Oh, the Humanities! - Pran, Mau, Jacob, Allen, Landscape, Bridges and SuperTalls - over 50 events on November calendar

Big Thinkers (patent pending) is one of the key themes of this year's Chicago Humanities Festival, and it's resulted in a series of programs to "celebrate architects, designers, and Big Thinkers (patent pending) throughout history and into the 21st century." We wrote yesterday about this past weekend's programs, but if you missed them, there are several more next weekend. Among them are Offshoring Audacity, and the opening on a new exhibition, Burnham 2.0, at the Chicago History Museum, both on Saturday, and on Sunday, Bruce Mau and Elva Rubio's The Chicago Project.

It's just part of a rich array of 50+ different programs on the November calendar that will also include a three-day conference, The Second Wave of Modernism in Landscape Design in America, Structural Engineers Association of Illinois' Evolution of Bridge Technology, and the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat's annual wards dinner. Friends of Downtown sponsors a look at the redevelopment of the Old Post Office with an expressway running through it, closed and empty since 1996. Carolyn Armenta Davis discusses 21st Century Designs from Black Diaspora Architects at CAF, which is also sponsoring tours of the Goettsch Partners and SOM offices on separate dates. AIA/Chicago offers a tour of Carol Ross Barney's office. There's a walking tour of the Cecil Balmond Graham Foundation exhibition, Solid Void, by IIT's Eric Ellingsen and Director/Curator Sarah Herda.

There are lectures by Vince Michael on preservation in China at CAF, William Tyre on Prairie Avenue at the Cultural Center for Landmarks Illinois, Peter Pran and Christoff and Finio at IIT, and Stan Allen, Interloop Architecture's Finley and Wamble, and Realtities: United's Jan and Tim Edler at UIC, and much, much more, including the last chance this Friday to be dazed and confused by my gallery talk for the exhibition, Boom Towns!, at CAF.

With the economy continuing to tank, you have to wonder if all these institutions will be able to continue their programs at the current pace, so gather ye rosebuds while ye may, and check the more than half a hundred great November events here.