a "mobile garden" built on a public transit maintenance flatcar. He's creating an organization, putting up a Facebook page, and soliciting funds with the idea of having the mobile garden coupled to a CTA train, and later rolled out to other cities in the U.S., Europe and Asia.
If it works for Santa, why not for a garden? Baldwin reports the CTA as responding, "If you think that it is possible to raise funds to cover the costs associated with running the charter, having additional staff, and the liner, I will not tell you we can not do it. I am happy to come up with some figures for you." To me, that reads as a not-so-subtle brushoff, but Baldwin prefers to see it more as a challenge.

And really, what could be a more encouraging in early spring, when there's still enough chill in the air to make you wonder if winter will ever really leave, to be standing, shivering, waiting for your train, only to see a beautiful garden suddenly rolling by, a harbinger of better times just down the road?

You might have the makings of a new Chicago tradition.

(We're working hard on finishing up the October calendar. No, really.)

Chicago Streetscene: Water Tower Bride

Vancouver Street Scene: Now that's a lamppost!

via Marc Van Wegeningen's DirectDaily blog.

Pecha Kucha Architects Night, Tuesday the 29th, at Big. Bold. Visionary.

A reminder that Tuesday, September 29th, will see an architecture-centric edition of Pecha Kucha Chicago, where presentations are brisk and visual, each one done in 20 slides at 20 seconds each. The special Burnham Plan Centennial edition will take place at the Chicago Tourism Center, 72 E. Randolph, site of the exhibition, Big. Bold. Visionary. Chicago Considers the Next Century.

Presenters for the night are scheduled to include both Tracey Dear, the architectural lightning designer whose colorful nightime illuminations added magic to the two Burnham Pavilions designed by Ben van Berkel/UNStudio and Zaha Hadid, and Thomas Gray, whose striking short film on Burham and Chicago was invisible during the largest part of the summer in its intended venue, the pavilion by Zaha Hadid Architects, because the design leaked so much daylight into the interior as to make daytime projection impossible. Also on the schedule is a presentation by cartographer and historian Dennis McClendon.

Architects abound on the night's agenda:

• Kyle Reynolds of Valerio Dewalt Train Associates whose projects include the Garmin Michigan Avenue Flagship, and the ghostly Miglin Staybridge Suites Hotel in River North Chicago.
• Brad Lynch of Brininstool + Lynch fame.
• Michael Wilkinson of WilkinsonBlender fame.
• Elva Rubio, formerly of Gensler, and co-founder of Bruce Mau Design's Chicago Studio.
• Millennium Park's Ed Uhlir
• Clare Lyster

And, on a down note, there will also be . . . me, talking about what may be Chicago's last great show, the 1948-49 Chicago Railroad Fair. On the plus side, I'll have pictures to divert you from my Ben Stein-like drone.

Again, it all takes place this Tuesday, September 29th, at the Chicago Visitors Center, 72 E. Randolph. Doors open at 6:00 p.m., program starts at 7:00 p.m., concludes by 9:00 p.m. or so. The co-emcees will be Pecha Kucha Chicago's Peter Exley and Julie Burros, Director of Cultural Planning, City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs. Tickets are $25.00, and can be purchased here.

And, by the way, the Big. Bold. Visionary exhibition has been extended, through October 11th. We hope to be writing more about it soon (apparently there's a law I can't write about an exhibition until just about when it's supposed to close - I think it's a federal law.) It's an important show with a lot of great work from of Chicago's most creative architectural minds, whose concepts will engage you and encourage your own thinking on where Chicago's future should lie.