Great Weekend Reads: Lifson on Agora, TribBus on Gang

Do 106 headless torso's an Agora Make? Edward Lifson of WBEZ's Hello, Beautiful has a great post on his blog on this week's dedication of sculptor Madgalena Abakanowicz's Agora, a ten million dollar installation, whose contributors include Robin Williams, which places 106 supersized lower torsos on a site in Grant Park just north of Roosevelt. Lifson's hugely entertaining and informative posting is a free-form riff including everything from a talk with the artist, a comparison with Eisenman's Berlin Holocaust memorial, the works of Rodin and Boccioni, and one of our mayor's own kind of improvisations that occur when an event actually takes him beyond his printed script and he begins to rap on his personal view of the city. Oh, and lots and lots of pictures. The post is all over the place, and all the better for it - it captures superbly the clash of ideas and "typologies" (sorry - I just came from Joe Rosa's Young Chicago), power modes and personalities. Thinking aloud should always be this good. Read and see it all here.

Jeanne Gang: Architect as Businesswoman - The Trib's Sunday business section includes an interview by Susan Diesenhouse of Aqua architect Jeanne Gang, currently on tour with her IIT students in Brazil, which covers everything from practical aesthetics, handling large projects like the half-billion buck Aqua, and the influence of rising materials cost on architecture. Read it here before it goes into paid archive hell.