North Grant Park at Block 37, Archeworks Mid-Year Design, McCurry's Distillations, Urculo and Bruder - still more for January

Still more for January Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events:

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The latest revisions for North Grant Park, a/k/a/ Daley Bicentennial Plaza, will be on display for the next week in the lower level pedway of Block 37.  Today, Wednesday, January 25th, buy a soft pretzel and hear the Park District and landscape architect Michael van Valkenburgh present where the still evolving plans are now.

For tomorrow, Thursday the 26th, we wrote yesterday about the lecture by Thomas Heatherwick at IIT.  Also Thursday, 6:00 p.m. at Access Living, Archeworks presents it's Mid-Year Design Review, including the projects Sustainable Food Through Design Innovation, and the Cermak Creative Industries District.

And a reminder that today, Wednesday, 5:30 - 7:00 p.m., there's a reception at Poliform showroom for Margaret McCurry and her new book Distillations: The Architecture of Margaret McCurry, and at 6:00 p.m. at the Graham, there's a lecture by Madrid-based architect Luis Urculo.  The month closes out Friday the 27th with Will Bruder at Crown Hall.

Check it out:  There's still over a dozen great events to come on the January 2012 Chicago Architecture Calendar.

today's daVinci or merely the future of British Architecture? Thomas Heatherwick at Crown Hall this Thursday

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It was the architectural sensation of Shanghai 2010 Expo - the Seed Cathedral, the UK Pavilion designed by Thomas Heatherwick 

a 20-metre high building, constructed from 60,000 transparent 7.5-metre long optical strands, each of which has embedded within its tip a seed. The interior is silent and illuminated only by the daylight that has filtered past each seed through each optical hair.

In August of that year, roaming scholar Edward Lifson had a great piece in Metropolis on the Seed Cathedral, including a Q&A with Heatherwick, of London's Heatherwick Studio, who says that the project brief was "exactly the same brief that every other designer of every other pavilion has been given.".  Lifson's article shows how what they got was anything but ordinary.  Don't miss Lifson's end photograph, which is super-cool.  Make up your narrative (but the one combining languorous eroticism and Sunkist jellies is already taken.)

In a last-minute coup, the School of Architecture at IIT is bringing Thomas Heatherwick to Crown Hall this Thursday, January 26th, for a 6:00 p.m.,  lecture, Current Work, in which we expect the architect will talk about such spectacular projects as the London drawbridge that doesn't just rise up, Chicago bascule fashion, but actually bends back and curls up into a ball.

 There's also a streamlined resign of the classic London red double-decker bus, and this . . .

. . .  Bleigiessen, the spectacular piece pictured above, in the 8-story atrium of the London Headquarters of The Wellcome Trust.  Bleigiessen refers to a German/Austrian New Year's tradition is which small amounts of lead are melted in a spoon over a candle and then dropped into a bowl of cold water, where they quickly harden into shapes that are then read, like tea leaves, to foretell a person's future for the coming year.  Heatherwick and his associates repeated this process to create over four hundred "extraordinary and complex forms in a fraction of a second."  Finally they came up with a single final form as the building block for the installation . . .

142,000 glass spheres suspended on 27,000 high tensile steel wires; 15 tonnes of glass and just under a million metres of wire. The spheres, made in Poland in a spectacle lens factory, were the result of a collaboration with Flux Glass, their shifting colour and brightness coming from a layer of dichroic film set between the two hemispherical lenses that make up each sphere.

Something like this could be perfect for the tall Macy's atrium not covered in Tiffany - are you listening, Terry Lundgren?

Heatherwick has been called everything from the daVinci of our time, to the man who could be "the future of British, if not world, architecture."   No pressure there.

In the current edition of Intelligent Life, there's a great profile of architect, The Designer Who Makes Buildings,  by Bryan Appleyard - the same guy who hinted at Heatherwick as architecture's savior. Heatherwick's entrance?

Finally, a dark, curly-haired, slightly bearded man appears with a wide-open, ecstatic expression, a bit like Harpo Marx when playing the harp.

An ecstatic Harpo Marx?  Can Crown Hall's minimalist sobriety endure such subversion?  Will it dissolve into a mist?  Beams of metal in spontaneous meltdown, reborn as a galaxy of shimmering spheres?  Stop by Thursday at 6:00 and find out for yourself.

A winter's tale: stitch embroidery on a Miesian grid

This is what the curtain wall of the Mies van der Rohe designed IBM Building (aka 330 North Wabash) looks like normally . . .

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. . . a monochrome grid of strip windows, spandrels and soaring I-beam mullions. 

But throughout the city, winter - cold, and, more specifically, snow - changes the acoustic.  Newly fallen, it turns sidewalks to sand . . .

 . . . and. multiplying the light, transforms night into a strange cousin of dusk . . .

And on the classic glass tower on Wabash, there was a small, subtle subversion.  Thin sills of snow formed on the spandrels, creating a new visual tension by bringing forward the horizontal elements to break the accustomed dominance of the verticals . . .

One day, a day we hope will not be too distant, sun and blue sky will return, to again animate the glass boxes with color, in backdrop and reflection.

Chicago Streetscene: The Way Home

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Today's Chaddick Institute Beyond Burnham event Re-envisioning Navy Pier cancelled

They will try to reschedule.  Someone told me it's snowing outside.  (Wait 'til it's snowing inside - then you'll really be freaked.)

Chicago Streetscene: Art of Winter

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Spectatorium (Pocket Guide to Hell), Global Cities, the Reopening of Mies' Villa Tugendhat - still more events for January

Still more new items for  the January 2012 Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events

We've got two new exhibitions opening this Friday at the Gallery 400 at UIC.   

Global Cities  Model Worlds "explores the spatial and social impacts of 'mega events' such as the Olympics and Word's Fairs, and the means by which their host metropolises work to secure their position as "global cities."

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The World Finder: Pocket Guide to Hell, explores the story of Steele MacKaye and his plan to build the "Spectatorium" at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, a massive display of the spittoon-ridden era's compulsion for spitting.  No, wait.  That was the Expectoratorium.  The Spectatorium, in contrast, was to be "the world's largest theater," hosting an epic depicting Columbus' voyage to America in four Wagnerian acts, complete with an ocean with real water and a cast of thousands.  I'm hearing it didn't go exactly as planned.

There's an opening reception for both shows, which run through March 3rd, this Friday, January 20th from 5:00 to 8:00 p.m.

Another addition, Celebration of the Reopening of the Villa Tugendhat: Mies Here and There, is an all-day symposium on Mies van der Rohe's famous house .  It takes place this Saturday, January 21st,  in the auditorium of the Rem Koolhaas-designed Campus Center at IIT.  The free event will include talks from architect Iveta Cerna and Chairman Ivo Hammer of the Tugendhat House International Committee, as well as from Dirk Lohan and Professor Petr Pelcak of the School of Architecture, Brno University of Technology.  Tugendhat is also the focus of two other programs this Thursday, the 19th, with Pelcak lecturing on The Architecture of Brono Functionalism, 1919-1939 at noon at AIA Chicago,  and Hammer and Cerna talking on Mies Here and There - Restoration of the Villa Tugendhat, Czech Republic, at the Chicago Architecture Foundation at 6:00 p.m.

Also on Saturday the 21st, there's the Future City 2012 Chicago Regional Finals at Student Center East, UIC.  On Thursday,  the 19th,  Edward W. Wolner discusses his excellent new book, Henry Ives Cobb's Chicago, for Landmarks Illinois at the Cultural Center at 12:15, and Tom Beeby talks on Connecting with the Past: The Harold Washington Memorial Library Center, for ICA&A Chicago-Midwest at the Driehaus Museum/Nickerson Mansion at 6:00 p.m.

Check it out.  There are still nearly three dozen great programs to come on the January 2012 Chicago Calendar of Architectural Events

History Discarded, History Preserved - the different fate of two Chicago churches associated with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

In the 1960's, Chicago was one of the major battlegrounds in the struggle for civil rights led by Martin Luther King, Jr.  He preached at churches throughout the city, including St. Sabina and Mount Pisgah.  In 1966, Dr. King came to Chicago to organize against the discriminatory housing policies of the administration of Mayor Richard J. Daley.  He moved into an apartment in a three-flat at 1550 South Hamlin, in the city's Lawndale neighborhood, to dramatize the issue.

 Only a few blocks away was the Friendship Baptist Church, which had moved into their new home at 3411 West Douglas Boulevard, the former Anshe Kenesseth Israel synagogue designed in 1913 by the architectural firm of Aroner and Somers.  It was one of the few churches to welcome Dr. King.  Most black ministers had willingly aligned themselves with Daley's all-powerful political machine.  According to the  book, Black Churches and Local Politics, "With the silent opposition of Daley-backed ministers and the sanctions that Daley had at his disposal to punish activist clergy, church-based resources were ineffective in mobilizing Chicago blacks. " The book quotes one of those ministers who dared to defy Daley, Reverend Clay Evans of the Fellowship Missionary Baptist Church, "Many ministers who were with us had to back off because they didn't want their buildings to be condemned or given citations for electrical work, faulty plumbing, or fire code violations."  Reverend Dr. Shelvin Jerome Hall, the long-time pastor of New Friendship Baptist, was one of the few who stood up to power, opening up his church to King.

The three-flat where Dr. King lived was damaged in the riots that followed his 1968 assassination and were demolished.  For decades the site remained a vacant lot, but last spring, new housing was finally built there, designed by Johnson and Lee Architects.  In 1983, Friendship Baptist moved to a new church they had constructed for themselves at 5200 West Jackson, beginning a long period of decline for the Douglas Park building,

Just in time for Christmas, the City of Chicago's Department of Buildings declared the historic structure on Douglas Boulevard - vacant and deteriorating for several years - "in imminent danger of collapse" and the Law Department has issued an emergency demolition order.  Activists have begun a petition drive to stay the demolition.  Last week, Lee Bey created this post about the church, with great photographs.  Preservation Chicago listed the building as one of its 2011 Seven Most Endangered, and you can find their report, from which the above pair of photographs was taken, here.

 Although Dr. King's experience there was contentious - at a famous meeting, he was challenged by the newly emerging Black Power militants - at Liberty Baptist Church, at 49th and South Boulevard, unlike Shepherd's Temple, has endured.  Unlike so many Afro-American churches, which found their homes in houses of worship abandoned by fleeing whites, this striking building, designed by architect William N. Alderman, with its own kind of distinctive modernism, was built specifically for the congregation.  Dedicated in 1956, it remains a handsome presence on what has now been renamed Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Drive, and down through the decades it has been central to the civil rights struggle in Chicago.

You you can read all about it in this article from last January, Modern Struggles, Modern Design, Dr. King and the story of Liberty Baptist Church. 

ArchitectureChicago Plus Cancelled: SNOW!

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All pending posts have been sent to the sidelines.  The city of Chicago reels shudders experiences acute disappointment as the city is pounded riled slightly tickled with an inundation heavy blanket dusting of the season's first major snow.  Mothers weep and newscasters rail as they battle bravely withstand stoically try to not look bored as blinding sheets sustained downfalls disassociated flakes combine with gale force winds chilly gusts annoying puffs of air to send Loop traffic towards a standstill increased travel times competitive hydroplaning, leaving the paralyzed crippled oblivious city a winter wonderland  silent ghost town sidewalk cocktail of slush and crud, with just a dash of dog urine. (at least I hope it's dog urine.)

 

Chicago Streetscene: Meditati-cat, Lincoln Avenue

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The Mummy of River North: Chicago has gone New Hotel Crazy (Just not at LaSalle and Huron)

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It didn't take much.  Just a good uptick from the dismal post-crash occupancy rates, and we've got new hotels coming out of our ears.  Richard Branson is converting the Rapp &; Rapp designed 203 North Wabash into a 250 room Virgin Hotel (hopefully, non-virgins will also be admitted.)  Aries Capital is looking to make the Art Deco Chicago Motor Club Building into a hotel.  As of last July, plans were still in place to make a dozen floors of Mies van der Rohe's IBM building into a Langham Hotel.  And just last week, the Sun-Times David Roeder was reporting a hotel conversion may also be in the future of the London Guarantee Building at Wacker and Michigan.  And then there's those three new River North hotels under construction with 600 rooms that we discussed yesterday.

But just a few blocks away, there it is, just as it has been since 2008, when the money ran out and construction stopped: the Staybridge Suites Hotel at 127 West Huron.  The handsome, sculpted design, by Valerio Dewalt Train, made use of innovative staggered truss framing for a lighter weight structure.  Ironically, the other advantage of staggered truss is speed of construction.

 So the steel frame went up quickly.  And then it sat there, awaiting its purpose.

After a while, the frame gets covered with protective fabric.  Over time, the fabric comes loose, and flaps in the wind.  Then it gets secured again.  Rinse and repeat.

Last year, a group led by Oxford Capital, which converted the former Hotel Wacker right next door into the Hotel Felix, and led an abortive attempt to put a hotel into the IBM before passing it on to Langham, took over the construction loan on the Staybridge.  That was last June.  That news item remains the most recent on the Oxford Capital Group website, linking to a no longer available article in Crain's.

Not much seems to be going on at the moment.  The sheeting - ghost armor - seems secure for now.  It seems like every developer has a hotel deal going.  Why is everyone spooked by Staybridge?

Chicago Under Construction: Going Aloft by Holding Back the Earth

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The battle to save the 19th century building at Clark and Illinois most recently home to North Bank was over before it began, as was the abortive attempt by the Commission on Chicago Landmarks to create a River North landmark district, which, like Bertrand Goldberg's endangered Prentice Hospital, appeared as an agenda item, and then was dropped before the meeting and never seen again.

So, the North Bank building bit the dust last October to make way for a 600+ room three hotel complex - a Hyatt Place, Fairfield Inn and Starwood Aloft - taking up the L-shaped half-block bounded by Clark, Grand and Illinois.  It's all a little early, so a lot of the current effort is just in holding up the retaining walls while excavation and foundation work take place.

 

Eventually, the North Bank corner will look like this . . .

and the whole thing like this . . .

And if you're less than thrilled about the quality, you obviously haven't seen what's going up just a block to the south . . .

VOA's Old Town School of Folk Music Opens Today

I won't be able to make it, so this pathetic photo of the new building for the Old Town School of Folk Music  designed by VOA Associates I snapped last night with my camera pressed against the window is all I've got.  However, the Old Town School is having a  week of grand opening events, including free tours today, Monday January 9th.  So take your pick and check it out for yourself.  Let us know what you think.  Or you can read Blair's review here.  (He actually got inside.)

Last week for AIC Goldberg shows, plus Japanese 1960's projects, Kenneth Frampton, Re-Envisioning Navy Pier, Landscape Design with Lurie Garden staff and Roy Diblik - a dozen new items for the January calendar

See, we'd told you there would be a lot more.  We've just added over a dozen new great items to the January Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events, including two new exhibitions.

On Monday at Crown Hall, IIT opens a new show, Struggling Cities: From Japanese Urban Projects in the 1960's, which runs through the 31st.  The Metabolists are back with a vengeance, and Struggling Cities includes work by Kiyonori Kikutake, Kisho Kurokawa, Masato Ohtaka, Fumihiko Maki,  Noboru Kawazoe and Arata Isozaki, whose  “Cities in the Air” is pictured here.  In conjunction with the exhibition, there will be a lecture at Crown Hall this Thursday, the 12th,  at 6:00 by critic and historian Kenneth Frampton, Ware Professor of Architecture at Columbia.  (There will also be a February 25th appearance by Peter Frampton at the Chicago Theatre, but we're hearing this may be an unrelated event, more about music than an actual lecture.)

Over at the ArchiTech Gallery, there's a new show, Architectural Drawing: From Europe to America, that runs through April 28, 2012 and features work by Louis Villeminot, George Mann Niedecken and Alfonso Iannelli, among others.  Hours are Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday from noon to five, "or by chance or appointment on Monday or Tuesday."

Elsewhere, we've added this month's events from the Chicago Center for Green Technology, which is branching out with a morning session on Landscape Design Series: Part 1 featuring the staff of the Lurie Garden and Roy Diblik at the Chicago Cultural Center on Saturday the 14th, and a Wednesday January 25th session on Green Roofing for the Homeowner and DIY-er at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum, as well as its usual programs at the Center, itself.

Crain's Chicago Real Estate Daily has a morning panel, Residential Forecast, on Wednesday the 18th moderated by Alby Gallun and featured Stephen Baird, Andy Konovodoff, Buzz Ruttenberg and Steven Fifield.  If there's a Q&A, maybe someone can ask Steve Fifield if his projects, like the ironically named Left Bank, really have to suck so much.

On Friday, the 20th, DePaul's Chaddick Institute has a panel on Re-Envisioning Navy Pier with Larry Booth, Gerry Butler, Michael Emerson, Reuben Hedlund, Cherri Heramb and Larry Lund.

And lastly, this is the last week to see two essential shows on Bertrand Goldberg at the Art Institute, Bertrand Goldberg: Architecture of Invention, and the uniquely expressive Inside Marina City: A Project by Iker Gil and E.G. Larsson.  Both are must-see exhibitions, and you have only through next Sunday to catch up with them.

Check it out:  There are still over three dozen events on the January Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.