Thursday, August 13, 2009

Big. Bold. Visionary opens 9.4. Chicago architects finally get to join the Burnham Centennial celebration

On September 4th, the day Daniel Burnham would have celebrated his 163rd birthday had they not cremated him in 1912, a new exhibition, Big. Bold. Visionary: Chicago Considers the Next Century, will feature the work of Carol Ross Barney, Larry Booth, Dirk Denison, Sarah Dunn, Martin Felsen, Paul Florian, Gordon Gill, Ralph Johnson, Dirk Lohan, John Ronan, Linda Searl, Adrian Smith, Stanley Tigerman, Joe Valerio, Brian Vitale, David Woodhouse and Brininstool+Lynch, whose The Chicago Grid (City of the Future), is shown above. The show, curated by Edward Keegan, will run at the Chicago Tourism Center, 72 E. Randolph, through October 4th.

It sounds a lot like the Visionary Chicago Architecture project that Stanley Tigerman curated for the Chicago Central Area Committee back in 2005, which offered a selection of super-sized projects, some enthralling, some appalling, many an amalgam of both, but all strong expressions of the kind of vibrant Chicago architecture that has so far been missing from the Burnham celebration. And, yes, I know it's all supposed to be about the whole "make no little plans" thing, but is too late for a counter exhibition along the lines of Let's Get Small: Burnham on a Human Scale?

Also on September 4th, another exhibition, Daniel Burnham's Enduring Vision for the Philippines, will open at the City Gallery of Photography in the Water Tower and will run through December 31st. The exhibition considers the legacy of Burnham's 1904 Plan of Manila, as seen in the work of photographer Tim Long, taken during a residency in Manila in 2007-08.

No comments: