It's the 6th of the month: Time for the July Calendar!

The pace may be slowing as people are remanded to the countryside for summer, but there are still over three dozen great events on the July calendar. Pecha Kucha goes out on the road for Volume 10, down to Doug Garafolo's Hyde Park Arts Center, where they promise to make use of those spectacular projection screens. (And because it's not at a bar, the event is both free and open to all ages.)

If you missed Dennis McClendon talking about the Plan of Chicago for Friends of Downtown on the 2nd, he'll tackle the subject again for APA Chicago on the 21st. Elsewhere, there's Rachel Crowl and Julie Fisher of fcStudio inc at a CAF lunchtime lecture on the 8th, where Steven Monz talks about Benjamin Marshall on the 15th, David Swan discusses the Fine Arts Building on the 22nd, and Mary Woolever takes on Edward Bennett on the 29th. Also at CAF, there's a big symposium, Reinventing Public Investment, on 14th, Architreasures has there Jewels in July 2009 benefit at Room and Board on 15th, and AIA/Chicago has events with Edward Torrez talking about Howard Van Doren Shaw's Marktown on the 8th, and Peter Janko on the restoration of the stunning Palmer House Grand Ballroom chandeliers on the 9th.

But wait - there's more! (Did I mention kickball) And, no, I'm not putting all the hyperlinks in this post. Check out all the great July events here.

The Last Great Oak Falls - a response from Andrew Patner

Chicago Sun-Times and WFMT critic and commentator Andrew Patner sent me a very thoughtful and thorough response to my post on the passing of Norm Pelligrini, which I want to post here, with his permission, in its entirety. Some of the more obvious mistakes it references have been corrected.

Andrew's comments are quite eloquent. I would make just a few responses (not numbered in the same order as his):
1. Although I can see that my sentence construction could be read in various ways, my reference to the station's full boil being brought down to room temperature was in no way a direct critique of Andrew's commentaries, which are in the great tradition of Claudia Cassidy and Herman Kogan, but to the overall direction of the station.
2. To me, 43, as 86% percent of the total, qualifies as "close to fifty" in a article that is not meant to be a legal brief.
3. I made no reference to Rita Jacob's complaints about the number of ads because I understood fully that they were legally mandated, today just as then. I referred, instead, to her complaints against what she stated was an over-reliance on syndicated programming.
4. Steve Robinson may, in fact, be WFMT's general manager, but that is not his official title, and it is the way the present titles reek of corporate bureaucracy that, to me, symbolizes, WFMT's current status.
5. To say that the cutting of Sunday newscasts had nothing to do with staffing or costs seems bizarre when the result was completely automated Sunday programming where live announcers were no longer anywhere in evidence.
6. I see little comparison between Rita Jacobs seeking contributions from listeners when the station had a basically non-existent budget and zero dollars in the till with an institution with millions in annual revenues and a surplus of upper level Vice Presidents, whom I seriously suspect all pull down very substantial salaries, doing the same. Ray Nordstrand was brilliant in leveraging current possibilities to create a self-supporting organization. In today's admittedly very different times, current management has not. Is it really impossible, or do we just not have the same level of thinking?
7. Two primary things we agree on: firstly, as I wrote in my original post, WFMT remains "a Chicago treasure"; and secondly, the magic - and innovation - created by the Jacobs, Nordstrand and Pelligrini were something that happens once in a lifetime, if that often. As Andrew himself writes, we shall not see its like - or their's - again.

Now, on to Andrew's response:

Dear Lynn,

I think you know of my admiration for you, your writing, your websites, and your tireless advocacy for the city's architectural and cultural legacies as one force or another takes a whack at them. And I absolutely share -- and have expressed at my own site and elsewhere -- the very same general sentiments as you have here about Norm's death and the history and continued importance of WFMT.

But I have to point out a few things in this post that are either incorrect or might benefit from some additional context:

1 -- Norm was program director of WFMT for 43 years, from 1953 to 1996.

2 -- Richard Dyer-Bennet is spelled thus, with one "t." The song of his that closed "The Midnight Special" for many years is "Lonesome Valley," which has no "lonesome river," although "Jordan River" is the subject of one verse.

3 -- I do not think that anyone could find any "unraveling" from the station's earliest days through the attacks some 33 years later by the CETA, now WWCI, board beginning in the mid-1980s and the sale of the magazine in 1986. The earlier sale of the station to WGN Continental Broadcasting in the late 1960s and the subsequent gift/transfer to CETA in 1970 resulted in no management or format changes. (Rita [Jacobs] Willens complains in Bob McClory's 1987 Chicago Reader article that you link to that there were to many "political ads" -- Bob should have pointed out that these were and are mandated by the FCC.) WFMT and WFMT, Inc., parent of the station and Chicago magazine then, functioned separately and without interference from CETA/WTTW. The bureaucrats took over in the mid-1980s, NOT in 1970 or at any earlier date. (My late father, Marshall Patner, worked with Len Despres on the WGN/TribCo purchase issue and I worked full-time at WFMT, Inc./Chicago magazine from 1981 to 1983 and observed the management of the station first-hand. I rejoined WFMT in 1998, at the invitation, as a matter of fact, of then WFMT chief Dan Schmidt, now the head of the whole WWCI/WTTW.)

4 -- Steve Robinson's title has changed several times since he joined the station in 2000, but he is in essence the station's General Manager, functions as such, and frequently refers to himself by that title.

5 -- The cut of Sunday newscasts was not a staff- or cost-cutting move. But I agree that it was and is not a good move either and I hope that the Sunday newscasts will be reinstated.

6 -- Is the current "state" of the station "compromised" or simply a reflection of the reality that if we refuse to take recorded commercials and jingles -- and we should refuse these absolutely, we present only announcer-read advertising copy -- and if we do not have the income that we once had from the magazine, then we have to come to the listeners for assistance, just as Rita Jacobs did in 1952. "Endless" pledge drives? We come to the listeners just three times a year and have eliminated evenings, nights, and Sundays from those three membership drives.

7 -- Thanks for the shout-out and link (which brings up my own initial tribute to Norm, with a great photo of Norm and Ray Nordstrand at the station in the early 1960s). If you found the commentary that you heard this afternoon on my "Critic's Choice" feature "veering towards the tepid" there's no one to blame but me. I was under some bad congestion and allergies on Tuesday when I tape it. No one dials my "creative boil" up or down but me. In fact, for the 11-and-a-half years that I have been doing these commentaries no one at the station has ever told me what I could or could not say or talk about or how I might talk about my topics. Nor has anyone ever heard, let alone edited, my commentaries before they are broadcast. The only change in the last few years perhaps did effect the level of "boil" for the better: Program Director Peter Whorf and Steve Robinson asked me to deliver these little talks without a script and ad lib as Peter and Steve thought that that would make them livelier and have more edge and that's how I do them now.

8 -- No, Steve is not Norm. And certainly I am not Studs Terkel or Claudia Cassidy or Harry Bouras. And no one is Jim Unrath. We won't see the likes of those folks again. But we are people who are trying to do our best and to live up to the history and principles of Norm Pellegrini. I hope that listeners such as you will continue to hold us to those standards and I hope that you might also recognize what we get right and when we do so.

Thanks!

Andrew Patner, Critic-at-Large, 98.7WFMT Radio and wfmt.com

viewfromhere.typepad.com

The Last Great Oak Falls - Norm Pellegrini is dead

I feared something was up when I started to see a number of hits to my website that came off of Google searches for Norm Pellegrini, and late last week, the fears were confirmed: Norman Pellegrini, program director for Chicago fine arts station WFMT for nearly fifty years, died on Thursday at the age of 79. For years, I would see him taking his lunch at, of all places, the food court atop Chicago Place. He was legendary for his outbursts of temper at FMT, but when I dedicated a contribution I made to a Lyric Operathon in his honor, I received not long thereafter a handwritten note from him thanking me.

He was the last survivor of a group of often contentious individuals, all now gone - Bernard and Rita Jacobs, Ray Nordstrand, Studs Terkel - who created one of the golden eras in Chicago's cultural history: a radio station that reinvented the very idea of classical music broadcasting into something that adhered both to the highest standards and most democratic impulses. No, I didn't go to college. I almost felt that I didn't have to. WFMT was my higher education, my introduction to the world of classical music and opera, Beethoven and Mahler and Verdi, and, through a special series, contemporary composers, as well. It's through FMT that I first encountered Job and Godot, and through Studs, people like journalist James Cameron and the voices of Hiroshima's survivors, through the Midnight Special, the great American musicals, Steve Goodman, and that the unearthly falsetto, as chill as death, of Richard Dyer-Bennet, taking us across that lonesome valley, a new baptism at the close of each week.

What went out over the air sounded seamless and perfect but, as chronicled by the Chicago Reader's Robert McClory all the way back in 1987, what went on beneath was apparently not entirely unlike Italy under the Borgias. Everyone had their own ideas of what made the station great and how to keep it that way. Rita Jacobs despised those taped transcript ions of performances of the Big Five orchestras and San Francisco Opera that I loved, that brought such soul-changing events as Tennstedt's first Beethoven with the Boston Symphony, and Giulini's Mahler 9th with the Philadelphia.

It all had started to unravel even before I became a listener. Ill health forced sale of the station, and a citizens group that included Nobel-prize winning author Saul Bellow, who I always remember poking fun at an FMT announcer's pronunciation of the word fondue in one his novels (Humboldt's Gift?), scuttled the station's purchase by WGN. Instead, the station was turned over to WTTW, where it's been in the hands of bureaucrats ever since. The management structure there, shared with WTTW, lists no fewer than eight Vice-Presidents - they threaten to eventually out-number the ranks of on-air talent. The titles, themselves, are masterpieces of obfuscation. Not one identifies anyone as general manager for either FMT or TTW. Steve Robinson, who used to have the title of WFMT General Manager, is now EVP for "Radio & Project Development". For TTW, there's a "SVP and Chief Television Content Officer." It's hard to imagine any place on such a roster for what was, for decades, Stud's official title: "Free Spirit."

The worst fear of the 1980's - that the station would be sold - has yet to come to pass, but many others have: - the sale of Chicago magazine without creating an endowment, a risible staff-cutting announcement of ending Sunday newscasts positioned as a gift of providing an untroubled Sabbath to listeners, followed by putting the day on autopilot, leading to one Sunday where an entire hour of programming was lost without anyone in management seeming to notice.

To be sure, even its compromised state, combining the worst of commercial radio (commercials) with that of public radio (endless pledge drives), WFMT remains a Chicago treasure - I've just heard Howard Shore's The Fly from the L.A. Opera, I'm listening to Andrew Patner as I write this - but brought down from a creative boil to room temperature, veering towards the tepid. There seems to be a lot more talking down, a lot more of the idea that everything has to explained to listeners.

Although I see him regularly at various events, I've never met Steve Robinson. He seems a very nice man, and I have no doubt he is very dedicated, but when I look into his eyes I don't see the fire I could see in Norm's even in a brief encounter at the food court when I told him how much I enjoyed still being able to hear his voice, that inimitable voice - warm, assured but approachable, inquisitive, and, always, almost breathless with enthusiasm - on the Lyric Opera broadcasts. Even now, it still hangs in the air. I strain my ears to catch every last trace. I don't want to let him go.

Last Two Days for great Edge of Intent - don't miss it.

In the time-honored Lynn Becker tradition of reminding you of something special just seconds before it's gone, one of best Burnham related events I've encountered is a superb exhibition at the Columbia College Museum of Contemporary Photography, Edge of Intent, which you have only two more days to see - today, Friday, the 3rd and Sunday the 5th (the Museum is closed on the 4th.)

On one level, the exhibition is completely tangential to the Burnham centennial celebration, with few overt references to the man and his celebrated 1909 plan, but at a deeper level, it's one of the most direct engagements, exploring the dynamics of urbanism in utopian/distopian viewpoints of often stunning visual power.
Andrew Harrison takes a roadmap of his native New Jersey and reconstitutes it within the contours of plans of perfect cities, from Burnham, to Atlantis, El Dorado, The Radiant City and the Plan for Brasilia, exploring the imposition of an abstracted, idealized order upon a terrain that has already been abstracted through mapping.
Simon Menner presents a series of high-res photographs depicting the homeless in very individual conditions from Mumbai to Paris to Chicago, where a shot of the homeless sleeping in a small park near where the Congress Expressway crosses the river appears almost cliche until you notice that they share the park with a family of nocturnal rabbits.
The photos of Tim Long begin almost like a travelogue on kayaking the Chicago river, but as it evolves you see you're on an eloquent journey, all the way to the Mississippi, that tracks the various landscapes of urbanism from the sleek towers of downtown, the raw industrial outskirts, the trashed outlying districts and the slow depacing as density dematerializes pre-despoiled landscape.
Perhaps the most cautionary and disturbing echo of the great expectations Burnham and his plan engendered can be found in a stunning series of photographs by Eric Smith of the abandoned Michigan Central Train Station, designed by the same architects - and the despairing doppelganger - of New York's Grand Central, a hallucinatory ruin of eviscerated grandeur and decimated ambition.

There's not a clunker in the bunch of the ten artists exhibiting - it's the best Burnham-related show I've seen so far. You can see descriptions of photo's of each artist's contribution here. The museum is free, and it's open today, Friday from 10 a.m., and 5 p.m, and Sunday from noon to 5 p.m. Conveniently located at 600 South Michigan and just on your way to Taste of Chicago and the fireworks. Try to carve out a half-hour or so of your holiday to check out this extraordinary show - you won't regret it.

Uncle Dan Wants YOU! A Burnham 4th - new edition of 1909 Plan, celebration at History Museum

July 4th, the day the Adams died (Jefferson, too), is not only the 233rd anniversary of our nation's birth, it's the day that Daniel Burnham and Edward Bennett officially unveiled their 1909 Plan of Chicago. As part of an enormous range of events the Burnham Plan Centennial Committee has co-ordinated to celebrate and contemplate the plan, at 1:00 p.m., the Chicago History Museum will be including a "Daniel Burnham historical re-enactor", Living History Theatre’s R. J. Lindsey, presenting a slide show titled, inevitably, Daniel Burnham: Make no Little Plans, in the History Museum's Rubloff Auditorium. It's free, and part of the museum's 50th 4th celebration, which takes place from 10:00 a.m. to noon on Uihlein Plaza behind the museum at 1601 N. Clark. At 11:00, there will be a "keynote oration will feature members of the Burnham and Bennett families in honor of the 1909 Plan of Chicago." Muskets will be fired, declarations will be read, faces will be painted, and at 10:45 a.m. children's costume parade promises "the world’s tallest Uncle Sam".

The Museum's celebration will also mark the presentation of the Great Books Foundation just-issued new edition of the Plan, available in paperback for $39.95, with an introduction by Carl Smith, author of The Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of the American City, and what is promised to be better quality illustrations than those found in the hardcover reprint of the Plan issued by Princeton Architectural Press, which has its own excellent introduction, by Burnham scholar Kristen Schaffer, and carries a list price of $85.00. A a paperback edition on Amazon is listed for $38.90 on up. Great Books is also publishing their version of the Plan in a "special hardcover collector's edition", complete with a hair from Burnham's moustache (or perhaps not) for $125.00. Both editions are available for purchase directly from the foundation, and at various venues, including the museum store, throughout Chicago.

Another new book is The Plan of Chicago @ 100, published by the Ely Chapter of Lamba Alpha International, made up of scholars and activists in the land economics field. You can see the list of topics and authors, which includes people such as Lawrence Okrent, Joseph P Schwietmann, and John Norquist, below. The book is also available at the Chicago History Museum, or directly from the publishers for $19.95 plus shipping and handling, here.

Chicago Streetscene: The Phantom of the Opera Tower

The 45-story Steuben Club Building, 188 West Randolph, 1929, Vitzhum & Burns, whose work also includes One North LaSalle, St. Peters on Madison, and Painters District Council 14 on Adams.

Not Pritzker perfect, but a new South Loop park a welcome addition to State Street

This is what it looked like in 2006, a flat, usually deserted expanse of fenced-in lawn:
This is what it looked like just this past February:
Now Pritzker Park, at State and Van Buren, is finally open, shorn of its unwelcoming fencing. The trees and the plantings still look a little sparse, but with time they should fill in. Last Saturday, there was only one other person taking respite in the quarter-block space, but with DePaul just across the street, you'd like to think it will become more popular, especially once all its amenities are in place.
The concrete edgings for the planted spaces are inscribed with quotations from a large and eclectic group of writers which ranges from Richard Wright, to Carl Sandburg, Walt Whitman, and that jolly Nazi philosopher and prince of polka Martin Heidegger. Poor Walt - his words are partially obscured by a garbage receptacle, but he still fares better than Indira Gandhi, whose name is covered over with black tape, as is that of Sandra Cisneros, whose name was misspelled "cisenos."
Right across from the library, and no one could find a proofreader?

"You can never have too much sky," is the Cisneros quotation. The park's planners have apparently came to a parallel conclusion that you can never have too much flat concrete. Although the northern half of the park is generously landscaped, the southern half is disturbingly barren. All the tall trees that lined Van Buren were uprooted and removed. Reports are that a large chunk of the expanse is to be turned over Chicago's bus shelter king JCDecaux for concessions and a cafe to be designed by New York's Robert A.M. Stern Architects. Let's hope Stern comes up with something more graceful than his stubby-limbed bus shelters strewn throughout Chicago's streets. "Removable seating" is also promised, on the website of park designers HoerrSchaudt landscape architects.
Even in its current schizoid, unfinished state, however, the new Pritzker offers a welcome change from a site that suffered from not-so-benign neglect until the city transferred ownership to the Park District in 2008. The old fencing and abutments basically negated the value of the openness by shearing it off from the surrounding streetscape. Now, movement flows unimpeded, and both Thomas Beeby's Harold Washington Library and the re-emerging beauty of Holabird & Roche's 1894 Old Colony Building get a welcome frame of space and perspective.

Even more importantly, Diane Legge Kemp's brawny Library Loop L station, which previously seemed uncomfortably shoehorned between the library and the fencing, now has room to breath, and the station and its rustic arcade offers a graceful hem-like transition from the park to the library's massive facade.

Trash Buckingham Fountain: Just Eight Bits a Day!

Chicago just spent a lot of money completely upgrading the surface paving all around Buckingham Fountain. A lot more will be spent after the fountain shuts down this fall to restore it to its original 1927 splendor. Reported cost: $25,000,000.

But for a mere dollar a day, you can turn all that work and beauty into a mere backdrop for your promotional appetites.
In a city where services continue to contract even as taxes and fees skyrocket and the mayor hordes billions into his slush fund TIF's to finance his beloved Olympics, the recycling bins you see here are being marketed as a solution for a city grown incompetent to provide adequate receptacles in its public places. Just throw up your hands and toss the problem over to an entrepreneur who provides the containers - free! - in exchange for getting carte blanche - if the situation at the fountain is any example - to paste advertising messages all over city landmarks. Couldn't we just persuade the mayor to get GoldenPalace.com tattooed on his forehead and be done with it?

Manny Renzo Leg and Wing

for non-Chicagoans: the item annotated and explicated.

On the Uptown Theater's Past - and Future, plus Under the Buckingham

"The best theater in Chicago that you can't see" is how one speaker describes the Uptown Theater in the documentary Portrait of a Palace, to be screened at a lunchtime lecture at the Chicago Architecture Foundation next Wednesday, July 1st. The 4,000+ seat Uptown, opened in 1925 at a reported cost of $4,000,000, was one of the city's very grandest movie palaces for over 50 years, but it's now been shuttered and rotting for almost 30, despite fervent efforts of activists to save it. Last July, finally, it was acquired by concert promoter Jam Productions.

On Wednesday, Friends of the Uptown's Andy Pierce will pair up with Jam founder Jerry Mickelson to show the 26 minute documentary, and after it will discuss "discuss the theater’s history and its planned renovation." The free presentation is Wednesday, July 1st, 12:15 p.m., at the Chicago Architecture Foundation, 224 South Michigan.



Under the Buckingham - today, Friday, June 26th, is the first of what is being touted as Fountain Fridays, half-hour tours of the operational underpinnings, including its underground pumping works, of Chicago's iconic Buckingham Fountain, which will be offered every Friday from July 10 through September 4, when the fountain will be closed for the first complete restoration since it's 1927 opening. The $50.00 cost of the tour ($30.00 for this Friday's preview) supports the Buckingham Fountain Restoration Project, which is funding essential repairs that range from plugging the leaks in the lower basim slab, securing crumbling Georgia marble, and replacing the corroded screws that keep the bronze seahorses from swimming off to New Zealand.

Make reservations via the Parkways Foundation at 312/742/5368 or at RSVP@parkways.org.

David Woodhouse makes a building disappear at DuSable Harbor

It's Where's Waldo, the architecture edition. Can you spot where the building is here? David Woodhouse Architects tames congestion and clutter at DuSable Harbor with a graceful unmatched set of the contemporary and the pastoral. Read all about it and see the pictures here.

Rare Showing: Lola Montès : Gene Siskel Film Center, Wednesday and Thursday

When we wrote about a rare showing of Max Orphuls' Lola Montes last year, we didn't think this intimate and epic - and painstakingly restored - 1955 film would be back so soon, but you have three more chances to see it, at the Gene Siskel Film Center, 6:00 and 8:15 p.m., today, Wednesday, June 24th and 6:00 p.m. Thursday the 25th. It's on your way home from work; don't miss it. Courtesans and circuses, irresistible beauties, Bavarian kings, revolution and Franz Liszt - my take on this amazing, visually ravishing film - and the dramatic story behind it - here.
You can see another Orphuls masterpiece, The Earrings of Madame de . . , with Charles Boyer, Danielle Darrieux and Vittorio De Sica, Saturday, the 27th, at 3:00 p.m. and Thursday, July 2nd, at 6:00 p.m.

A film I haven't seen, but that is being called "a mesmerizing and eloquent essay" is Of Time and the City, from director Terence Davies, whose haunting, unforgettable The Long Day Closes knocked me on my ass in 1992. Of Time and the City is a return to the Liverpool of Closes and Davies' youth, "a love song and a eulogy" and his first documentary. "I wanted to cut it as if it were fiction," says Davies in an interview which you can view here. The film is also in its last two days at the Siskel, 8:15 p.m. on Wednesday, 6:15 on Thursday.


The Gene Siskel Film Center is at 164 North State, 312/846.2600.

Great Advances in Elevator Design: Hell to Heaven in just 20 floors

Imagine leaving your swanky hotel room, entering the elevator and descending into hell. No, we're not talking about the trip down to the mall level at Illinois Center. It's actually an incredible installation, Civilization, created by video artist Marco Brambilla, working with Toronto's Studio Crush, that can be seen on an HD display through a viewing port in the elevators of André Balazs' swanky new hotel, The Standard New York, designed by Polshek Partnership Architects for a meatpacking district site straddling the newly opened High Line, from which views of guests having sex in the hotel's windows has apparently become a major competing attraction.

The 1920 x 7500 pixel video is composed of 500 clips from 400 sources - from stock, film (no doubt you'll recognize many of them) and original content - combined to form a spectacular tableau of six main sections: hell, lower purgatory, middle purgatory, upper purgatory, heaven and upper heave/lower hell. Yes, the damn thing loops, so you're constantly moving from the highest point of heaven, only to plunge right back to the depths of hell. Kind of like my average Friday night.
Brambilla and Crush Senior Artist Sean Cochrane discuss the project here.

View the entire video, and see photos of how it's mounted in the elevators, here.

A Park for People? No way. A Park for an Office Building? Here's $7 million

The irony is irresistible. Although a 2007 presentation by John Buck development head Greg Merdinger claimed they had offered the parcel on two separate occasions, the city refused to raise a finger to acquire the beautiful park adjacent to Kenzo Tange's AMA Building on State Street that Buck had spent millions to maintain over a decade and a half, despite the fact that it was the only real park space in the eastern half of River North, where residential population has exploded over the last decade with a building boom in condo, rental and hotel towers. Buck, whose original plan was always to have a companion structure next to the AMA, finally had enough. The park was destroyed, and a skyscraper hotel is now nearing completion on the site.

Now, however, the city is spending $7 million in TIF money to demolish three buildings and create a new 9,600 square foot park at Franklin and Randolph specifically to support John Buck's latest office tower right next door, with Buck kicking in the balance of the estimated $20 million price tag.

One can certainly understand why Buck would prefer to have something other than this . . .
at the end of the grand arcade of the Goettsch Partners designed, sleek new, 46 story 155 North Wacker.
So now the end structure on Franklin is undergoing demolition, the tiny 1870's Showmen's League Building,
which always seemed almost custom scaled for the diminutive Harry Heftman, who had been serving up hot dogs and snacks there since 1954. Heftman celebrated his 100th birthday in March, and Mayor Daley stopped by for a final hot dog and to extend his congratulations to the man whose business he was taking away in April.

The elephants that once graced the tympanums above the windows . . .
. . . have all been removed . . .
. . . and a century of history is being reduced to rubble. Harry, himself, has moved on to another gig, working for someone else for the first time in over sixty years.
In a recent newsletter, 42nd ward alderman Brendan Reilly published the site plan for the new green space, generically labeled the "Randolph Pocket Park," which will no doubt also benefit those residents of the handful of new developments in what remains an office-dominated district. If there's any justice in the world, it will quickly be renamed Harry Heftman Park. Maybe he'll even stop by for the dedication, with the mayor serving up hot dogs for everybody.

Chicago Baroque

Zaha's Web, Ben's Incredible Ice Cream Suit - the Burnham Pavilions in Chicago's Millennium Park

Two Burnham Pavilions, designed by Zaha Hadid Architects and UNStudio Ben van Berkel, were unveiled to the press Thursday morning just as the sun, breaking through the usually omnipresent clouds, set them both to brilliant shimmer. One of them is finished; the other is not. But even in its unfinished state, the Hadid pavilion had a delicate splendor. We were told it would soon be concealed from public view by a construction tarp, but we captured it in pictures before it disappeared under the covers.
Friday, June 19th, is the official opening. A photo essay, including videos of the architects explaining the origins of their designs and their relationship to Chicago and Daniel Burnham's 1909 plan, plus everything you need to know about this weekend's Burnham Centennial events, here.

Ellingsen tonight, cans and bricks this weekend, zoning later

Department of Goings-On - update edition:

Eric Ellingsen - tonight, Thursday, June 18th 6:00 p.m., at Archeworks, 625 N. Kingsbury at Ontario. A gallery talk on Ellingsen's exhibition SEA: Seeing Eye Architecture, a species of Architecture Service Animals, at the Extension Gallery at Archeworks through July 10th. SOS is described as "structured on the illogical leaps of open door collaboration, cultivated difference, the responsibility of risk, and the joy of the embodied imagination playing in space and matter."

Brickworld -
this weekend, Thursday through Sunday, a conference for adult Lego-maniacs, ($50.00 registration) with public days Saturday and Sunday, tickets sold at the door only $10.00 adults, $7.00 seniors, kids under 10 - kids under 3 free. Website site here. A great compendium of the amazing Lego structures that were seen at least year's event (it may be the only place you'll ever seen a completed Calatrava Spire) in photo's - including the one shown here - by the tireless Bob Johnson here.

Canstruction -
the annual event benefiting the Great Chicago Food Depository at the Apparel Center, 350 Mart Center Drive (or Franklin, just north of the river) in which sculptures are made out of 86,000 cans of food, to be donated to the Depository at the end of the show. A jury that included Alpana Singh, Jimmy Bannos, Craig Vespa and Zoka Zola this year awarded Juror's Favorite to Nagle Hartray's Can-tastic Voyage. You can check it out through June 28th, suggested donation at least one can of food. Ths photo here is also (inevitably?) from Bob Johnson, and I'm told on reliable authority that it's a dam.

History of Chicago's Zoning Code and its Current Implementation - Mary Jo Graf of DeStefano + Partners will moderate a panel including 42nd ward alderman Brendan Reilly and the man who, literally, (co)wrote the book on Chicago zoning, Prof. Joseph P. Schwieterman. It's being put on at the Chicago Yacht Club June 24th - $50.00 members, $60.00 members - and if you don't make yourself a royal pain, they'll let you stay and watch the Wednesday fireworks show afterwards. Info here.

Grainy video from last Thursday's Lighting Crown Hall

Last Thursday, June 11th, artist Jim Tichy and students from IIT, SAIC, Bauhaus-Universitat Weimar, and Bezalel Academy Tel Aviv presented Lighting Crown Hall, turning it into "a massive light box, sending video projections and elaborate time-base lighting sequences through the glass windows." The project was a collaborative venture with the School of the Art Institute and the Mies van der Rohe Society, and the culmination of Bauhaus Labs' three week summer session "exploring the ideas of visionary artist and educator Laszlo Moholy-Nagy."

Zaha and Ben update - 7:30 a.m., June 16th

Our thanks again to Bob Johnson for the photo.

SAIC Student Show: Making Modern - opening reception and panel with Gordon Gill, Kelly Costello today

Over the weekend I had the opportunity to take in a great show featuring the thesis work of AIADO graduate students of the SAIC (Architecture, Interior Architecture, and Designed Objects of the School of the Art Institute to you). The work is enriched by the varied backgrounds of the students - artists, writers, etc. We'll be writing more about this, hopefully soon, but we wanted to remind you that there's an opening reception today, Tuesday, June 16th, at 6:00 p.m. in SAIC's Sullivan Galleries, on the 7th floor of the former Carson Pirie Scott building. (enter at 33 S. State.)

At 4:00 p.m., there'll be a panel that will include architect Gordon Gill of Adrian Smith+Gordon Gill Architecture, design consultant Kelly Costello of Doblin, SAIC professors Hennie Reynders and Ben Nicholson, graduate students, and - God save us all - me. More information here:

And here's a brief video featuring exhibition designers Odile Campagnon and Hannah Swart. The audio is absolutely abysmal (I'm still learning this whole video on the run thing) but they have some interesting things to say about the show and the work.

Get up to HALF off on all books at the Prairie Avenue Bookshop

This is the good stuff, the stuff you can't get on your Kindle. Through July 18th, one of Chicago's great treasures, the Prairie Avenue Bookshop, is having a remarkable sale that presents an irresistible temptation to bulk up your library.

Buy $10-49.00, take 20% off; $50-99, 35%, and once you hit $100.00 - which is, what, half a Phaidon? - you start paying half price. The books can be new or out of print. The fine print? Books have to be in stock, payment due at time of invoicing, discount calculated pre-tax, and can't be combined with other offers, all sales final.

Hours: 10 to 6 MtoF, 10 to 4 Saturday, closed Sunday. 418 S. Wabash. 312/922.8311. Website here

Bon appetit.

van Berkel pavilion unveiled!

why does it put me in mind of an egg salad sandwich? (I think I need to go to lunch.) again, thanks to Bob Johnson for the pic.

Zaha has landed

Blair Kamin was reporting last week that the Zaha Hadid designed Burnham Centennial pavilion in Millennium Park was weeks behind schedule, with only the skelton likely to be place for this Friday's official opening. That skeleton is now being mounted on site, as you can see in this photo from our indefatigible correspondent, Bob Johnson. The wraps are coming off the Ben van Berkel pavilion to its north, which is scheduled to open on Friday.

Update: just got an invitation from the Burnham Centennial Committee that seems to indicate both pavilions will be available for viewing by late this week. Could Zaha Hadid's actually be assembled by then??

Cecil Balmond and the Bonfire of the Vanities

This is an article I should have completed eight months ago. It concerns the most brilliant man I’ve yet to meet, the engineer, architect and polymath Cecil Balmond. A striking exhibition of his work, Cecil Balmond: Solid Void, is entering its final week at the Graham Foundation, 4 West Burton Place. Sorry for the short notice, but you will regret it if you miss it.

Is the new austerity the death of "star-chitecture"? And what caused eight months of writer's block? An article on architecture after the fall, the work, thought and relevance of Cecil Balmond, and a brief history of the Indian Rope Trick -all copiously illustrated with images and videos - here.

Waiting for Zaha

Remember when I wrote back in April about the Burnham Pavilions slated to open in Millennium Park on June 19th:

Will the stararchitects be able to match Burnham's 1893 creation of a perfect city, on-time, by opening day? Place your bets, ladies and gentlemen, place your bets.

Well, if you put your money on built-from-scratch Ben van Berkel, collect your winnings. Bet the ranch on Zaha? Pre-fab or no, better luck next time. Blair Kamin reports that Hadid's pavilion won't be ready, possibly for weeks after this Friday's official opening.

Reminder: Preservation Chicago Pilsen benefit, 2nd Fridays Gallery walk tonight

A quick reminder that the grassroots group Preservation Chicago is holding its spring benefit tonight, Friday, June 12th, 5:30 to 8:30 p.m., at 1835 S. Halsted, the heart of the Pilsen Chicago Arts District. The $30.00 at-the-door price includes beer, wine and appetizers, as well as music by the muy caliente Latin band, Son Bel Viento and d.j. LiMbs. There'll also be an exhibition of art by the organization's members and local artists and photographers, which you'll be able to buy directly from the artists. Full information here.

Tonight is also this month's 2nd Friday's Gallery Night, with 35 galleries, representing the work of over 100 artists, open from 6:00 to 10:00 p.m. You can download a printable map here.

A rainless evening, a good cause, and a gallery walk in one of Chicago's most historic neighborhoods - what's not to like?

Mr. Kamin Protests: Mr. Becker Apologizes - to a degree

Pulitzer Prize-winning Blair Kamin of the Chicago Tribune is among the nation's most respected architecture critics and, truth be hold, a very nice man. So when, he bitches and moans about being misrepresented you eventually have to listen.

The point of contention was a paragraph I wrote in my post about the travails of the old Chicago Post Office:

Of course, all of the city's dutifully sober critics at the time, most prominently Blair Kamin , dismissed the concept as a morbid caprice not even worth discussing. The big idea on their platter? Condo's. Carving condo's out of floorplates as big as two square blocks and actually suckering people into buying them. Yeah, right. Remind me again, which of those ideas was the big fantasy?

Almost immediately after the post hit the web, there was a comment posted by Mr. Kamin disputing the construction that inferred that he was among those proposing condo's for the site. So I added my own comment reprinting his actual words, and a sentence to the original post: "[Mr. Kamin takes exception: see comments]". This was apparently not enough, as Blair soon thereafter left a message on my home answering machine (unfortunately I was at work all day - sorry) again expressing his displeasure, which he indicated was shared by others posting comments on my site. (Actually, there was one.)

So I've included a revised paragraph on that post that I hope will remove any ambiguity about Mr. Kamin's position. He never proposed condo's for the Post Office, and I apologize if the paragraph in question inferred that he did.

The condo reference, however, was a secondary issue, a sideshow to the larger point that only a radical rethinking of the city may be enough to save it. Befitting his position as the critic of what remains, even in today's troubled state, one of the most powerful publications in America, Blair is kind of the pope of architectural criticsm, codifying the conventional wisdom of the moment. He is, in short, a supremely cautious man. He has many interesting things to say, but has he ever written anything that startled or surprised you?

Blair has a hard-won reputation to maintain. It is reasonable that he be cautious, even if not always useful.

I, on the other hand, have no reputation to speak of - other than, perhaps, that of the guy sitting alone at the far end of the bar spouting his opinions to the air - and am free to speak incautiously. And I say this: quibbling over the condo's reference is a pettifoggery diversion from the real issue: is the future of Chicago to be found catering to what "every business leader wants" when many of the most powerful of their number, traveling in a herd, have left us with a revised cityscape of staggering, generic mediocrity, or is that future to be found in a vision like John Ronan's for the old post office, and similar, muscular rethinkings of urban life that could actually lead to the city's salvation?

Got 12 cents a square foot? Take our Post Office - Please!

That's right, friends. Just 12 cents, a measly 12 cents per square foot, could make you the proud new owner of Chicago's largest antique: the 1932 former post office! Straddler of expressways, repeller of investors, threatening bankruptcy to any demolition company who dares to destroy it - it can all be yours!

That 12 cents comes from dividing the building's 2.5 million square feet (the Merchandise Mart has 4), into the suggested opening bid of $300,000 for an August 27th auction of the property. As reported by, among others, the Sun-Times David Roeder, Walton Street Capital has walked away from a $300 development plan that would have seen the razing of a large part of the building that crosses over the Eisenhower Expressway. The deal collapsed even though Walton was in line for a $51 million subsidy from the local TIF slush fund, and would have gotten back $9 million of the $10 million it was going to pay the postal service for the acquisition.

Now the postal service, spending $2 million a year just to keep the building shuttered, is reduced to playing the role of desperately motivated seller. "Whatever we can get from a sale," a spokesman told Roeder, "every penny counts." So that $300,000 could be the opening of a Dutch auction; not a floor, but a ceiling from which bids descend on a steep incline towards zero. If you're enough of a gambler, you might be able to win the behemoth on Harrison for not even the change in your pocket, just the lint.
The old Main Post Office was once a proud symbol of civic achievement, of American power and affluence. It's block long lobby was one of the most spectacular - if chilly - interiors in Chicago. Now it's garbage.
So we're back to square one. We could do a lot worse than to return to architect John Ronan's brilliant vision of turning the Post Office into a Municipal Mausoleum, a Pantheon for both Chicago's greatest and its common men and women, an incredible spectacle of urban drama that boldly re-imagined the expression of urban life - and death - through architecture.
Of course, all of the city's dutifully sober critics at the time, most prominently dismissed the concept as a morbid caprice not even worth discussing. The big idea on their platter? (Except for Blair Kamin. Blair Kamin never proposed condo's) Condo's. Carving condo's out of floorplates as big as two square blocks and actually suckering people into buying them. Yeah, right. Remind me again, which of those ideas was the big fantasy?
Read what I wrote about Ronan's proposal here - with illustrations - and judge for yourself.

Recover from your Workday in just one graceful half hour: Rush Hour Concerts at the Cathedral of St. James

So here's the deal . . . Leave the office at 5:00 after a hard day, 5:15, have some Argo tea, snack's from Trader Joe's, perhaps even a little wine. 5:45, hear a chamber concert in one of Chicago's finest spaces, in one of its most historic churches. 6:15, applaud generously. Horrors of workday past now only a distant memory, head out, relaxed, refreshed, and primed to enjoy the rest of your evening.

That's the great concept behind the Rush Hour Concert series sponsored by the Cathedral of St. James. "Great music for busy lives," they call it, and with a reception and a 30 minute concert early every Tuesday evening through August 25th, and a superb roster of musicians that draws heavily from the ranks of Chicago Symphony and Lyric Opera players, who's to argue?

St. James, itself, is a civic treasure, one of Chicago's oldest houses of worship. It was founded in 1834, just one year after the city's incorporation, the same year John Kinzie settled here. Along with another Chicago pioneer, Gurdon S. Hubbard and Margaret Helm he was considered the parish's founder, and early services were held in rented quarters in a wood building at State and Kinzie streets which he furnished. Kinzie would later donate the land at Wabash and Illinois where in 1837 a new brick church, costing $14,000, was dedicated. Pews were sold at auction, netting $13,862.

In 1856, at a time when most of Chicago's earliest churches were moving to south Wabash Avenue from present homes centered around the public square that's now the site of City/County building, St. James moved even farther north, to its present location a block south of Holy Name Cathedral, into a $100,000 edifice by architect Edward Burling, who would later bring a young, pre-Sullivan Dankmar Adler into partnership in his firm.

Just after the dedication of a new organ, the Great Fire of 1871 hit. As one eyewitness described it, "I saw the beautiful Episcopal Church of St James in flames. They came on all sides, licking the marble buttresses, one by one, and leaving charred or blackened masses. But the most wonderful sight of all was the white shining church tower, from which, as I looked, burst tongues of fire." That bell tower, along with portions of the facade, were among the few structures left standing in a city reduced to rubble.

As Chicago boomed in the last part of 19th century, St. James' congregation grew wealthy and elite. As quickly as the 1920's, however, the tide turned. The wealthy had moved on; their former mansions cut up into apartments as the neighborhood veered toward skid-row.

Now, of course, the neighborhood, renamed by developers "The Cathedral District" to help move the pricey condo's, is again thriving. A multi-million dollar 1980's restoration brought most of the St. James back to the Arts and Crafts, Victorian Gothic design of the 1890's.

The Rush Hour Concerts series kicked off June 2nd. Next Tuesday's event on the 16th features no fewer than eight cellists from the CSO and Lyric, along with soprano Maire O'Brien and conductor Michael Mulcahy. The programs are extremely varied and creative: Gershwin and Ives on the 23rd, a brass transcription of Shostakovich's String Quarter No. 12 on the 30th, Couperin for Bastille Day on July 14th, Poulenc on the 21st. On the 4th of August, there's CSO principal oboe Eugene Izotov with cellist Katinka Kleijn and organist David Schrader: 11 more concerts in all from now through the end of summer. Check out the full details here. St. James Cathedral is at Wabash at Huron.

Thursday, One Night Only: Eine Kleine Nachtlichtmusik at Crown Hall

In the early days of Mies van der Rohe's Crown Hall, the jewel of the IIT campus, architect John Vinci, then a senior, convinced the school to let him use the new building for the annual dance. He managed to book Duke Ellington to provide the music, and students from IIT's Institute of Design were given responsibility for providing the decor. "They put blue and green spotlights on the grass outside," remembers Vinci, "and aimed them at the branches of the honey locust trees lining the building, so that inside you'd see the shadows of the branches moving behind the lower milk-glass windows like animated drawings on Japanese paper."

This Thursday, June 11th, from nine-ish to midnight, that idea will be turned outside in, as artist Jim Tichy and students from IIT, SAIC, Bauhaus-Universitat Weimar, and Bezalel Academy Tel Aviv will present Lighting Crown Hall, turning it into "a massive light box, sending video projections and elaborate time-base lighting sequences through the glass windows." The project is a collaborative venture with the School of the Art Institute and the Mies van der Rohe Society, and is the culmination of Bauhaus Labs' three week summer session "exploring the ideas of visionary artist and educator Laszlo Moholy-Nagy."

Grab a lawn chair (and a jacket, and maybe an umbrella) and stake out your place. Crown Hall is at 3360 South State Street. There's public parking in lots D1 and D2 at the southeast corner of 33rd and State, entrance on 33rd.

Rabble Overtakes Trib Tower Aerie - with the right kind of cash, you're invited, too.

In case you've ever wondered about the accommodations the Chicago Tribune aristocrats carved out for themselves below the soaring buttresses and behind the Gothic tracery atop Hood and Howells' Tribune Tower, wonder no more.
Chicago caterers Food for Thought have announced they are the "exclusive representative" for the top of the tower and its "State-of-the-art conference facilities, old-world charm, and stunning views." Standing reception: 300; seated dinner: 100. The apoplectic spirit of Col. McCormick restlessly haunting the room: priceless.

Dubai's Giant Swiss Cheese Grater becomes Reality

Usually when you see some architectural firm's really pushing-the-envelope design, your first - and correct - reactions are: a. it's very nice and b. it will always remain in the unrealized perfection of the drawings.

Occasionally, however, such a design does get built. Case in point is New York-based reiser + umemoto's stunning office project O-14, which has actually just been topped out in the architectural fairyland of Dubai, and is projected to be completed next year. Like SOM's 1961 Hartford Building on Wacker Drive . . .
. . . O-14 wears its structure as an exoskeleton. Unlike the more conventional Hartford, however, 0-14's exoskeleton creates a column-free interior. It also provides solar shading, and pairs up with the glazing set a meter within to create what is the equivalent to a double-skin facade, whose chimney effect channels hot air - of which I hear there's a lot in Dubai - up through the cavity, cooling the surface of the window wall.

The exoskeleton is of self-consolidating concrete cast around a "basket weave" of reinforcing steel, with the large circular openings created by inserting cut polystyrene voids in the "basket-weave" rebar matrix. You can see an illustration of the process in photographs accompanying this fine article on Arcspace, from which we've stolen borrowed the image below.
reiser +umemoto's website also includes their interesting entry in a competition to design a new home for the Pittsburgh Children's Museum. Like everyone else in the world excepting the bunker-loving Gigi Pritzker Pucker, Mayor Daley and their minions, the architects recognize the importance of making a "building that is at once light and inviting." (Since it's designed with Flash, we can't provide a link to the project's page on their website - you just have to burrow to find it.)
In an amazing coincidence, Lucien Lagrange, working independently, completely unaware of reiser + umemoto's design for O-14 , came up with a strikingly parallel concept to counter Mies van der Rohe 860-880 Lake Shore Drive apartments when the Chicago architect assumed he would get his hands on the Athletic Club site right across the street.*
*important note to attorneys here.

No Room for the Inn: Mondrian Stateless; Waterview "Worthless"

Two stories this week in Crain's Chicago Business underscored how the current slump in hotel fortunes is affecting the city's architecture.

On Wednesday, Crain's reported that it's now official: there will be no Mondrian Hotel on State Street. The plan of the buyers of the former Cedar Hotel at 1112-18 North State, shuttered since 2007, was to strip off its terra cotta facade, demolish the hotel behind it, construct a new 200 room building in its place, and then slap the old facade onto it, in still another instance of a practice that's becoming so common in this city that it should probably be renamed a "Chicagectomy". (It will interesting to see what happens to another property, the historic Esquire Theater on Oak Street, which the same developer acquired with the idea of knocking it down for a new development.)

No one knows what to do with the hotel, but the ground level space that was formally the long-time home of Melvin B's Truck Stop and the adjacent bar my co-workers used to affectionately refer to as "Man vs. Margarita" will soon be the home to a new pub to be named, ironically enough, Cedar Hotel. Let's hope it will bring back the outdoor terraces teeming with imbibers that were a more democratic counterpoint to its more pretentious Viagra Triangle neighbors.
The news in Shangri-La - the hotel version - is even worse. Crain's also reported this week that the Bank of America has foreclosed on the hotel's intended home, Waterview, the projected 90-story tower that has remained an empty, 26-story stump since the money ran out last year, constructed halted, and the innkeepers fled. It seems no one has a good word to say about Waterview now. One lawyer for one of the other lien holders calls it "worthless"; a second attorney is quoted by Crain's as saying “The property is worth less than it would be if it was vacant."
Forget the Burnham Memorial. Let's do something useful and have a architectural competition to come up with ideas of what to do with the massive, abandoned concrete abortion on West Wacker.

Meanwhile, the Joseph P. Kennedy award for smart investing in an economic meltdown has to go to Kimpton Hotels. I named this award after the booze peddler who in 1945 paid $11,500,000 to buy the Merchandise Mart from a desperate Marshall Field & Company that had built it at a cost between $32 and $38 million, only to see the Great Depression transform it into an "Chicago's #1 real estate white elephant." The Mart became the cornerstone of the Kennedy family fortune (in 1998 it would be sold for over half a billion dollars), eventually supporting Joseph P. Kennedy's prodigious bankrolling of the successful 1960 presidential campaign of his eldest son Jack.

Strategic Hotels, sent to the ropes by the deepening recession, pulled out of a deal to build an annex to their Fairmont Hotel in Jeanne Gang's new Aqua Tower. While other chains are overleveraged and reeling, Crain's reports that Kimpton Group Holding, which last year end created a quarter billion fund specifically to pick up the bargains that a crashing market presents, is close to sealing a deal to take over the 15 hotel floors at Aqua for $56 million, a third less than Strategic was going to pay, with that $28 million difference matching the $28 million in earnest money that Strategic left in the developers pockets as they walked away from their deal.
Analysts are calling the deal a major risk for Kimpton, but to me it looks like a masterstroke. Aqua has a great location, equidistant between Millennium Park and the Mag Mile, and its completely unique profile of sculpted balcony slabs offers both a distinctive branding vehicle and, at 80 stories, a kind of architectural GPS device, with the tower visible in the skyline all across central Chicago, allowing travelers to easily get their bearings and find their way safely back to their rooms. POSTSCRIPT: The new edition of Crain's is reporting that the Kimpton deal may not have been the lock they originally indicated, and that negotiations are continuing with the final results as yet far from certain.

A Great Show and a Great Storyteller: Tim Samuelson on the art of John T. McCutcheon today at 12:15

Here's a show you shouldn't miss: The Cartoons of John T. McCutcheon: Chronicles of A Changing World, at the Chicago Cultural Center through September 27th. The Pulitzer-Prize-winning artist, whose career ran from 1889 through 1946, mostly at the Chicago Tribune, was most of the celebrated artists of his time, and a walk through the exhibition makes it easy to see why.

And today, June 4th, at 12:15 p.m., you can hear exhibition curator - and one of our city's best storytellers - Chicago Cultural Historian Tim Samuelson give a gallery talk. (They'll be one more, on Thursday, July 9th, also at 12:15) The exhibition - and Tim - are in the Chicago Rooms, 2nd floor, Washington Street side.

You can see a few snippets of his opening night tour from last Friday below, which also also illustrate the striking way curator/designer Nathan Mason uses walls of different bright colors to make the rich, mostly black and white drawings pop. Instead of your eyes growing tired as you move row after row, they're refreshed each time you move to a new panel. SPOILER ALERT: stop watching the video after the background goes orange-yellow to avoid learning the secret of the McCutcheon's "Mysterious Stranger" drawings before you see the show.

The Mysterious Stranger is just one of a wide universe of characters populating McCutcheons's series A Chronicle of Social Happenings at Bird Center, from 1903 and 1904, a melodrama in pictures of the goings on in a mythical small town that drew on McCutcheon's own upbringing in Lafayette, Indiana. It was, in the words of a current writer, The Simpsons of its time, immensely popular. So popular, in fact, that it inspired a play written by Chicago novelist George Ade, Captain Fry's Birthday Party, that was performed by members of the fine arts club The Little Room. As documented below, the members happily assuming the identities of various Bird Center characters included Poetry editor and John Wellborn Root biographer Harriet Monroe, and such prominent architects as the Pond brothers, Hugh Garden, and Howard van Doren Shaw, McCutcheon's father-in-law. (click to see larger version.)
Much of McCutcheon's style falls within a fairly conventional center, but there's no shortage of engaging, eccentric accents. One drawing of the cartoonist, shown from behind, sweat shooting out of his head like a nimbus as he struggles against deadline to come up with ideas, could have been drawn by Robert Crumb. Extras filling up a street in another cityscape, by Saul Bass.
And then there's the architecture, depicted, mostly in witty caricature, but sometimes also in sharp detail, not just in the operatically scaled scenes of the rising of the city's skyscrapers, but in the smaller snapshots of its brutal, unsentimental dynamism - an abandoned church turned into a storage warehouse, a closed synagogue a cigar store. Politics and corruption (or should it be politicscorruption?) are also explicated with a satiric acuteness not even Mike Royko could better. Walking through this exhibition, you really feel you've stepped back in time, immersed in the huckster exuberance of Chicago at its boom town peak, all vividly captured byMcCutcheon.

Balconies and Eaves, Laurel and Hardy in Chicago and Madrid

Our roving correspondent, architect Iker Gil of MAS Studio, brings to our attention this striking building in Madrid . . .
which, of course, puts us in mind of a slightly taller Chicago variant, Studio/Gang Architect's Aqua tower.
The Madrid building, Edificio en la M-30, is actually a retrofit, by the firm of Jerónimo Junquera-Liliana Obal, of an existing 1.2 million square foot, curtain-walled office tower for the headquarters of Gamesa, a company specializing in sustainable energy technologies and one of the world's largest wind turbine manufacturers.

The Spanish architects share a common vision with Aqua's Jeanne Gang in using the built environment as a reflection of the structures of nature. Gang drew inspiration from stone outcroppings in Michigan; Junquera and Obal see the mountains reflected in urban buildings and the rivers in the city's highways.

The balconies at Aqua and the eaves at M-30 were both designed to provide shading and reduce solar height gain, as well as to set their respective buildings, in Junquera's words, "vibrating with light" in variation day to day and season to season. At M-30, there's also atmospheric lighting at night.
In Madrid, the continuous eaves, made of pre-cast fiber-reinforced concrete, also buffer the offices from street noise - the site is along two major thoroughfares (the M-30 is one of them) which together bring 100,000 cars rushing past the building each day.
In Chicago, the poured-in-place concrete slab balconies, scraped away in places to create sculptural voids of curtain wall, provide views into the city's dense urban forest that would not be available from a rigidly rectangular perimeter.
Isn't it an enormous relief to have Aqua finally wash the sour taste of the once-dominant bunker of the Park Millennium out of the skyline?

Children's Rises, Time Falls

Birth and death portrayed in two photographs from CAF docent Kathleen Carpenter.

First, this spectacular shot of the new, billion dollar Children's Memorial Hospital, now fast rising on Chicago Avenue just west of the recently completed Prentice Women's Hospital.
Second is this final portrait of the clock perch that stood above the entrance to the recently evicted Talbott's in Chicago Place, the pall mall now in the process of largely being converted into office space. For a brief optimistic moment at the time of the mall's 1990 opening, it was the roost of the proud, shimmering metallic bird that personified the space's first tenant, legendary Chicago jeweler, C.D. Peacock. In brutally short order, the store went bust, the bird disappeared, and it's pretty much been downhill from there.
And if you have any doubts about the whole tempus fugit thing, consider the buildings depicted in one of the murals (I wonder what will happen to them) at Chicago Place's entrance. Wrigley Building: owned by Mars. Tribune Tower: bankruptcy central. Sears Towers? Oh, you must be referring to the mighty Willis.
For those of you suffering withdrawal from being able to immerse yourself in the unsettling emptiness and disquieting silence of Chicago Place, may I offer up for your next Dead Mall fix, the Century? With its Landmark Cinemas at the top, it's like a tree house built upon the branches of a dead oak. Ramps descend past a succession of nowheres, all the way down to the basement, where abandoned metal bones are all that's left of the subterranean Eatzie's, done in by a witches' brew of overambition, bad location, mediocre food and fatal cuteness.

Pecha Kucha 9, Woodhouse, Preservation Chicago, Model City, Jens Jensen, Bucky, Uncle Dan, Aunt Bertha, Pilgrim Baptist, - 60 events on June calendar

By the end of the month, people will be heading out to the beach and events get scarce, but until then, we've got 60 - 60! - architecture related events on the June calendar.

It starts out with the Grant Park Advisory Council considering the new Burnham Memorial, then there's Pecha Kucha 9 on Tuesday, a three day symposium on the legacy of Jens Jensen, Preservation Chicago's Pilsen fundraiser, SEAOI's annual banquet honoring the best engineered buildings of the year, Chris Lee talking about plans for restoring Adler & Sullivan's Pilgrim Baptist, at CAF. where on another date Dirk Denison will also be speaking. Also at CAF, Donald L. Miller discusses Daniel Burnham, while Arthur Miller discusses Edward Bennett and Uncle Dan's shadow for Landmarks Illinois at the Cultural Center.

There are receptions for new exhibitions: Model City, at CAF, David Woodhouse Architects, at I Space, and Daniel Burnham's Vision of an American Metropolis, at the Newberry Library. Again at CAF, Grahm Balkany talks about the Walter Gropius legacy at the Michael Reese Hospital that the city's hot to destroy. (The campus has now been sealed off so people can no longer see what they'll be missing: surprise, surprise.) And then there's this year Canstruction at the locale formerly known as the Apparel Center. Could this be the year we'll see Trump Tower realized in tuna and sardines?

Check it all out - and decide for yourself what you can't miss before you bundle the family and its pets into the Rambler American . . . here.

Reap What you Sow. Supreme Court declines to review hack judge's decimation of landmarks law

Crain's is reporting that the Illinois Supreme Court has declined without comment the Daley administration's appeal of the ruling of a lower court led by a hack political judge that decimated the law that protects Chicago's landmarks. The case is now remanded for retrial but the original ruling is expected to provide the Cook County Court no other option but to affirm the original finding that the landmarks ordinance is unconstitutional. Read Crain's report here. Our original report here.

Opening Reception Tonight: The Cartoons of John T. McCutcheon

Today, the Chicago Tribune has been without a primary editorial cartoonist for years, another sign of the decline of print journalism. But for over almost sixty years, from 1889 through 1946, most of them at the Trib, cartoonist John T. McCutcheon created, in the words of the subtitle of a new exhibition opening tonight, Friday, May 29th, at the Chicago Cultural Center, Chronicles of a Changing World that documented the evolving story of America, often reflected in the light of the Trib's conservative outlook.

The Pulitizer-Prize winning McCutcheon was known as the "Dean of American Cartoonists." His take ranged from the whimsical, as in this portrait of a whirlwind visit to Chicago by President Theodore Roosevelt . . .
to this bitter commentary on the aftermath to World War I, reproduced courtesy of the Smithsonian.
The new exhibition shows the wide range of McCutcheon's beautifully drawn work, both as a political commentator and as an acute observer of the everyday life of his times.

Tonight's opening reception, running from 5:00 to 7:00 p.m., features a 5:30 p.m. gallery talk by exhibition curator and Chicago cultural historian Tim Samuelson, who not only has no equal in his knowledge of the city and its history, but draws on a seemingly inexhaustible wealth of great stories to tell, as well. Samuelson will also be giving gallery talks at 12:15 p.m. on June 4th and July 9th, both Thursdays.

The exhibition runs through September 27th in the second floor Chicago Rooms of the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington. Did I mention it's all free?