ArchitectureChicago PLUS

The Donald: Trump Riverwalk ghost town ok with me

2012-02-01T13:41:00.000-06:00

We wrote yesterday about the current state of the Wrigley Building plaza and the empty shops at the Trump International Hotel and Tower riverwalk. Today, Alby Gallun of Crain's Chicago Business has an interview with Donald Trump in which the creatively coiffured mogul says that if you're expecting to be able to sip a coffee, or buy a gelato or Coach handbag at his spectacular, SOM-designed riverwalk, don't hold your breath. Trump tells Gallun they've basically given up for now, putting leasing on hold until retail rebounds. Oh, he would also like to land bank the site of the Calatrava Spire, if he can get it cheap. Read the full interview (subscription or registration required) here.

Juan Moreno and UNO Charter today at CAF, Tigerman rêverie at the Graham tomorrow - February calendar . . . ?

2012-02-01T10:41:00.001-06:00

We're still in our hamster-in-a-wheel phase of completing the February calendar of Chicago architectural events . . .

So, here's a heads-up that today at 12:15 at the Chicago Architecture Foundation, 224 South Michigan, there's a lecture, Instituto Health Sciences Career Academy and UNO Charter School, featuring Juan Moreno, AIA, President JGMA Architects.

And a reminder that tomorrow at the Graham at 6:00 p.m., there's the opening reception for the Stanley Tigerman exhibition, "Ceci ne'st pas une rêverie". (At Yale, it was known as "Ceci n'est pas une rêverie") The accompanying 5:00 p.m. lecture by exhibition curator Emmannuel Petit, Scaffolds of Heaven: on Tigerman, is waitlisted. More info here.

. . . and now - back to the wheel (spin,spin,spin)

Gummy Passage: Why Landmarking the Wrigley needs to consider its elegant plaza

2012-01-31T04:26:00.000-06:00

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This Thursday, the Commission on Chicago Landmarks will consider bestowing official landmark status on the Wrigley Building, the gleaming cream terra cotta pair of towers that are one of the crown jewels of Chicago architecture. Designed by Graham, Anderson, Probst and White, the two linked buildings - the main structure completed in 1921, the annex in 1924 - ended nearly a century serving as the high-profile headquarters of the Chicago gum maker last summer when the company, now a subsidiary of global candy behemoth Mars, announced it was dumping 100 Chicago area employees, and pulling out of the Wrigley Building, shifting the last 250 workers to its research center in the ritzy confines of Goose Island.

In September, a deal was finalized to sell the structure for $33 million to an investor group led by BDT Capital Partners. Earlier this month, the new owners announced their intentions to redevelop the buildings, and now the first new business on Thursday's Landmarks agenda is preliminary landmark designation for the Wrigley. The second agenda item is a recommendation to the City Council to approve a Class L Property Tax Incentive that would substantially reduce taxes on the building for the next 12 years, in exchange for renovations that would equal at least 50% of the complex's value.

While the actual terms of the ordinance had not been posted on the Commission's website as this is being written, it's reasonable to suppose that it will protect all exteriors facing Michigan, the river, and on the west facades. What is not clear is how the ordinance will address - if it all - the exterior of the two buildings facing the wide plaza between them.

As we wrote about in this photo essay, in August of 2010, the Mars subsidiary undertook a bargain-basement renovation of the plaza that saw, on the plus side, the removal of a dilapidated fountain and planters, versus, on the minus side, leaving behind an ugly motley of paving, and the installation of new generic and cheap-looking storefronts on the annex side of the plaza that gashed an ugly scar across the elegant terra cotta ornament of the historic facades.

For decades, the Wrigley Building restaurant, which had, itself, grafted a modernist entrance onto the annex's plaza facade, was a prime lunchtime destination. Now, according to a report in Crain's Chicago Business, the new owners are planning to bring a restaurant of the same quality back to the plaza, along with additional retail. The way Crain's describes it - "The shops will be built out into the plaza with entrances from the outside" - is fairly ambiguous. Does it mean new storefronts and entrances will be added to the current facades, or that there will be new construction extending behind the current exterior walls?

In either case, the landmarks ordinance for the building needs to be written to protect the Wrigley Building plaza from further insensitive assaults on its distinctive architecture. We've already seen, in the Mars renovation, how not to do it, but there are any number of ways to do it correctly, and the ordinance should make sure the new owners, whose hearts seem to be in the right place, are encouraged to adopt one of them in meeting their own needs.

The quality of the plaza has become even more important as it is now the Michigan avenue gateway to River North, leading in to the broad expanse of the Trump Tower promenade, which terminates visually in the shimmering short-and-tall backdrop of the illuminated Trump Tower parking ramp and Goettsch Partners elegant 353 North Clark office tower, disgorging pedestrians into two different pathways leading to either to Marina City or the IBM Building at 330 North Wabash. Right now, the shopworn Wrigley Plaza is clearly the poor sister to the newer Trump promenade, even after Trump Management trashed Hoerr Schaudt's distinctive landscaping for a cheaper and more generic alternative.

Outside of the landmarking process, there needs to be more planning between Trump and Wrigley management in helping the plaza and promenade realize its full potential as a vibrant civic amenity. In this case, the Wrigley could actually take the lead. Imagine, on a warm summer day, people taking a break from their workday or shopping watching the world go by as they sit at a Wrigley Plaza table enjoying a leisurely meal or sipping coffee. It's a large space, and a lot can be done with it, both with permanent retail installations, and with event programming throughout the year.

The spectacular Trump Riverwalk offers up an even larger space, but a lot more disappointment. In the over two years since its opening, none of the retail on its terraces has been leased, so on most days, even in great weather, the huge complex can seem almost depopulated. No one's suggesting turning it into a carnival (the way that huge O'Briens restaurant on the opposite side of the river sucks up all but the perimeter of the riverwalk is another example not to be emulated), but maybe Trump should explore some loss-leader incentives to get the momentum going. The Wrigley landmarking and plaza development, done right, could be the spark that leads the Wrigley-Trump promenade and riverwalk to overcome its current, largely unrealized status to attain its full potential as one of Chicago's great urban treasures.

The monthly meeting of the Commission on Chicago Landmarks takes place Thursday, February 2, in City Hall chambers, room 201-A, 121 North LaSalle, at 12:45 p.m. It is open to the public.

Urban Degreening: Garden Gateway to Back Door Stonefest

2012-01-28T09:22:00.000-06:00

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In memory of the AMA Building Park, the last real green space in River North, a gift from John Buck that survived nearly two decades before the Daley administration and Lori Healy rebuffed offers from Buck and refused a lift a finger to save it. Relive its destruction here.

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

2012-01-25T06:58:00.000-06:00

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

2012-01-23T22:14:00.000-06:00

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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

2012-01-22T12:09:00.000-06:00

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

2012-01-21T02:05:00.000-06:00

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

2012-01-20T15:03:00.000-06:00

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

2012-01-18T07:54:00.000-06:00

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

2012-01-16T23:58:00.000-06:00

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.

2012-01-16T00:41:00.001-06:00

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!

2012-01-13T00:01:00.000-06:00

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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

2012-01-12T08:04:00.000-06:00

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

2012-01-10T22:33:00.000-06:00

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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

2012-01-09T22:43:00.001-06:00

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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

2012-01-09T00:00:00.000-06:00

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

2012-01-08T14:27:00.002-06:00

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.

The Architects behind the Architects: Anne Tyng dies at 91

2012-01-07T11:48:00.000-06:00

photograph courtesy Domus magazine. You can read Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss's excellent, beautifully illustrated interview with Anne Tyng here.

According to Inga Saffron's fine obituary in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Anne Tyng "struggled her entire career to be taken seriously." Much like Marion Mahony with Frank Lloyd Wright and Walter Burley Griffin, she was a pioneer, one of the earliest female architects. Without a doubt they had a major influence on the now iconic architects they worked with and for, but their identities were subsumed in history.

At a recent lecture by Tyng at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard, dean Mohsen Mostafavi revealed some of Tyng's history by reading from her book, Louis Kahn to Anne Tyng: The Rome Letters, 1953-1954, a collection of letters written during her year in Italy . . .

I was the only woman to take the exams in 1949. In addition to the written exam for state registration, an oral exam was required for national certification. In Harrisburg, one of the three reviewers was so against the idea of a woman architect that he refused to speak to me and actually sat apart and turned himself away so he wouldn't have to look at me . . . Any misgivings were apparently resolved, because I passed.

They was another complication that may have affected her hostile examiner. Anne Tyng was a great beauty. It would have been bad enough if Tyng had been the stereotypical mouse of male fantasy fears - homely, wearing eyeglasses, socially inept, a misfit, a female looking to become a man - but to be razor-sharp, beautiful and ambitious, that's a toxic cocktail for any male chauvinist to have to swallow.

And there was still one more complication. She not only worked with Louis Kahn, she was his lover. (He was married at the time.) She bore him a daughter. Awkward. Not just in matter of personal relationships, but in writing history. Saffron relates that although Tyng kept all of the letters she wrote to Kahn when in Rome, Kahn destroyed all of her replies.

It was Tyng that turned Kahn on to the possibilities of geometry, resulting in their remarkable 1956-57 proposal for a Philadelphia City Tower. In an interview in Domus by Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss, Tyng relates "The tower is really just something I did . . . Lou also worked on the base, so he didn't have much to do with the tower either. He didn't really grasp the geometry that well." The unrealized tower is a stunning "geodesic skyscraper" "Each level is identical," Tyng told Mostafavi, "and it just rotates in plan as you go up. It kind of animates the building to some degree, I think, because it looks as though it might be in motion, possibly, if you have enough imagination for that. If you look at it, it almost looks like a women with her hips thrown out dancing . . ."

Kahn basically expunged Tyng as a generator of the design, which Tyng found out when she never received an invitation to a MOMA opening of an exhibition that featured the project.

He's a rascal. He actually took my name off. I had put his name on with mine because I thought it might be a gesture he might appreciate. And then he took my name off. So I went into his office and I say, 'Wouldn't it better if you called them than if I called them?' and he did and straightened it out.

Tyng's influence on Kahn is apparent in such projects as the Yale Art Gallery and the recently restored Trenton Bath House. At the very end of her very long life, Anne Tyng was finally rediscovered, with an exhibition of her work and thought, Anne Tyng: Inhabiting Geometry, which opened at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia just last January, before coming around to the Graham last April. I didn't get around to seeing it. Idiot.

Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got
Till it's gone

It was just last fall that Tyng, age 90, went to Harvard for that remarkable GSD lecture, which, fortunately, was captured on video, and you can see it below. (I would recommend you click on the video to view it on YouTube full-size.)

“The feminine is more dominant for the moment. There are many women doing things that they never did before or given positions they were never given before or earned before. They had earned it before, but never got it.

“Geometry when you have it in school was never animate in any form, but I think that there are ways of making things that are flexible that have a kind of life of their own. That aren't necessarily gimmicks, but something that is just basic . . . the kind of things I think architects can discover. Something that adds function, adds dimension or some sort of quality that hasn't been done before. If you look back at the five platonic solids, we don't really use all of those . I mean - there they are. We can use them. The tetrahedrons and the octahedrons fit together. They fill space. They're really quite simple . . . Out of that, you might make all kinds of interesting architecture that almost has a life of its own.

John Ronan's Poetry Foundation wins 2012 AIA Honor Award

2012-01-06T12:11:00.002-06:00

For someone who's been dead now for over two years, Ruth Lilly is having a really good year. Two buildings that she made possible with her bequests have just been announced as winners of the American Institute of Architects' Honor Awards for 2012.

The first is Guy Nordenson & Associates' Ruth Lilly Visitors Pavilion at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. The second is the new home for her beloved Poetry Foundation designed by Chicago architect John Ronan.

We're still working on our piece on the Poetry Foundation (see the Hugo post below for an explanation of my bizarre methods for avoiding work), but you can see and hear John Ronan discussing the project here. Part one below.

And you can see our photoessay on the construction of the building here and here.

Come and Dream With Me: Scorsese's rapturous Hugo and why you shouldn't miss it.

2012-01-05T23:00:00.000-06:00

I have a problem. Whenever I encounter something that matters deeply to me, I experience a failure of nerve. I fall into full Prufrock mode. I want make my readers feel for themselves the wonders of my discovery . . . "I am Lazarus, come back from the dead, Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all." But in a flash I'm measuring it all off in coffee spoons. "Do I dare?" and, "Do I dare?"

That is why I didn't publish my piece on Cecil Balmond until a week before his great exhibition at the Graham closed, why I waited for months to try to express my thoughts on Bertrand Goldberg: Reflections, at the Arts Club. And it's why I'm still working on a piece on Martin Scorsese's new film, Hugo, which has engaged and moved me more than any movie I've seen in a long time.

Hugo has been described as Scorsese's first film for kids, but it is as far from pablum as you can get. Critics have congratulated themselves with the "discovery" that "Martin Scorsese has made a picture about film preservation!," but to say Hugo is a movie about film preservation is like saying À la recherche du temps perdu is a novel about cookies.

The themes of Hugo are as deep and probing as the film is entertaining and beautiful. While the plot is resolved with absolute grace, challenging questions are often posed rather than answered. The score by Howard Shore is both incredibly gentle and subtly insinuating. The performances, especially of Ben Kingsley as the bitter old man who is much more than he appears, are glorious. The physical production is astonishing. The evocation of Paris and its architecture, above all the remarkable reproduction of the Gare Montparnasse rail station, and the surreal world behind its walls where Hugo makes his home, will take your breath away.

Obviously, my reaction to Hugo is deeply personal. I can't guarantee yours will be similar. But with such possibility of delight, why not take the chance? Hugo has been around since Thanksgiving, and its theater count continues to shrink. Go see it - now. On the big screen, where you can appreciate its ambition and visual splendor. In 3-D if at all possible, such as the AMC River East, or, if you prefer, in the restored beauty of the Patio Theater, where it begins this Friday. If you don't like it, I apologize. If you wind up loving it as much I do, come back next week and we'll talk - I promise.

One Tower for the Meatpackers; One for the Fashionistas - Ross Barney's new Morgan Street Station bridges old and new Fulton Market

2012-01-04T22:35:00.000-06:00

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While major Chicago institutions like the South Water market have relocated several times over Chicago's history, and others, like the Union Stockyards, have completely vanished, the Fulton Market district, the clearinghouse for meat, fish and dairy characterized nearly a century ago as "a sight to gladden to anyone interested in the trade . . . thoroughly modern in every sense of the word", has endured in its original location, even as it becomes marbled with gentrification.

Loft rehabs are common. Smart boutiques . . .

mingle with meatpackers . . .

Art Galleries . . .

amidst butter-and-egg firms . . .

There's the new home of the Showmen's League of America . . .

and this Archer-Daniels-Midland complex, reported to be Chicago's last active grain elevator . . .

The area is still defined by the soaring, massive hulk of the Fulton Cold Storage building . . .

. . . designed by Gardner & Lindberg and built in the 1920's at a cost of $4,000,000 - 5,000,000 cubic feet "for the proper keeping of butter, eggs and other perishable produce." It survives today as "The only 100% owner operated warehouse in Chicago," and, as pictured on website photographs, a magnet for beautiful women hanging off its highest ramparts.

Now, however, the Fulton Market is getting a new visual marker, one that will end the district's long isolation from public transit. Morgan Street was one of the original stations on the 1893 Lake Street Elevated line, but it survived only until 1948, when it was among 10 stations closed in an efficiency drive by the recently formed CTA. Since the rebuilding of what is now called the Green Line in the early 1990's, there has been no L stop between Clinton and Ashland, part of a short-sighted rapid transit redlining of the inner city that also saw the demolition of all Green Line stations from Roosevelt to 35th, a nearly three mile stretch. (Efforts are now underway to also reconstruct the station at Cermak, serving McCormick Place.)

The design of the new Morgan Street station comes from Ross Barney Architects, which recently completed an award-winning, $100 million rehab of the CTA's Red, Brown and Purple transfer stops at Belmont and Fullerton. $30 million in TIF funding is going towards Morgan Street's estimated price tag of $38,000,000, about what it cost to complete the entire Dan Ryan extension back in the 1960's.

The design offers a station house on either side of Lake, leading up to staggered platforms that reduce the strain on the trestle structure . . .

. . . and translucent polycarbonate canopies that provide both shelter and daylight.*

Trees, landscaping and bicycle racks are planned for street level.

Dominating the composition, however, are the pair of tall, wide and thin stair towers, like a pair of giant bookends, that rise first from the street to the platforms, and then above the platforms to a bridge crossing the tracks.

While the entire design stresses a sense of openness, eventually the stair towers will have a perforated metal screen.

Today, without that screen, the wide-open, white-painted metal frame gives an almost vertiginous sense of the high-height wafers poking into the sky.

We'll be waiting to see how it all turns out, but there's no doubt but that Ross Barney's design for the Morgan Street station creates a strikingly distinctive emblem for a classic neighborhood that - so far, at least - hasn't sacrificed its historic character as it gains a new kind of vitality.

*Direct daylight not available during night-time hours.

Classicist/Modernist Smackdown, Luis Urculo, Margaret McCurry: Distillations, Future City 2012, The L, Henry Ives Cobb's Chicago, Tugendhat, Bloomingdale, Hedrich-Blessing - it's the January 2012 Calendar!

2012-01-02T20:24:00.000-06:00

It's Classicist vs. Modernist smackdown night January 19th, as Iveta Cerná, Head of Villa Tugendhat at CAF faces off at 6:00 p.m. against Tom Beeby, of the Harold L Washington Library, at the Richard H. Driehaus Museum, a/k/a Nickerson Mansion.

But that's just two of the highlights of the January 2012 Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.

On Wednesday, January 25th, Madrid architect Luis Urculo lectures at the Graham, while at the Poliform showroom, Margaret McCurry signs copies of Distillations, the new monograph on her work. On Friday, the 27th, architect Will Bruder lectures at Crown Hall, IIT

There seems to be a new tradition of holiday parties after the holidays, which includes Architecture for Humanity Chicago Chapter's Holiday Hangover which couples the Black Cloud Gallery with Friday the 13th, while APT and others host a Chicago Preservation Holiday Party 2012 on the 11th.

Saturday the 21st is the 2012 Future City Chicago Regional Finals at UIC, where 6th, 7th and 8th trades from area schools compete with their own visions.

More authors: Greg Borzo discusses the The Chicago L for Friends of Downtown at the Cultural Center this Thursday, the 5th, Barbara Geiger talks about Low-Key Genius: The life and Work of Landscape-Gardener O.C. Simonds, and Edward W. Wolner discusses Henry Ives Cobb's Chicago for Landmarks Illinois at the Cultural Center on the 19th.

More? This Thursday marks still another month when the Commission on Chicago Landmarks completely ignores the battle to save Bertrand Goldberg's Prentice Hospital, SEAOI has a dinner program on Geotechnical Lessons Learned on Tuesday the 10th, while Tuesday, the 17th, AIA Chicago offers a tour of the ACE Technical Charter High School serving students with an interest in architecture, construction and engineering, and the Chicago Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians have a tour of the legendary photographers Hedrich Blessing.

Other CAF lunchtime lectures feature The Bloomingdale Trail on the 18th, and Zurich Esposito, Julie Liska, Pat Saldana Natke and others on the Small Firm/Small Project Awards on the 25th.

I'm sure we'll be adding more events, especially since the Chicago Plan and Community Development Commissions and the Center for Green Technology haven't released their 2012 schedules yet, but we've already got over 30 great items. Check out the entire January 2012 Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.

Chicago Streetscene: Towards a Better 2012 - Happy New Year!

2012-01-01T00:21:00.000-06:00

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Ricardo Legorreta, who brought back the sun to the U of C's Gothic gray, dies at 80

2011-12-31T00:49:00.000-06:00

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A brief obituary here. A sampling of his work here. My photoessay on the Max Palevsky Residential Commons at the University of Chicago here.

INOMA Holiday Party/Benefit on Thursday

2011-12-28T08:40:00.001-06:00

Never too late to add to the December Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events. The Illinois Chapter of the National Organization of Minority Architects is having its annual holiday party, tomorrow, December 29th, from 6:00 to 10:00 p.m. at the Roosevelt Square Sales Center, 1200 West Roosevelt. $10.00 of every ticket goes towards their scholarship fund. More information here.

Garrett Popcorn: Harmless Addiction or Quest for Global Domination?

2011-12-26T23:29:00.000-06:00

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You laugh. Okay, so answer me this: Did you know there are as many Garrett Popcorn shops in Singapore as there are in Chicago? Or that there are two outlets in KL, where the Petronas Towers overtook the Sears Tower as world's tallest building? And that now there's two outlets in Dubai, where, in turn, the Burj Khalifa supplanted Petronas as world's tallest? Do you see a pattern emerging?

Did you know there's major trafficking of Garrett popcorn from Dubai into Kuwait? Can another outlet territory - and a new tall building champion - be far behind? Did you know the word "Garrett" has been banned from the Internet in the People's Republic of China, with all searches redirected to the web site of Xiào's House of Tasty Kernels, West Nanjing Road?

It's just popcorn, you say. Yeah, right. That's why at every Garrett Popcorn Shop, including its newest outlet on West Jackson in Chicago, pictured above, the smell of CaramelCrisp® lures shoppers, lawyers, judges, FBI moles and unindicted co-conspirators into a common thread of humanity that, no matter the weather, queues down the street to infinity, much like the line of appliance installers in the Monty Python new gas cooker sketch.

Dancing with Filamentosa: Tristan d'Estree Sterk AIA Chicago's Dubin Young Architect for 2011

2011-12-26T00:37:00.000-06:00

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When, at the turn of the 20th century, Louis Sullivan talked about an "organic" architecture, it was largely a poetic conceit.

Despite their rich ornament, their greenest feature was probably the windows that opened and closed, which, like the central atriums of the large "donut" office buildings of the same time, allowed for natural lighting and ventilation.

As modern architecture involved at mid-century, even that feature was thrown in the trash bin, replaced by sealed glass boxes with huge floorplates and glazed facades that leaked heat in the winter and sucked up solar gain in the summer, all compensated for by pumping in btu-guzzling air conditioning and forced air in that lost era of "cheap" energy.

Now, energy is anything but cheap, and architects strive towards "zero energy" structures that produce as much as energy as they use. Are we on the verge of a truly "organic" architecture, where buildings respond to their dynamic environments the same way trees and plants do?

On December 9th, the Chicago chapter of the American Institute of Architects awarded its 2011 Dubin Family Young Architect Award to Tristan d’Estree Sterk, founder of ORAMBRA, The Office for Robotic Architectural Media and The Bureau for Responsive Architecture.

Sterk's investigations address how such a "Responsive Architecture" could reduce energy consumption in all regions of the U.S. by more than 30%. At a forum sponsored by The Economist, posted to YouTube, Sterk said such an architecture . . .

. . . requires systems that change color, change the color of skins, change the degree of insulation and also change shape. . . . Color can provide smaller savings, in the order of 2%, permeability or openings and closings can provide around 8%, and shape change of buildings can provide in the order of 25 to 30% . . . shape change builds upon [Buckminster] Fuller's understanding of tensegrity to produce a new structure called an actuated tensegrity structure . . .soft shells that can change color, that can gently change shape, that have an optimized thermal mass, but they're very lightweight. And all of this is achievable if we take a different view of what architecture might be . . . We're no longer thinking of buildings as static creations that are built of "dumb" material. These are systems that rely on control, and sensor input, and actuators

Sterk's projects includes a Prairie House: House for A Fashion Pattern Maker and Fiber Artist that was the winner of a 2011 AIA Chicago Design Excellence Award. And while sculptor Kenneth Snelson, whose pioneering work on tensegrity structures inspired Buckminster Fuller, denied that such structures could scale up to massive size, Sterk created the concept of Filamentosa - ultralight, tensegrity skyscrapers, which ORAMBRA has imaged rising amidst the classic Chicago skyline.

At the end of the YouTube presentation, Sterk shows a video demonstrating the structure's flexibility. Assuring his audience that the towers wouldn't actually move as radically as in the video, Sterk still added, "If you wanted to dance with a building, this might be one of those buildings."

Christmas 2011 in a Square Mile of Chicago

2011-12-23T23:33:00.000-06:00

with the worst audio track on YouTube!

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Chicago Interior: Look Up

2011-12-20T06:59:00.000-06:00

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On the 30th anniversary of its closing, Andy Pierce reminds us what's so magical about the Uptown Theatre

2011-12-18T22:53:00.002-06:00

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Today, December 19th, marks the 30th anniversary of the day Chicago's famed Uptown Theatre closed its doors. By the time I got around to it in the 1960's, the 4,300 seat former movie palace designed by Rapp & Rapp was past its prime. Apart from the John Frankenheimer masterpiece, The Train, most of the films I saw there were unmemorable - The Ballad of Josie? The Dave Clark Five in Having a Wild Weekend? - but I was always blown away by the grandeur, beauty, and sheer scale of the place.

Since its closing, the Uptown has suffered the indignities of being owned by some of the city's most infamous slumlords, leaks, floods, freezes, neglect and decay. In 2008, it was acquired by Jam Productions, which already books the Riviera across the street. Last October, representatives from JAM, mayor Rahm Emanuel's office and freshman Chicago alderman Harry Osterman and James Cappleman met to discuss how a revived Uptown could anchor a new vision for an Uptown Entertainment Center.

In 2006, the price tag bandied about for fully restoring the Uptown was $30 to $40 million. Today, it's more like $70 million. If hope is to be had, it might be found in the examples of two New York City theaters, the 1929, 2800 seat Beacon, designed by Walter Ahlschalger, which withstood bad times and attempts to "improve" it into a disco to emerge as a beloved and active concert venue, despite being far from the Mid- Manhattan Theatre district. Even more striking is the comparison to the 3,200 seat Loew's Kings Theater in Brooklyn, designed by the fame Chicago movie palace architects Rapp & Rapp, left to rot ever since it's 1977 closing. Like the Uptown, those who cherished the theater battled to keep it alive for revival, and their efforts were rewarded in a project, launched last year for a 2014 completion, to restore the Loew's Kings to its former glory as the centerpiece of the renewal of the Flatbush shopping district. The city of New York has committed $50 million to the project's expected $70 million cost.

This week's edition of Time Out Chicago has an excellent article by Andy Pierce, one of the people most instrumental in Friends of the Uptown. who have been tireless in championing saving the theater. We're privileged to have Andy provide us his overview of the history, importance and future potential of the Uptown . . .

Whatmakes a theater a movie palace?

Atsome point, almost any surviving vintage theater is referred to by fans orreporters as a “movie palace.”

photograph: Theatre Historical Society of America

Thelong-closed Uptown Theater, 4816 N. Broadway, is truly an early example of thevery large movie palaces of the mid-to-late 1920s. It is also one of the last greatmovie palaces to not yet be restored, renovated, radically altered or demolished.

Chicago’s remaining open and operating movie palaces -- used for live performances -- are the Riviera, Chicago, Congress and Oriental theaters. The Central Park has survived as a church since 1971 and the restored New Regal (originally Avalon) has been closed intermittently since 2003. [Note: Our Palace Theater was not amovie palace. Rather, it was built for Big-Time Orpheum Vaudeville.]

Arguably the most profitable themed entertainment of the day, Balaban & Katz “presentation houses,” such as the Uptown, featured continuous performance of three or more shows daily; stage shows with themes, costumes and sets planned in consideration of the feature film; a full orchestra rising and falling on multiple stage lifts, with a conductor at the helm of projector speeds and tempos to keep on schedule and massive theatre organs to accompany the orchestra and provide the aural environments and voices for the early and yet-still-silent stars of the screen.

In B&K’s deluxe presentation houses such as the Uptown, a system of colored cove lights controlled the accent lighting of the auditorium such that the audience was entirely encapsulated in the mood of the moment on screen; forexample yellow for sunrise, red for war, blue for night, purple for love.

Most of America’s movie palaces carried a Neo-Classical theme cohesively throughout their public spaces and were lavishly decorated not only with plaster relief but also with fanciful polychrome paint schemes, damask, drapes, elaborate chandeliers, antique oil paintings, marble sculpture groups and fountains. Patron comfort and service were augmented in the Uptown for example with amenities such as hat racks beneath seats, a parcel check, luxurious men’s andwomen’s lounges and a fanciful playroom with storybook themes for children.

Grand entrance lobbies gave standees a place to wait behind ropes while the previous audience exited through other lobbies and ambulatories. A full, working stage with scenery, a theater pipe organ, and multiple thousands of seats in floor, mezzanine and balcony areas completed the movie palace formula over tens of thousands of square feet of real estate.

By Popular Demand
Closed 30 Years, the Uptown is Ready for Revival

Baptized in oil, labor and love, friends of Chicago’s historic Uptown Theater, 4816 N. Broadway, are recognizing a peculiar anniversary for one of the world’s largest and most lavish surviving movie palaces today, Monday, Dec. 19, with a letter-writing campaign.Please see the Uptown Theatre, Chicago, Facebook page for details:

photograph: Theatre Historical Society of America

While the Uptown has been closed for 30 of its 86 years, demolition by neglect was held at bay largely through the work of volunteers who kept the theater graffiti free as high as they could reach, who stoked her shopwornboiler and who kept the landmark interior as dry as possible, using patches upon patches of hydraulic cement to seal cracks in steel roof drains that had been pushed open by ice. Uptown’s 12 different roof surfaces drain through thissystem of pipes. The failure of this system in the arctic winters of the early 1980s allowed water to damage to some interior areas of ornate plaster ceilings and walls.

This less-than-glamorous anniversary comes as both Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Ald. Harry Osterman (48th) are avowed boosters of the Uptown Square business and entertainment district and have voiced their cooperation andsupport for renovating the Uptown.

The theater was built at a cost of $4 million between 1924 and 1925 by the local, family-owned company of Balaban & Katz, following the success of their Central Park, Riviera, Tivoli and Chicago theaters. “Built For All Time,” its over-the-top, neo-Spanish Baroque design by the Chicago architectural firm of C.W. and George L. Rapp was touted as “An Acre of Seats in a Magic City.” The Uptown has a marquee bigger than a yacht, three lobbies as big as train stations, and boasts more than 4,300 seats in its vast floor, mezzanine and balcony.

The opening of the Uptown was commemorated in the August 17, 1925 edition of Balaban & Katz's weekly magazine. It's a fascinating snapshot of both the Uptown and 1920's Chicago. You can download the entire issue courtesy of the Compass Rose Cultural Crossroads website.

Many historians note how the popularity of television in American homes curtailed the tremendous number of movie patrons. However, the late Bro. Andrew Corsini Fowler was quick to remind me that our fascination with radioprograms took the first cut out of movie palace receipts. [Note: Bro. Andrew was a cofounder of Theatre Historical Society of America in 1969 alongside impresario and theater organ enthusiast Ben Hall, the Time-Life Editor andauthor of “The Best Remaining Seats."

As entertainment tastes and choices changed through the years, the Uptown was operated by successors to B&K before it was leased by the local Rabiela family in the late 1970s for Spanish-language films and special ticketed events. Interestingly, Jerry Mickelson, of Jam Productions, the Chicago music promoter who booked the Uptown for years and staged the last public concert there in 1981, is part of the LLC that owns the Uptown today.

“It was a very sad day for me on Dec. 19, 1981, when I told Rene Rabiela Sr. after Jam’s concert with the J. Geils Band that the theater was uninhabitable for the public use without repairs,” Mickelson recalled in an interview. “The washrooms were barely functioning and Jam had to pay for the oil to heat the theater.”

Mickelson credits local officials and longtime volunteers for the Uptown surviving decades of deferred maintenance and neglect through a succession of owners and receivership. Also, the City of Chicago invested in more than $1 million in court-ordered stabilization work and repairs, which removed and stored decorative terra cotta and replaced the system of pipes through which the rain and snow melt from 12 roof surfaces drains. It was this system’s failure in the arctic winters of the early 1980s which caused water damage to some interior areas of ornate plaster ceilings and walls.

While there is no shortage of public sentiment for the theater, the riddle of the Uptown is how to fund a restoration in the tens of millions of dollars such that the historic, block-filling movie palace will serve the entertainment and special events needs of the ticket-buying public of today.

“There is a new energy that has been infused by Mayor Emanuel, whose vision is to create an entertainment district that will provide an unprecedented economic and cultural development opportunity for this great neighborhood,” Mickelson said. He added that both Ald. Osterman and Ald. James Cappleman (46th) are also working hard to see the Uptown reopen and be a catalyst for enlivening the district.

Being closed 30 years means that most of the Uptown’s friends onFacebook, its persistent advocates and its letter-writing activists are not oldenough to have seen a show there.

photograph: Theatre Historical Society of America

This 40-year-old writer became attuned to the dedication and resolve of Uptown’s volunteers during a frigid winter day sometime in 1998. We were getting the theater ready for a special event rental such as the Hearts Party, a commitmentceremony or a chamber of commerce dinner. I recall pulling down a rotten 1950s curtain that was hanging in shredsfrom its hoisted frame atop the grand lobby window facing Broadway and asking if it we should save it. “No. It will be replaced when the restoration happens,” Mangel said matter-of-factly without a hint of “if” in his tone.

At first, it struck me as very sad to think of how he and other volunteers would feel crushed if the building were not saved. Then, after seeing the entire building and working until I was exhausted and could no longer feel my feet orhands, I knew in my heart that the Uptown was too valuable and too extraordinarily beautiful to not save for some future use.

There was a time during my early work for the Uptown when I was ushering on alternate nights for the Auditorium, Chicago and Oriental theaters. I would come and go at times from their carpeted and well-lit spaces to the almost-forgotten Uptown. The disparity of attention and investment was palpable.

photograph: Theatre Historical Society of America

I also have a clear memory of sweeping the Uptown’s basement one day in preparation for a tour, listening to the President Bill Clinton and White House intern Monica Lewinsky hearings being broadcast from Capitol Hill. I thought:What if we had the money being spent on this ridiculousness? Turns out the $30 million Kenneth Starr spent on the investigation could have renovated the Uptown at that time.

Preparing for working within the Uptown was like going on a long, winter hike inthe woods. I dressed in layers and packed water, snacks and flashlights. Asidefrom doing a good deed for the sake of preserving the building, the reward fora day's work was usually a big, hot meal at Fiesta Mexicana Restaurant or acocktail at the Green Mill Cocktail Lounge, both of which are on this historicblock.

During rare special events -- banner days, really, for the Uptown, I've heardthe Uptown pulse with incredible dance music for events and seen every SpanishBaroque detail lit up in brilliant color by the industry's best rented lights,disco balls and lasers. I also had a glimpse of a lost era when I saw theUptown lit by candles and caressed in the music of a jazz trio. These areprecious memories that make the work worthwhile. Together with the twocommunity portraits I have organized in front of the theater for the 75th and80th opening day anniversaries, I feel as if I have done everything I can do withinmy means and abilities as a volunteer for and with the Uptown.

On most days, the only performance one can hear in the Uptown is a small jambox tuned to WDCB or WFMT, the distant rhythm of the "L," and theoccasional shrill call of the resident peregrine falcon aerie. Time is at astandstill and the countless griffins, maidens, fascia brutes and laughingkings who populate the Uptown's walls are simply waiting mutely for their nextaudience.

photograph: Theatre Historical Society of America

Some of the Uptown's many friends who have said to me "I hope to live to see it restored" over the past 18 years have since passed away. I too had hope that they would be here to celebrate its reopening day. We stay positive asvolunteers and have faith that the project will happen.

photograph: Theatre Historical Society of America

My trusted friend and mentor Joe DuciBella, the noted theatre historian and designer who succumbed to cancer in 2007, was one of the Uptown’s most tactful and respected advocates. Late at night following Theatre Historical Society of America events, our heady conversations in Joe’s National Register home on Caton Street in Wicker Park would always drift to the Uptown and its chances for revival. Deep down inside, Joe hoped that the Uptown would be restored in herentirety. However, he was a realist and would concede that perhaps it would survive in some repurposed form. Privately, the closest Joe would come to how he truly felt about the Uptown’s odds was to say the matter was “softterritory.”

In addition to DuciBella, who gave countless tours and chronicled its importance in Marquee magazine, the Uptown’s patron saints include Don Lampert, who had the building listed on the National Register and designated as a City of Chicago landmark; Bob Boin, who stored its bronze and crystal chandeliers and is his in his third decade of volunteering; Curt Mangel, the restoration consultant who gained the confidence of owners Ken Goldberg and Lou Wolf (notorious tax-sale buyers) so that he could go in, thawout, dry out and revive the Uptown’s systems in the 1980s; David Syfczak, the volunteer security guard since 1996, who checks all 110 doors and who does plaster repairs, paints and sweeps miles of floors and sidewalks; JimmyWiggins, manager of the Riviera Theatre, who oversees operations, maintenance and repairs; and many more unsung friends.

Despite being dark for three decades, the Uptown still has several mature professionals in its corner that did experience it alive with music and audiences. Time will tell if Chicago’s powerbrokers, elected officials, financiersand entertainment industry leaders will find a creative, collaborative and altruistic way to re-lamp the nation’s best closed theater.

Andy Pierce, a volunteer who helped found Friends of the Uptown in 1998, is a member of the Theatre Historical Society of America

weblinks:

Friends of the Uptown

Theatre Historical Society of America

Chicago: First Snow of the Season

2011-12-17T11:15:00.000-06:00

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Door to the Heart: Bertrand Goldberg Reflections - the things he kept, the things he made (Open House This Saturday, 12/17)

2011-12-16T03:18:00.000-06:00

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This Saturday, December 17th, The Arts Club of Chicago, 201 East Ontario, will have a rare Saturday opening for a public Open House of its exhibition Bertrand Goldberg: Reflections, from 10 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., with gallery talks at 11, 1 and 3.

In an oral history conducted by the Art Institute's Betty Blum, architect Bertrand Goldberg (1913-1997) talked about how he should have known more about his mother's life, "but her life was, like most mothers, always so close to mine that I thought that was the only life she ever had."

Our relationship with buildings is like that. Apart from a small number that we actually watch growing up from the ground, we experience a building as a done deal. As far as our personal everyday experience is concerned, it's always been there, always will be there. And never could have been anything else.

Yet, architecture is more than what's left over after the making is done. Like all art, it is not just a product, but a process, and in being an essentially practical art - art for use - it engages the society in which it's created more deeply than any other art form.

Nowhere is this complex, anything-can-happen process better captured than in the exhibition, Bertrand Goldberg: Reflections, at The Arts Club of Chicago through February 8 of 2012.

Reflections stands in the shadow of Bertrand Goldberg: Architecture of Invention, the long-awaited blockbuster retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago that runs through January 15 and draws on the museum's extensive Goldberg collection and archives, bequeathed to the museum by the architect. The show is spectacular and encyclopedic, beautifully designed by John Ronan and Cheryl Towle Weese, with a great, catalog edited by curator Zoë Ryan, richly illustrated and including a series of thoughtful and informative essays. No question about it: if you care about architecture, it's a must-see show, which I hope to write about more before it closes.

As you walk through the wedge-shaped galleries with their mirrored gateways, you feel the sweep of history, from Goldberg's 1938 North Pole Ice Cream stand, with its roof suspended from cables hung form a tall mast, to his last great vision, River City, from the 1980's. Even as you observe the projects evolve, each individual stage looks inevitable and immutable.

In a small adjoining gallery, however, you get what's usually missing from exhibitions such as these: a sense of a building as it's experienced and lived through time. Inside Marina City: A Project by Iker Gil and Andreas E.G. Larsson examines Goldberg's most famous creation by going beyond the abstract to see the architecture as it is experienced and transformed by its residents. While in the big show next door, the photographs tend to hew black-and-white, Inside Marina City explodes with color. In place of the snow-white, abstracted form of the Goldberg's pie-shaped wedges, we see those spaces animated through habitation, with glimpses of how dozens of Marina City residents have taken that basic container and made it their own. Some of the views appear to extend all the way back to original tile bathrooms and pink-cabineted kitchens.

Others are almost surrealistically traditional. Some are classically minimalist . . .

Others seem to be stage sets of our contemporary hyper-virtual world, as in a shot of a studio crammed to the gills with gadgets, bare-metal shelving and a digital designers desktop abutting the balcony window wall, soaking up the light. The exposed gearworks inside a modern machine for living.

Inside Marina City defines a work of architecture by carrying from its point of creation forward into tine. Bertrand Goldberg: Reflections, like the Art Institute's Architecture of Innovation, moves in the opposite direction, going back to the beginning and moving sequentially to the end to define a lifetime of work. Reflections adds another dimension. In addition to renderings and drawings, it draws heavily on Goldberg's "personal collection of art and artifacts."

Don't expect to find smoking guns -"Aha, that's where Marina City came from!" - but where a traditional exhibition makes you a passive observer of a fait accompli progression, Reflections invites you to bring your own imagination to connecting the dots between the things Goldberg collected and the meaning behind the work he created.

No two observers will the see the connections the same way, but to me it begins with a late, chalk-on-paper work by Paul Klee, Kindes statt (childlike state), that is unlike anything else I've seen from that artist: a borderless membrane of cells in green, gold and rust, given depth with a chiaroscuro texturing, separated by a irregular grid of thin charcoal lines that angle, bend, branch and insinuate small pods into larger cells. Klee pulls on the collapsed regularity of Miesian geometry until the grid dissolves and blossoms into an organic web of asymmetric spaces that flood with color, pulse with pattern. The impression is not one of fragility, but of a mysterious, timeless strength, like moss clinging to a rock, observing the millenia pass by.

The artwork reminds us that early in his life, Goldberg had a knack of being in the right place at the right time, traveling to Germany in 1932 to apprentice in the offices of Mies van der Rohe and study at the illustrious Bauhaus with such teachers as Wassily Kandinsky and Josef Alberts. Paul Klee taught there, as well. Goldberg was in Berlin when the Reichstag burned. He heard Le Corbusier lecture at the Arts Club in 1935. In 1937, he accompanied Mies van der Rohe and helped translate for the famous visit to Frank Lloyd Wright in Taliesen. It was all preparation for when Goldberg would break free of the what he called the "Right Angle Club" to create a new modernist alternative in such works as Marina City, the Hilliard Homes, and Prentice Hospital.

Reflections is like a time capsule, filled with wonderful things, the collected and the created in equal measure. The exhibition, designed by architects John Vinci and Geoffrey Goldberg, Bertrand's son, subdivides the Arts Club's main gallery in two, as part of creating several intimate spaces for the show. You enter into a room filled mostly with sculptures by artists with which Goldberg had a long relationship, including an untitled bronze sculpture by Pietro Consagra which seems almost like a premonition of Marina City's twin towers crossed with Magritte's Sirens.

The small catalogue places the objects of the exhibition photographed in their original context, such as in the kitchen Goldberg designed for his mother-in-law Lillian Florsheim, including rounded metal appliance "garages", a spice rack made out of baking tins, and an amazingly complicated winch, made out of perforated stainless steel and metal engine parts, that allowed Florsheim to adjust the height and angle of a large lighting fixture near the ceiling. Its drill-like crank, detached and displayed to the side, has the aura of a Medieval torture device. (Geoffrey Goldberg told me that once Florsheim got the light in the desired position, she never moved it again.)

Free from a chronological structure, the objects in the exhibition offer up striking juxtapositions, such as in the corner where a working drawing for the Ronchamp-like theater for Marina City is next to a drawing of swirling ornament for a recreation of the Belle Époques splendor of Maxim's de Paris in the basement of Goldberg's strikingly modernist Astor Tower, next to a collage of a color field design for a Jack-in-the-Box(!) drive-in, next to a beautiful cut-away rendering of the architect's design for the Unicel Plywood Freight Car.

There's a selection of photographs taken by the architect, including a shot of Mies's iconic 860-880 North Lake Shore Drive apartments over which Goldberg places an arbitrary frame that challenges the geometric "perfection" of the offset box-like towers. The great thing about the photographs is that they're not the usual shots that look like a neutron bomb went off, leaving the buildings but getting rid of the messy humanity. In one Goldberg photo . . .

. . . the rooftop of Le Corbusier's Unité d'habitation is framed and defined by the people using it. The man who fills and spills out of the frame to the left defines the foreground, just as the women vigorously walking towards the building defines the mid-distance. The bold, rounded patterns of her dress seem to grab the essence of the rounded concrete corner and spits it back against the unyielding rectilinearity of the facade.

In the Art Institute, there's a study of circles Goldberg did while studying with Josef Albers at the Bauhaus. A quarter of century later, when Goldberg got the commission from Michael Todd to reimage Howard Crane's classically styled Harris Theater as a high-glamour showplace suitable for showing Todd's spectacularly successful Around the World in Eighty Days, Goldberg collaborated with Albers on a unique design for the theater's doors. According to Chicago cultural historian Tim Samuelson, Albers had a succession of circles sandblasted at varying depths into the glass panels of the doors. The aluminum doors bore concealed neon tubes all along the inside perimeter of the frames. When the light from the tubes hit the glass, it became visible only on the sandblasted surfaces, creating the appearance of "glowing circles of light" floating on the glass.

photo: Hedrich Blessing Archive at the Chicago History Museum

Unfortunately, that glass no longer exists, but a section of the ceiling lighting Goldberg created for the Michael Todd, lovingly restored, rows of small round bulbs in counterpoint to the circles in the doors, has a prominent place at the Arts Club exhibition.

photo: Hedrich Blessing Archive at the Chicago History Museum

There's also a selection of furniture designed by Goldberg. A menu from Maxim's. A Clavilux, championed by no less than Leopold Stokowski as generating "a new art of color in form and motion" moving toward a day when art could be "pure spirit." Two pairs of suspenders, one gold, one rainbow, some primitive sculpture, a monkey's skull. Add up all the wonderful array of objects in Reflections and they spell - well, no, not "Rosebud" - but "Bud" (Goldberg), a man of unending curiosity and creativity, who wrote all the way back in 1967 . . .

Dynamic space is not an architecture of grids, of walls, of modular intervals of structure and form. This is rather an architecture of forces, of energies, of movements of spaces. This is an architecture regulated by time, volume, and change. These are spaces which will be built from materials have have living plasticity, like the human body. Cells of space, forming a structure as they combine together, will have a spatial biology

Walton-Seneca Building, 1977 (unbuilt)

Bertrand Goldberg was ahead of both the curve and his time in seeing what architecture could become. Reflections is as close as you're likely be able to get inside this restless, ambitious, and relentlessly creative spirit.

Gene Summers dies at 83

2011-12-14T07:22:00.002-06:00

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The Trib's Blair Kamin has a good overview of the life of architect Gene Summers, who has died at 83. Summers worked with Mies van der Rohe on such projects as the Seagram Building and Chicago's Federal Center, going on to create the strikingly modernist McCormick Place after the dreadful original burned to the ground, and served as Dean as the College of Architecture at IIT. Read it here.

The Rookery: How to Get Lit without Getting Drunk With It

2011-12-11T13:08:00.001-06:00

Click images for larger view. (And, yes, I need to buy a wider angle lens)

While we could always use a few more - I'm thinking especially thinking of 333 North Michigan, a gateway sentinel to the Loop (how about it, Rocky Wirtz?) - Chicago has no shortage of lit-up landmarks, with the blazing Wrigley Building the clarion princess of them all. Floodlighting is the usual method of choice, but with increasing awareness of energy use, more subtle methods are now also coming in play.

Exhibit one might be Burnham and Root's 1888 Rookery Building at 209 South LaSalle, one of the glories of Chicago architecture. On November 30th, a new exterior lighting system was switched on, designed by Jean Sundin and Enrique Peiniger of New York-based Office for Visual Interaction.

You can see the designers talk about the project for the John-Buck managed building in the promotional video below. Sundin calls it "beautifully illuminated with very low energy", a claimed total of 2304 watts. (In contrast, the Wrigley building uses well over a hundred 1,000 metal halide lamps to get its knock-you-out-glow.)

The fixtures, from Austrian company Zumtobel, were hand crafted specifically for the Rookery. "Nothing touches the building," says Sundin. The brackets extend from the sills and rest on structure rather than attaching to it. "The light fixture [is] not even two inches high and it's a little bigger than an index card. This made the microsize fixture really vanish invisibly into the architectural detailing"

The red terra cotta that makes the Rookery so distinctive in daylight tended to make the building become something of a looming glob at night, punctuated by light coming from rectangular and often arched windows of isolated offices burning the post-5 p.m. oil. There's something to be said for the organic and dynamic qualities of such improvisational lighting, but OVI's new lighting plan is subtle enough to preserve that kind of variance while still giving the Rookery a gentle visual pulse in the urban nightscape.

Now That's How to Get Their Attention - Barenboim/Carsen Don Giovanni at La Scala

2011-12-10T15:30:00.001-06:00

Director Robert Carsen is known for his often controversial interpretations of classic operas, and his new production of Mozart's Don Giovanni which opened at LaScala Milan this past Wednesday would appear to be no exception, but - especially if you were in the audience and didn't know it was coming - the opening scene, played to the beginning of the overture, has to be one of the most spectacular conceits ever executed.

The danger with well-known works is that familiarity shears away the audacious qualities that put them at the forefront of creativity. Carsen's shock treatment of beginning - not raising, but pulling down the curtain, revealing not a set, or even a bare stage, but the audience looking at themselves in an unstable mirror that seems to have placed them at the bottom of a fish bowl - is the shock that pulls the rug out from under business as usual and invites the audience to see one of the greatest creations of Western culture as if for the first time. Critical reaction seems to have been mixed, and if you watch the entire trailer above some scenes look great, while others, such as the Commendatore running through Don Giovanni with a comically bendy sword, seem to have missed boarding the A-train.

The all-star cast includes Petter Mattei, Bryn Terfel, Anna Netrebko, Giuseppe Filanoti and Barbara Frittoli. If you have the time and the money (up to $500 bucks or more a ticket), the LaScala production plays through December 28th, and returns in January with a substantially less starry cast.

If you can read Italian and make your way through a post of consists almostly entirely of scanned newspaper pages, check out the indispensable Opera Chic's coverage of the premiere, which was attended by both Italian President Giorgio Napolitano and new Prime Minister Mario Monti, as well as broadcast live across the nation on Italian television. And if you don't mind bleeding chunks that look like they were taken from someone's cell phone, you can check out these excerpts on YouTube.

If you want to see the entire production, apparently in Chicago proper you're out of luck, but you can catch the opera on December 13th at the Marcus Theaters in Orland Park, and on December 18th and 22nd at the Wilmette Theatre in, you know, Wilmette.

Curator's Talk: Bertrand Goldberg Architecture of Invention, noon today at the Art Institute

2011-12-09T10:55:00.001-06:00

"Join curatorial staff on a guided walk through the exhibition, Bertrand Goldberg: Architecture of Invention, the first comprehensive retrospective exhibition of the architect's career. Featuring over 100 original architectural drawings and models as well as graphic and furniture designs, this seminal exhibition explores Goldberg's 1930s futuristic designs to the iconic towers and hospital complexes of his mature career and his life-long dedication to architecture for urban environments." 12:00 - 12:45 p.m. today, December 9th, Art Institute of Chicago, 111 South Michigan. Free with admission.

Chicago, Close-up and On-High

2011-12-08T23:01:00.000-06:00

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Night and the City

2011-12-06T08:16:00.000-06:00

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Bertrand Goldberg Reflections Open House, percussive Taliesen, North Grant Park, Rüedi Ray's Bauhaus Dream House, Cannon's Sullivan, Dahlman's Marina City, Teshigahara's Antonio Gaudi - and more holiday events on the December Calendar

2011-12-04T11:57:00.000-06:00

Even with things winding down for the holidays, there's still over three dozen great programs on the December 2011 Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.

Toplined is a special open house for Bertrand Goldberg: Reflections, at the Arts Club of Chicago, 201 East Ontario, on December 17th 10:a.m. to 4:00 p.m. . This may be your only chance to see this don't-miss exhibition, which I expect to be writing about this week, on a Saturday, liberated from the Arts Club's usual bankers hours of 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., Monday through Friday. The day will include gallery talks at 11 a.m. and 1 and 3 p.m.

There's a lot there in December, including volume 20 of the 20-slides-20-seconds each presentations of Pecha Kucha Chicago, at Martyr's on Tuesday the 6th. Wednesday the 7th, updated plans will be unveiled for the North Grant Park (a/k/a/ Daley Bicentennial Plaza) Project, this time at the Fairmont Hotel, while at CAF lunchtime, Katerina Rüedi Ray discusses her new book Bauhaus Dream-house: Modernity and Globalization. On Thursday the 8th, Friends of Downtown's annual meeting will feature a presentation by Steven Dahlman, the man behind the essential website Marina City Online. That weekend, Glessner House will be offering its annual Holiday Candlelight Tours of both the H.H. Richardson mansion and the historic Clarke House.

On Sunday, December 11th at the Cultural Center, the Third Coast Percussion Ensemble will be offering the Chicago premiere of Common Parts in Uncommon Time, a new work by David Skidmore celebrating the 100th anniversary of Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesen. On Wednesday the 14th, the last CAF lunchtime lecture this year features Patrick F. Cannon discussing his new book, Louis Sullivan, Tragedy and Triumph.

There'll be a Holiday Party/ Book Sale at the Graham on Thursday the 15th, Kim Nigro at Chicago Women in Architecture's Party and Silent Auction benefiting their scholarship fund at Häfele this Thursday, and the annual meeting and Awards Presentation at the Rebuilding Exchange on Friday. On Saturday, the 10th, Rush-Presbyterian will be offering public tours of its spectacular new building by Perkins+Will. And 2011 ends from December 16th through the 23rd with what's become a Gene Siskel Film Center holiday tradition: Hiroshi Teshigahara's hypnotic documentary, Antonio Gaudi.

Check out all the great items on the December Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.

Sunday reading: The Lost City of Rangoon, Christmas-mad China, mad-as-a-hatter GOP

2011-12-04T00:35:00.000-06:00

The weekend Financial Times is always a great read, but this weeks edition is particularly rich, with Thant Myint-U's Forgotten Treasures, a fascinating report on the time-capsule colonial architecture of Rangoon. now Yangon, a remnant fantasy world that could disappear as fast as it's being rediscovered as Myanmar emerges from its long isolation. Elsewhere, we find out that Christmas is becoming a really big deal in China, with the city of Yiwu, self-billed as the "Christmas ornament capital of the world", now claiming over 600 companies manufacturing holiday decorations. And in Republicans respond to anger over inequality, we read about the New Feudalists' plan to derail public outrage over increasing U.S. inequality by offering legislation to cut $9 billion over the next decade by closing loopholes that the reliably hallucinatory Newt Gingrich describes as an Obama conspiracy to give food stamps to millionaires. Apparently, this will distract us from the fact that, over the same coming decade, the cost of the GOP's obsession to extend Bush tax cuts largely benefiting those same millionaires will come in at a somewhat larger $3.7 trillion.

Life and Work of Benjamin Marshall Today, December calendar tomorrow (we hope)

2011-11-30T22:39:00.001-06:00

Maintaining a time-honored tradition, we're a little late with the December calendar, which we expect to have up tomorrow.

So here's a heads-up that at 12:15 p.m., today, December 1st, in the Millennium Room of the Chicago Cultural Center, Friends of Downtown is sponsoring a talk by Stephen Monz on the life and work of architect Benjamin Marshall, whose work includes such buildings as the Drake and Blackstone hotels, and 1550 North State Parkway.

Thursday is also the day, 12:45 p.m., in the Council Chambers of City Hall, 121 N. LaSalle, for the monthly meeting of the Commission on Chicago Landmarks, which continues to be nowhere to be found in the battle to save Bertrand Goldberg's gravely endangered Prentice Hospital, but has an agenda item proposing landmark designation for the Art Deco DuSable High School at 49th and Wabash. No landmarks report on the structure has been posted yet, but there's an informative piece on the building by Lee Bey here.

A follow-up on Lightscape; Pop-Up Galleries still alive

2011-11-29T07:02:00.000-06:00

Yesterday afternoon, we received a note from the Chicago Loop Alliance's Ty Tabbing regarding my post on the new Lightscape installation on State Street, admirably restrained considering how rough I was on the project. Mr. Tabbing informs me that the listing I noticed in some of the "reeds" - the individual light poles - is actually intended to help withstand Chicago's winds - with today's 40mph gusts, they'll get a workout - and mimic the movement of Midwest prairie grass. He also challenges my characterization of Lightscape as a "one-size-fits-all" solution with a reminder that it was designed specifically for the State Street site. It was not my intention to suggest otherwise, and if that was the impression I gave, I apologize. When I wrote "one-size-fits-all", it's referring not to the origin of its design, but to the generic nature of the project. Changing the color palette and music at different times of year doesn't disguise the fact the entire thing is numbingly uniform, to the point where I believe Lightscape will ultimately become as invisible as a street lamp, which by the way, actually have more varied decoration by replacing the globes with Jack O'Lanterns for Halloween, golden baubles for Christmas, etc.

More importantly, Mr. Tabbing corrects what he says was a quote taken out of content in Crain's. While the decreasing vacancy rate on State has reduced the venues for display, Mr. Tabbing assures me - and I hope he won't mind me quoting him here - "Pop-Up galleries were, and will remain, an important strategy to bring art and artists into the Loop." And that's very good news.

Chicago Streetscene: Shadow Branches

2011-11-28T23:08:00.000-06:00

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Pathetic on a Stick: Lightscape on State

2011-11-27T22:41:00.001-06:00

This is what a million dollars looks like today . . .

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The fad of the cactus lamp died out decades ago, but it lives on in Lightscape, a series of a dozen clusters of 9-foot-tall "prairie grass" lights that has just been unveiled down State Street that, according a report in Crain's Chicago Business, cost a cool $1 million. It replaces the traditional holiday lighting on the street, for which Crain's quotes the Chicago Loop Alliance as saying cost about $120,000 a year. Only 9 years to breakeven.

They were paid for by assessments on State Street retailers, in largest part by allocating the next five years of the former holiday light funds to Lightscape. They're using new energy-efficient LED lamps from OSRAM Sylvania, cutting electrical costs, and sharply curtailing labor expense, 'cause they're never going to be taken down. They're up year round, "changing" with the seasons and for special events. There's also supposed to be embedded speakers for "special announcements" and syncing the light show with musical selections, although during the two days I scoped out Lightscape, if there was any sound being produced it must have been in the range only dogs can hear.

The project reeks of the usual greenwashing (we're saving thousands of dollars in electricity, and it only cost a million!) and hype, from the self-congratulatory claim that now they won't have to just throw away all the lights each year (as if the whole point of the exercise wasn't to encourage shoppers to buy tons of stuff they'll hopefully mostly throw away by next year so they'll have to do it all over again), to descriptions of the anemic displays as "setting the Loop ablaze."

Well, the second coming of the Great Chicago Fire, Lightscape ain't. Instead, it's just another flavorless homogenization of a once great shopping street. The faux-glitter of the poles look cheap, and a number of them already look to be listing away from plumb. A lot of time watching the clusters at the end of last week consisted of waiting for them just to light up, then seeing one or two lamps slowly come to life, and then colors that appeared to have nothing to do with the traditional green and red of the holiday, but instead completely generic whites, yellows, oranges and purples. And then back to a long waiting period of nothing being lit at all.

Some of this, I'd like to think, is just a matter of early performance jitters. Soon, it's hoped, the music will start to play, and it won't sound like it's coming from a $2.00 boom box. Soon, the co-ordination between the music and lights will start to take hold, creating patterns that are interesting rather than just erratic. And the selection of colors will actually have some relationship to the holiday they're supposed to be celebrating.

Even if all this comes to pass, however, the bottom line is this: Lightscape is a lightweight - a supply-chain, one-size-fits-all solution for a shopping district that desperately needs a distinctive identity. Again according to Crain's, funding for Lightscape not only has killed off traditional holiday decorations, but it's also resulting in pulling the plug on the work of real, distinctive artists who exhibited in the "pop-up" art galleries in empty State Street storefronts. Loop Alliance director Ty Tabing told Crain's they're no longer necessary. He may wind up being the only guy actually blinded by Lightscape's dim light.

Follow-up: Ty Tabbing of the Chicago Loop Alliance has written to tell me that "reeds" - the individual light poles - are actually designed to sway as a way of dealing with Chicago's high winds, and also that the Pop-up Gallery program, despite a reduction in venues due to decreased vacancies along State, is still very much alive.

Art Institute Lion On the Prowl and Back to Nature for Christmas 2011

2011-11-26T09:23:00.005-06:00

click to view on YouTube in larger size

No plastic bubbles this year; the Art Institute of Chicago is going back to nature. Friday, the workers from the museum's Physical Plant department were working with physical plants during this holiday season's ceremonial wreathing - the 20th - of On the Prowl, the northernmost of the the two lions, sculpted by Edward Kemeys, that guard the Michigan avenue entrance. (The name of the southernmost lion? Surprisingly enough: Murray.)

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The large crowd assembled for the event enjoyed the joyful singing of the Wooten Choral Ensemble, while the lions on the Peoples Gas Building looked down on the scene with the usual mixed emotions of envy and hurt feelings.

The Great Chicago Christmas Tree, Placed versus Constructed

2011-11-24T04:11:00.000-06:00

This was the scene at Daley Plaza late Wednesday afternoon, as mayor Rahm Emanuel and ABC7's Val Warner and Mike Caplan lit Chicago's official 2011 Christmas Tree. A 55-foot-tall Colorado spruce brought in from the Spangler home in Western Springs, where it was threatening the foundations, it's s all of a piece.

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It wasn't always so. Not that long ago, the Daley Center Chistmas tree soared over a hundred feet tall, a construction project of over a hundred individual trees carefully stitched together to appear as one. Check out our photo essay from 2007, It's the Great Chicago Christmas Tree (Some Assembly Required).

Norman Foster Weighs Buildings at the Siskel, Geoffrey Baer walks the Loop for 'TTW

2011-11-23T06:58:00.001-06:00

In his new memoirs, Designing Buildings to Burn, Stanley Tigerman writes of an encounter between Buckminster Fuller and Chicago architect Charles Murphy, Jr., regarding the rough-hewn skyscraper now known as the Daley Center.

Fascinated by the long-span high-rise structure that had been designed by Jacques Brownson of the Murphy organization, Fuller asked Murphy not what the building cost per square foot, but what it weighed per square foot. Murphy's puzzled expression told the story; he had never perceived a building in those terms, whereas Fuller, not trying to put down Murphy, merely wanted to ascertain the building's value so that he could measure it against other structures built in a like fashion.

Tigerman adds that Fuller's question was decades ahead of its time, but not much later Fuller was asking a variation of the same question of Norman Foster, and although the British architect was also taken aback, his reaction was quite different. He was completely intrigued by Fuller's investigation of minimizing structure and "working with nature". Not only did those questions become hallmarks of his work, but Foster also entered into a working relationship with Fuller that ending only with Fuller's death in 1983. Last year, Foster paid tribute to Fuller by recreating his pathbreaking 1933 Dymaxion car.

Fuller's irreverent and probing question has now become the title of a documentary, How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr. Foster?, that's coming back to the Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 North State, for two encore showings, Sunday, November 27th at 3:15 p.m., and Wednesday, November 30th at 6:15 p.m. More information here.

Also on the documentary front, on November 29th at 7:30 p.m., WTTW will be offering up the premier of Chicago's Loop: A New Walking Tour with Geoffrey Baer, including the story of how Bruce Graham illustrated the design for Sears (Willis) Tower as he "picked up a fistful of cigarettes and extended some of them from his hand in a staggered profile" (Fazlur Khan didn't smoke). There'll be a number of repeat showings throughout early December. More information, and a trailer, here.

(I really need to be starting on an iPhone app.)

Rehabbing Chicago, in Maple and Granite

2011-11-22T00:19:00.002-06:00

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So, yeah, we've kind of dropped out for the moment, and the world doesn't seem any worse for wear. Posts will be few through the holiday, as we deal with cats that won't eat, crumbling teeth, and Siri waking up my iPhone to make sarcastic remarks about the way I've dressed myself for the day.

We will, however, reopen for Black Friday at 9:45 p.m. Thanksgiving evening (take that, Wal-Mart!) and if you want to get a head start and out of the chill, doors to the cramped vestibule next to the dumpsters open at 6:00, with free hot coffee, strolling Mariachis, and a phalanx of really angry turkeys with some factory farm pictures they want to share with you.

Chicago Streetscene: deconstructed

2011-11-15T21:49:00.002-06:00

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Rm W Vu, Wi-Fi, Oxygen: Rush Presbyterian's Proud Tower on the way to January opening

2011-11-15T02:39:00.004-06:00

It's a long way from here . . .

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. . . to here:

The countdown is on towards the scheduled January 9, 2012 opening of Rush-Presbyterian's new 806,000-square-foot, 14-story, billion dollar East Tower, designed by Perkins+Will, the hospital's first major new facility in 25 years, with over 300 beds.

The top five floors, in a stretched cloverleaf reminiscent of the design of Bertrand Goldberg's threatened Prentice Hospital, is for acute and critical care. Each single-patient room is identical, with discrete areas for patient, caregivers, and visitors, and including a sleeper sofa, Wi-Fi, 42-inch flat panel, and large windows with spectacular views.

The columns of the 3-story high entry pavilion are wired for oxygen, so the space can be converted into a treatment center with temporary beds in case of a catastrophic epidemic or bio terrorism event.

On Saturday, December 10th of this year, the hospital will be offering one hour preview tours of the new facility. Registration required. Info here. The hospital's website is also offering an interactive tour.

Reinventing Daley Bi

2011-11-13T23:58:00.013-06:00

The clock is ticking on Daley Bicentennial Plaza. The approximately 20 acre rectangle east of Millennium Park and south of Randolph is about to be destroyed and rebuilt, an action made necessary by the need to replace the deteriorating waterproofing membrane that seals off the huge parking garage below.

According to Chicago Park District Director of Planning and Development Gia Biagi, "fences go up at the end of summer of 2012 . . . The current goal is finish the work in two years, and have the the new park open for summer of 2015."

Biagi spoke at an October 26th public forum where a clear picture of the design of the new park, while far from finalized, began to clearly emerge. The first major change was that the scope of the project is now confined to the area of Daley Bi. The Cancer Survivors Garden stays, as does the "Peanut Park" between that garden and Lake Shore Drive, although it stands to be commandeered as a staging area during the period of construction.

Also confirmed by Biagi: "My notes say, 'what's going on with the Children's Museum?' Well, they're not coming to Grant Park," a remark that evoked loud approval from the audience. "I didn't intend it to be an applause line," said Biagi, "but . . . "

The current Daley Bicentennial Plaza fieldhouse is also staying. The Chicago Children's Museum had proclaimed - risibly, considering their almost complete ineptness in fundraising - they would simply throw in a new $20 million fieldhouse as part of a deal to let them construct a new subterranean museum in Daley Bi. The Museum pulled the plug on that fantasy early in the battle, and sights are now being lowered.

"We're not talking about anything major," said Biaggi. "We need to stop the bigger problems of leaking and make the building a little more operable. We are interested in looking at the facade of the building, too, in a way that it would relate better to the park and the design ideas we have here. So it's a pretty light touch on the building aside from the major it's got to stop leaking, it's got to be functional and that's something we're going to see if we can fit it into our larger capital improvement program to try and fund that project."

Biagi said that for rebuilding the 20 acres of Daley Bi, "We have a little over $30 million to do this project. That money comes from the revenue from the transfer of the parking garage to the city and then on to private vendor of the garage. Part of that exchange included a set aside of about $35 million for this project . . . It started at 35 and then with design fees and a couple other things we're just a little over 30. in terms of what we have available to build a park." Biagi didn't out rule lining up corporate sponsors to help defray costs.

Landscape architect Michael van Valkenburgh presented the latest iteration of the park design.

Presently, Daley Bicentennial is an extension of the formal composition of the larger Grant Park.

North Grant Park, as the reincarnation of Daley Bi is being called, will be something completely different. As you can see from the illustration at the top of this post, the goal is to create a park filled with varied program that strikes a balance between the passive and the active.

In survey feedback from the public, over 50% rated providing space for special events as "Not important", while over 70% rated both providing "Space for Quiet, Relaxation, and Repose" and "Retain and improve views of Grant Park, the city, and the Lake" as "Very Important"

"Most people", said Van Valkenburgh, "were very appreciative and laudatory about Millennium Park, but the main thing they said was we don't need to repeat the things that Millennium gives us. We want things to complement, so we're using Millennium and go over the Gehry bridge and want other things to do over there. We heard that in the public meetings and the questionnaires definitely back up this notion of more passive things to do, and things you don't have to spend money on."

So the current design is a combination of passive and active spaces, of built-up landforms that reduce noise and wind in the interior of the park while providing expanded views of larger Grant Park and the lakefront.

"We all go there to see things," said Van Valkenburgh. "We like to feel the space. We like a lot of borrowed landscape, especially Grant Park to the south, and the lake to east, and so getting people up on higher ground where they can look out and borrow that visual landscape is an extremely important thing . . . making hills - not crazy-high hills, but a kind of rolling topography."

Balancing this complexity is a "visual sense of welcome," said van Valkenburgh. "You want to see deeply into the park. You don't want it to be too mysterious at the corners. You want to know what's up ahead as a major part of making an urban park welcoming."

The park designs includes both a "passive axis", from sw to ne, emphasizing natural landscape and a boundless sense of space, and an "active axis", from se to nw, encompassing more urban and civic aspects.

"Rock climbing as a possibility," said van Valkenburgh. "We also liked the idea of a temporary ice rink in that area. The problem with skating, of course, is what is it in the summer? We didn't want to have a big water area, so we liked this idea of a skating ribbon which goes away in the summer. It just becomes a path that you walk on. Instead of a rink that you go around in, this is more of a meander. Potentially that could be an area where we include the outdoor cafe [in the summer]."

Van Valkenburg is also looking to include in North Grant Park, the "very best playgrounds that any park in America has for kids, and that doesn't mean that we won't use any traditional playground equipment. There are some things that are universal. I don't know any kids who don't like swings, but it can't only be swings and slides and things like that."

After the presentation, the assembly broke up into three groups to ask questions and offer feedback on the plan. What about the tennis courts? Will the paths be wide enough to accommodate bikes? Will parents be able to watch their kids easily? There was no shortage of opinions and concerns, not infrequently in conflict.

When former Mayor Richard M. Daley talked of Daley Bi as being a "nowhere", he was indulging himself in the kind of willful, malicious ignorance that became a hallmark of his last years in office. Make no mistake: Daley Bi is a wonderful, calm counterpoint to the hyper-activity of Millennium Park. That wasn't a failing. That was a virtue. But while there's still a long way to go, and a lot of opportunities for things to go wrong, Van Valkenburgh's redesign holds out the promise of building on that quality to create a new North Grant Park that's every bit as remarkable in its own way as Millennium Park.

You can check out the entire October 26th presentation for yourself, in the "albums" section of the North Grant Park website, here.

Gang: Sky's the Limit encore Monday, Biomimicry, Karthik Pandian, Brand Brewing, DeJong's (Sub)Urbanisms, Tatum's Pond - new for November

2011-11-13T12:24:00.002-06:00

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We wrote on Friday about the new documentary, Jeanne Gang: The Sky's the Limit, and now we've learned of another chance to catch this striking, 14 minute production. Chicago Tonight on WTTW will be screening it on this Monday's edition - the current estimate for the segment is sometime after 7:30 p.m., but you may want to check in at the beginning of the program at 7:00 p.m. to be sure.

And, amazingly enough, we also have a entire slew (or "slaugh" for our Gaelic speaking readers) of new additions to this month's calendar. I'm too lazy to provide all the links here, but you can get the full details on everything on the November Calendar of Chicago Architectural events.

On Monday, the 14th, Urban Activators opens a new exhibition taken by young people who were taught photography techniques and sent out to document their Bronzeville neighborhood. On Wednesday, the 16th, there'll be a networking event and panel on Biomimicry: Designing from Nature's Innovations at the Jefferson Tap & Grill, while on Thursday the 17th over at the Graham, artist Karthik Pandian will be presenting Late Culture in the American Bottom, reflecting on his 16mm films and sculptural exhibitions produced out of his research at the pre-Columbian Cahokia Mounds in southern Illinois.

On Monday, November 21st, at the Revolution Brewery, Preservation Chicago will be holding a fundraiser to help save the 1899 Brand Brewing Administration building.

On Tuesday the 29th, the UIC School of Architecture's Judith DeJong will be discussing New (Sub)Urbanisms at the Great Cities Institute.

Believe it or not, halfway into the month, there are still over 30 great events still come, including two dozen just this week, with Stanley Tigerman, Roger Sherman, Ezio Manzini and The Lost Panoramas at separate events on Monday, Tom Jacobs of Krueck + Sexton discussing their new Net Zero Office Building in Florida at the CCGT on Tuesday, Terry Tatum talking about Irving Pond at the Glessner on Wednesday. On Thursday, Dennis McClendon lecturing on Chicago's Moveable Bridges at the Chicago Cultural Center for Landmarks Illinois, while Jeanne Gang discusses her new book on the Chicago River, Reverse Effect, with Henry Henderson of the Natural Resources Defense Council at the Harold Washington Library.

This afternoon (Sunday), there's a discussion of Islamic Architecture by Ellen Bailey Dickson at the Glenview Ismaili Jamatkhana, and a lecture by Dale Gyure on the work of architect Minoru Yamasaki at the North Shore Congregation Israel.

So little time, so much to do. Check out the November Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.

Jeanne Gang: The Sky's the Limit - hidden documentary debuts tonight on WTTW

2011-11-11T17:25:00.003-06:00

If look at the WTTW schedule for tonight, you wouldn't even know that it's there, but somewhere after the conclusion of tonight's 9:00 p.m. showing of American Masters, Bill T. Jones A Good Man (the current estimate is around 10:30 p.m.) they'll be screening Jeanne Gang: The Sky's the Limit - a new documentary produced by Dan Andries, shot and edited by Tim Boyd.

It may be short - under 14 minutes - but it's far from filler. For talking heads, there's Blair Kamin, Stanley Tigerman describing the rise of the Chicago skyscraper from the Great Fire to Mies to Gang, Redmoon Theater's Jim Lasko, and - apologies in advance - me. Most importantly, there's lots of Jeanne Gang, herself, discussing her work and thought, and seen in action at Studio/Gang's Bucktown offices. Boyd's photography is sharp and expressive, and the production covers a lot of ground without feeling rushed.

If you're not one for sleeping, the combo of documentaries is scheduled to be repeated on WTTW at 12:00 a.m., Monday Morning, November 14th. Or you could just watch Jeanne Gang: The Sky's the Limit on-line here.

"He was still was wanting us to repeat Aqua, right?" "He was wanting something Aqua-esque, yes."

Friday News from All Over: Queen Recrosses, Lost Panoramas Regained, IIT Dean Reset

2011-11-11T13:46:00.004-06:00

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The news about Grant Park just keeps getting better and better. The Children's Museum plot to jam their bunker of a building into the park is dead. There's a great new plan for the Daley Bi rehab emerging from Michael van Valkenburgh. And in today's Chicago Tribune, Jon Hilkevitch is reporting that the city is in the process of reversing the 2005 shutdown of the crosswalk at Queen's Crossing that turned the route from Buckingham Fountain to the lakefront promenade a complete dead end.

The action, put in place almost overnight without discussion and debate, was one of the rotten fruits of the increasingly imperious last years of the reign of Richard M. Daley. (One worker putting up the obstruction told a neighborhood resident it was because the mayor had been ticked off hitting the red light on the way to his Michigan summer home.)

According to Hilkevitch, the new stoplight will be activated only when pedestrians push a button, and it will include a countdown clock to keep them from getting stranded halfway across the drive.

The reopening of the crossing unsevers what should be one of Chicago's great promenades - an echo of the 1909 Burnham Plan - down Congress Parkway, between the Bowman and Spearman gateway, to Buckingham Fountain, and to Lake Michigan, itself.

Read: Restoring Burnham's Vision for A Grand Gateway to the Lake

Lost Panoramas Regained
Elsewhere, we've added two more events to the November Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events, both revolving around the publication of The Lost Panoramas: When Chicago Changed its River and the Land Beyond, which includes 150 never-before-published photographs from a stash of over 20,000 glass plate negatives taken in 1894 to document the mega-project that reversed the flow of the Chicago River. On Monday, the 14th, the authors will be at the DePaul Art Museum, and on Thursday, November 17th, at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum an event marking the re-opening of the exhibition showcasing a number of the images blown up to a size where you can really appreciate the scale of the project and of the Chicago of that era.

Deansearch, IIT Edition
Meanwhile, architect and IIT professor John Ronan has set out an email seeking candidates to succeed the School of Architecture's Donna Robertson, who has resigned effective at the end of the Spring 2012. semester after 15 years as Dean. Robertson's tenure included the first major construction on the Mies van der Rohe designed campus in decades, bringing it into the 21st century with the addition of Helmut Jahn's State Street Village, and Rem Koolhaas's McCormick Tribune Campus Center, and keeping the faith with the restoration of Mies's iconic Crown Hall . . .

. . . the College of Architecture has launched a search for our new Dean. IIT’s College of Architecture is at a critical point in its history and the new Dean will have the opportunity to lead the school in an exciting new chapter.

Through its deep commitment to a rigorous architectural education and its historic contributions to the legacy of modernism, the IIT College of Architecture enjoys an unparalleled international reputation. The College is one of the largest and most international architecture schools in the United States, with over 800 students from fifty countries and more than 100 full and part-time faculty members. With a pedagogy based in the synthesis of practice and research, IIT offers B.Arch., M.Arch., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in architecture, as well as a recently accredited M.L.A. degree . . .

. . . The new Dean of IIT’s College of Architecture will have the opportunity to set the next vision for the school. The Dean is the chief academic and executive officer of the College of Architecture and is responsible for all matters related to the management of the College. In response to the College’s recent growth in students and faculty, the Dean will have an opportunity to oversee both administrative reorganization and the expansion of the tenure-track and tenured faculty.

We are seeking an architectural educator of the highest quality, with a deep understanding of architectural practice and its needs, with an internationally recognized body of experience in practice, research, and/or scholarship. The Dean will have a clear vision for leading the school to greater excellence by building on the existing strengths of the College and by thoughtfully expanding into new areas of education and research . . .

Chicago Streetscene: Soap Bubble Bride

2011-11-08T06:45:00.000-06:00

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Urbanized and Eames at the Siskel, Ezio Manzini at SAIC, Archi-Treasures at DIRTT - still more for November

2011-11-06T12:50:00.004-06:00

. . . and the hits to the November Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events just keep coming . . .

Today, Sunday, at 3:00 p.m., and Monday, the 7th, and Sunday the 13th, the Gene Siskel Film Center is screening a new documentary, Eames: The Architect and the Painter. If you purchase a ticket, you can get a discount on tickets for Urbanized, another new documentary by the director of Helvetica, Gary Huswit, that offers up a global tour of public planning from Mumbai to Beijing and beyond. Urbanized is showing at the Siskel today through next Thursday, except on Wednesday.

This Tuesday, November 8th, Julie Burros will be discussing A New Chicago Cultural Plan at the Great Cities Institute, and that evening John Zils will be discussing The Art and Science of Building Design at CAF, where on Wednesday the 9th, Art Institute curator Alison Fisher will be discussing The Road to Community: The Houses and Housing of Bertrand Goldberg at lunchtime.

Again on Tuesday, over at AIA Chicago, there's a cocktail reception for the publication of The Lost Panoramas: When Chicago Changed its River and the Land Beyond.On Wednesday, November 16th, Archi-Treasures gets Down & Dirtty with a fundraiser at the DIRTT showroom.

On Monday, the 14th, industrial designer Ezio Manzini of Milan Polytechnic comes to SAIC to talk about "regeneration as a result of social innovations and new ideas of quality in design.", followed by a panel discussion exploring intersections between Manzini's talk and its possible implications in Chicago.

And although it's not on the calendar because it's a trade-only rather than public event, on Wednesday the 9th at the Metropolitan Club, there will be a panel discussion on Trends in High End furnishings and fixtures: Perspectives on the current US and international Markets, with Cheryl Durst, Zurich Esposito, SOM's Eric Keune, Getty's Meg Prendergast, David Grout and SCB's Renee Sprogis-Marohn. It's part of an Italian American Chamber of Commerce Midwest's 2-day event, November Italian Design B2B. For more information, contact Lisa Kostner at 312/553.9137, ext. 23.

This is the last week for an exhibition at the Instituto Cervantes, European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture – Mies van der Rohe Award 2011, which this year was won by David Chipperfield for his Neues Museum in Berlin. The exhibition closes on Friday, the 11th with a free lecture by Helmut Jahn at 6:00 p.m. Also on Friday, there's Irish Architecture Now - with real Irish architects! - at the Art Institute, with Ed Dimendberg at the School of Architecture at UIC.

There are fifty great items still to come this month. Check them all out at the November Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.

Bertrand Goldberg: Architecture of Invention Curator's Talk Friday, Lost Panoramas Tuesday, SAH's Chicago Cultural Icons on the 12th

2011-11-02T23:04:00.003-05:00

This Friday, November 4th, from 12:00 to 12:45 curator Alison Fisher will be leading a guided tour of the Art Institute's spectacular exhibition, Bertrand Goldberg: Architecture of Invention. It's free with museum admission.

Another beautiful exhibition that was at the Peggy Notebaert last year, The Lost Panoramas: A Snapshot into Chicago's Past, is now a book, The Lost Panoramas: When Chicago Changed Its River - and the Land Beyond, including the best of 22,000 photos taken in 1894 to document the massive public works project that reversed the flow of the Chicago. Next Tuesday, November 8th, the Chicago Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians will be hosting a reception and book signing at AIA Chicago, with a cocktail reception at 5:30 p.m., and program at 6:00.

The following Saturday, the 12th, at the Casino Club, the SAH will be holding a Gala Benefit Reception Honoring Chicago's Cultural Icons, John Vinci, Mary Zimmerman and Sophia Siskel, supporting the society's varied educational initiatives.

You can check out the details on these three newly-added events - and more than fifty total -on the November Chicago Architectural Calendar.

(And a correction for those of you wanting to attend Ellen Bailey Dickson's A Discussion on Islamic Architecture at the Glenview Ismaili Jamatkhna, the right number for making an RSVP is 847/730.1950.)

Chicago Streetscene: Millennium Flush

2011-11-02T22:38:00.000-05:00

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The Building Louis Loathed

2011-11-01T22:53:00.000-05:00

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The architect did not give the building any rest, but as to the remainder of the structure -- it seems an ill-compounded salad, with a rather rancid, New-Yorky flavor.
Kindergarten Chats, Louis H. Sullivan

David Owen and Green Metropolis today; Islamic Architecture and Real Estate 2012 later - more for November

2011-11-01T03:38:00.001-05:00

Yup, we just put the November Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events yesterday, and already we're adding three more events.

Today at 4:00 p.m., New Yorker staff writer David Owen, author of Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer and Driving Less are the Keys to Sustainability, will lecture at the Great Cities Institute at UIC, while on Sunday, the 13th, Ellen Bailey Dickson will lead a Discussion on Islamic Architecture at the Glenview Jamatkhana, and on the morning of the 14th at the Union League, Curt Bailey, President of Related Midwest will be among panelists at a ULI Chicago event, Real Estate Forecast 2012.

Tomorrow is SEAOI's Structures Symposium and Kate Keleman's curator's talk for Design on the Edge at CAF, where Alexander Eisenschmidt lectures at lunchtime on visionary Chicago architecture, with Sheila Kennedy at IIT in the evening, where on Thursday the 3rd, there's CTBUH's Best Tall Buildings Awards Symposium, one of no fewer than nine events taking place that day.

We're about to cross the 50 items mark, so check 'em all out on the November Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.

November Calendar, devoid of Turkeys: Zils, Gang, Goldberg, Jahn, Dimenberg, Pond (x2), Gruen, CTBUH - nearly 50 great events

2011-10-30T22:57:00.003-05:00

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Even though I know we'll be adding more, there's already nearly 50 great items on the November Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.

It begins on Tuesday the 1st, with Arturo Vittori at Columbia College, continues on Tuesday at CAF, with Kate Keleman's curator talk for Design on the Edge, and Alexander Eisenschmidt on Chicago's unbuilt visionary projects, and Sheila Kennedy at IIT, and then explodes on Thursday the 3rd with no fewer than eight events, including John Ronan talking about his new home for Poetry Foundation for Friends of Downtown, the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat's star-studded 10th Annual Best Tall Buildings Awards Symposium at IIT, Stuart Cohen discussing Howard Van Doren Shaw's residential designs at Second Presbyterian Church, and the release of Jeanne Gang's new book, Reverse Effect, on possibilities for the Chicago river at the fundraiser for the Natural Resources Defense Council that also includes a one-time-only performance of Carpocalypse! by a troupe from Second City.

On Tuesday, November 8th, there'll be a lecture by great structural engineer John Zils at CAF, where on Wednesday the 9th, Art Institute architecture curator Alison Fisher will talk about The Houses and Housing of Bertrand Goldberg, in conjunction with the museum's blockbuster retrospective on the architect. On Friday, the 11th, a group of architects discussing Irish Architecture Now goes up against Helmut Jahn lecturing at the Instituto Cervantes, and Ed Dimendberg, author of Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity at UIC, where RSAUD's Roger Sherman lectures on the 14th.

Want more? How about Dale Gyure lecturing on the work of Minoru Yamasaki on the 13th at the architects North Shore Congregation Israel in Glencoe, a reception for Stanley Tigerman at AIA Chicago on the 14th marking the publication of not one but two new books, Tom Jacobs of Krueck + Sexton talking about their net zero environmental impact building for the GSA in Miramar, Florida on th1 15th, and Terry Tatum discussing the work of Irving and Allen Pond at Glessner House on the 16th. Dennis McClendon talks about movable bridges for Landmarks Illinois at the Cultural Center, while Jeanne Gang is back discussing her new book at the Harold L. Washington Library, with the month ending on the November 30th with Greg Peerbolte discussing the new book on Victor Gruen and Randhurst center at CAF.

Even with things shut down for the Thanksgiving holiday week, things are jumping, and we've only scratched the surface. Check out everything on the November 2011 Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.

The Epic Journey of Otto Klemperer

2011-10-30T02:21:00.004-05:00

It's 2:00 a.m.; I should have been asleep hours ago. Instead, thanks to Opera Chic, I've been watching this documentary from which I couldn't turn away, on the life of conductor Otto Klemperer, a man who had Gustav Mahler as a mentor, a man who was at forefront of the explosion of musical and theatrical creativity of the Weimar Republic, a man who was run out of Europe by the Nazi's, run out of Budapest by the Communists, and out of America by the McCarthyites; a man who survived both a brain tumor and setting himself on fire, a man who in later half of his life left a first impression of frailty unto death, but who was making orchestral magic until only a few years before he died, age 88. And that's not counting the things the documentary left out - Klemperer's recurring mental illness, his ceaseless womanizing, his erratic and often abusive behavior. Like Steve Jobs, he inspired terror and devotion, and his life and career was like an exposition on the 20th century, its music, from Mahler to Pierre Boulez, and its turbulent history. Much of that story is told in his own voice, at times breaking out into an amazingly robust near-giggle laugh that seems to say that, for all the torment, he thoroughly enjoyed the trip.

Scales House Takes A Fall

2011-10-25T22:05:00.001-05:00

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John C. Scales House, 1894, George W. Maher, architect.

Understatement on Huron, Enameled in Blood-Red Nail Polish.

2011-10-24T23:33:00.008-05:00

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Nestled in blandness between a 1907 neoclassical apartment house and the lumpen-Gothic parking podium of Lagrange's Pinnacle like a swift poke in the eye, it's the new three level, 16,000 square-foot home of Ikram, the high-end Chicago clothier best known as a fashion destination for First Lady Michelle Obama.

Described in one account as designed by Mario Aranda and built by Oak Park's Aria Group, the building's style is cubist orientalism, with a red-lacquer-like facade punctuated by huge circles of doors and windows and a keyhole entrance into an open courtyard. (And how many Gold Coast shops have their own courtyards these days?) The form is severe; the appliqué delirious. It's like a really funky Lego set.

This is the kind of place that has its own art gallery, the kind of place where it's considered vulgar for the manikins to be anything but minimally clothed.

It's the kind of place where this is the only sign.

It's the kind of place where if you don't already know where you are, you probably don't belong there.

Whether it's true or not that the bold design was meant to compensate for Ikram Goldman's reputed shrinking-violet personality, there's certainly nothing quite like it. And if you forget your morning coffee, you can always walk by to make sure you arrive at work fully awake.

How a Bunch of Blockheads restored Chicago's last complete Wood-paved Alley

2011-10-23T14:22:00.006-05:00

A great city scales. While it makes its mark most often at the mega end of the scale - Willis Tower, O'Hare, Millennium Park - it doesn't really work unless it bores down to the small detail of a single block.

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An example of which can be seen in the photo above, taken in 2007, of Chicago's last complete wood block alley, located between State and Astor, just south of the Cardinal's mansion and coach house on North Avenue. It was built between October 29 and November 23rd of 1909, when wood paving was still an option for city streets and alleys, including in the Loop. Wood blocks treated with creosote, a coal-tar derivative that kept out moisture, were created in batches of up to 30,000, and could be had for $4.74 per square yard. In the city of London in only one year, just one company laid down 370,000 square yards of wood paving, including in such major locations as Leicester Square.

All of Chicago's wood-paved streets are long gone. The alley off of Astor was placed on the National Register in 2002. The registration form contains an exhaustive history of both the alley and of the rise and fall of wood pavers.

At the time of the 1871 Chicago Fire, 37 of the city's 61 miles of improved streets were paved with wood. Although the paving was said to have fueled the fire, an 1872 report concluded, "The wooden block pavement, although considerably damaged on all the streets where it was laid, withstood the fire much better than was expected." By 1891, 62% of Chicago's 774 miles of improved streets were paved with wood. Although the use of stone for paving was judged superior and longer-lasting, wood endured because it was a plentiful and it was cheap - it could be had at about 1/3 of the cost of stone. Over time, however, as Chicago exhausted the forests of the Midwest, the price of lumber increased, and by the time the Astor alley was created, the use of wood for paving was already in steep decline. By 1934, the cost of a wood paved street was actually higher than than of asphalt, and only 400 yards of creosote pavers were deployed that year. To put that in current perspective, Chicago currently has 1,900 miles of public alleys, with 3,500 acres of surfacing.

Restoring the alley off Astor became a long-term project, championed by former 43rd ward alderman Vi Daley, and Maureen O'Brien and the Gold Coast Neighbors of Chicago. Their cause was taken up Chicago Department of Transportation Project Director of Streetscape and Sustainable Design Janet Attarian, who with co-workers and compatriots formed the band of "Blockheads" who taught themselves everything there was to know of the snares and challenges of wood paving in the 21st century.

At this Saturday's ribbon-cutting ceremony, Attarian gave a fascinating account of the long, laborious process of figuring out how to restore a wood paved alley, which you can see in the video below, starting at about 1:50 in. "Where do I get wood blocks? Well, nobody's making wood blocks. No one's installing wood blocks."

The alley is 18 feet wide, and 919 square yards, with blocks that are four inches deep, by four inches wide and in sizes of 6, 8 and 10 inches in length. The original pavers were cedar blocks, treated with creosote, set in tar and gravel. To her surprise, Attarian found that the original base was of concrete, "not in that bad a shape concrete"

Attarian found only one company, Kaswell Flooring Systems in Massachusetts, still making the wooden blocks, but not for exterior use. (Check out their website for a wealth of great historical information on the use of wood paving.) Today, wood blocks are used as distinctive elements for interior design, and on factory floors, where they absorb grease. But when Attarian tested the blocks, they shrank and distorted within months. Making them usable by treating them with creosote was out. As a known carcinogen, it's now a banned substance. And the type of old-growth cedar used originally is no longer available.

After a long search - for a while the only alternative seemed to be a wood found in virgin rain forest - she found the ideal replacement wood: black locust, an "incredibly hard, incredibly stable wood that doesn't absorb moisture very well or very quickly . . . it turns out that it's sort of a scrap wood down in Pennsylvania - invasive weed trees." So the supplier of the black locust was put in touch with the manufacturer to create the new pavers.

The entrance section of the alley off of State Parkway is now the "piece of the historical alley that we salvaged and sort of concentrated . . . the wood is exceptionally beautiful."

The new alley of black locust pavers stretches to Astor. As opposed to the original tar and gravel, the new pavers are set in sand. Unlike the original alley, the restoration includes concrete bands to help keep the pavers in place. The pavers use the heart wood cores of the trees, making for striking patterns.

The original cost of the alley was $3,346.96 in 1909 dollars. According to the price list that the City of Chicago distributes to alderman, the cost of repaving a block of alley with concrete is $95,000. Non-concrete paving goes for $26,500 for the first block and $37,500 for each subsequent block. To repave to adhere to the city's Green Alley initiative, which replaces expensive storm sewer connections with a permeable paving that allows water to soak into the soil or infiltration basins, and uses a light, reflective surface to reflect solar heat, the cost per block is $125,000. According to an article in Skyline, the cost for restoring the Astor Street alley was $400,000, paid for out of an alderman's annual allotment of $1.35 million for ward projects they select.

Is it worth it? In these days of budget cuts and layoffs, with libraries cutting hours, and police and fire stations consolidating, it's tempting to say no, but down that sackcloth-and-ashes path lies a dull, dead city, where beauty becomes an extravagance, and living, a bargain-basement slog. If everyone did their job right, the beautiful wood alley off of Astor could last another 100 years, and $4,000 per annum seems a reasonable price to to secure this irreplaceable part of Chicago history.

Chicago Streetscene: Abe Lincoln contemplates Fall

2011-10-22T15:14:00.001-05:00

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Sometimes, architectural traditions aren't really worth continuing: Northwestern's OCP

2011-10-21T00:51:00.013-05:00

In a presentation to SOAR this summer, this is actually how Northwestern described the design for it's new 25-story, $344 million Outpatient Care Pavilion, to be built at Fairbanks and Erie . . . .

"The OCP is a campus building continuing the architectural tradition of Feinberg, Galter and Prentice . . . "

Could they set the bar any lower?

This is the new Rush Presbyterian Hospital, designed by Perkins+Will, and the adjacent Midwest Orthopaedics building . . .

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This is the Zimmer Gunsul Frasca's new Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital . . .

. . . and this is Northwestern's new OCP . . .

Can anyone explain the logic of this design? Why, on the Erie and Fairbanks elevations shown above, the precast concrete piers or fins are rendered as being continuous, while on Ontario street . . .

the concrete piers start, and then stop, and then the curtain wall is all steel-and-glass, and then it stops, and then the piers start again, and then they stop again, and then its steel and glass again, and then it's a steel penthouse like the top of a cheap medicine bottle. And what's the deal with those metal louvers like hanging chads that cover over half the windows between the piers? If they're venting the parking garage, why are they on only some of the parking floors? Could there be any more graceless way to do this?

Could a design be any more jumbled and incoherent? If it were a patient, attention-deficit-disorder would be the easy diagnosis. I suppose you could try to pass it off as a kind of Mannerist Modern, but I'm not sure even that would wash.

As someone who was recently there for an outpatient procedure, I can attest that Northwestern's medical credentials are top drawer. It's now embarked on a campaign to establish itself as a world-class institution, on the level of the Cleveland and Mayo Clinics. So why does it insist on presenting itself through buildings whose profiles are relentlessly indifferent, so generic and forgettable?

And why is it so hell-bent on destroying the only truly distinctive work of architecture on its campus, Bertrand Goldberg's Prentice Hospital?

Virtual Facadectomy: On October 26, Grant Park Advisory talks 618 S. Michigan, unveils plans for North Grant Park

2011-10-19T12:45:00.003-05:00

What's thinner than a facadectomy, that dubious "preservation" process that strips off the facade of a soon-to-be demolished building and slaps it onto a new structure? How about a fritectomy?

It's part of the plan for a new facade at 618 South Michigan, a topic on the agenda of the next Grant Park Advisory Council meeting, to be held Wednesday, October 26, 2011 , 6:00 to 8:00 p.m. in the 8th floor meeting room of the Chicago Park District Headquarters, a/k/a Harry Weese's Time-Life Building, 541 North Fairbanks (enter on Ohio).

The major item at the meeting will be Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates' presentation of the revised plans for North Grant Park/Daley Bicentennial Plaza. In May of 2010, Van Valkenburgh gave a presentation of his views of park planning even as the Park District's Gia Biagi mandated than any plans would have to accommodate a new building for the Chicago Children's Museum, the pet project of movie producer Gigi Pritzker that a flailing and exhausted Mayor Richard M. Daley tried to ram into the park while vilifying as racists and child-haters anyone who dared oppose it. Flash forward to today: Daley is gone, Pritzker is gone. The opponents prevailed. A stake has been driven into the project's heart, and the Museum is negotiating to continue at Navy Pier and expand its presence. Will this give Valkenburgh more freedom to come up with something spectacular, like his new Brooklyn Bridge Park, which balances playlots with a salt marsh?

But back to 618 South Michigan. It looks like the original intrusion of modernist structure into the 600 block of the neo-classical Michigan Avenue streetwall, anchored by Marshall & Fox's Blackstone Hotel at the south, and the Harvester building to the north, with the Blum's Vogue building, constructed by Florence Ziegfeld, Sr., in between. Actually, however, as related in an excellent post on John D. Cramer's great HPRES-ist blog, 618 South Michigan was actually built in 1913, designed by architects Zimmerman, Saxe, & McBride with a Burnham-esque classical buff terra cotta facade. That facade survived into the 1950's, but when IBM took over the building, a new Miesian steel-and-glass curtain wall replaced it, designed by Shayman & Salk, a more suitable visual expression for one of the corporate powerhouses of mid-century modernism.

In 1974, the Spertus Institute took over the building, and added that monolithic entrance wall unbeloved by many. In 2007, the Institute moved again, to a spectacular new building by Krueck & Sexton that has quickly become one of Chicago's architectural icons. Two years before the opening, the Spertus sold 76,000 square-foot 618 South for $8 million to Columbia College, which already owned both the Harvester and Blum's Vogue buildings.

For Columbia, which has a sterling record of purchasing, retrofitting and restoring vintage buildings throughout the South Loop, Gensler has been engaged in an Urban Campus Repositioning "to rethink the way its 16 buildings fit into this burgeoning South Loop neighborhood." But what of 618 South? Unlike most of Columbia's other structures, 618 South Michigan's original facade, long gone, couldn't be restored, only recreated, an inauthentic process. So what is Gensler going to do? First, they're going to replace the 1950's curtain wall with a new curtain wall, but on the glass they're going to etch a fritting that will evoke the terra cotta original.

That kind of applied imagery is very Venturi, and not unknown. Cramer cites its use by Herzog & DeMeuron on their 1998 Fachhochschule Eberswalde library, where Thomas Ruff transferred images onto what became a photographic concrete facade. Looking at the redesign of 618 South in this image from the invaluable skyscrapercity.com website, it's hard to make a judgement of how it'll work out.

The fritting is described as "suggesting" the image of the original facade. If it's too abstracted, will it be too insubstantial to register? Still, the idea of this kind of layering, of intimating the past without denying the present, creating a tension of simultaneity, makes me look forward to seeing how it will all turn out. And it doesn't -well, a future generation gets to take it apart and put it together still again - maybe they'll rename it "The Face Lift Building".

Bring Back the Airport in the Lake!: Aerotropolis discussed October 24, unknown Mies this Wednesday - new October events

2011-10-18T05:59:00.003-05:00

According to Kenan Institute director John D. Kasarda, Korea's Songdo City is the new Eden, a "Smart City" in which the government of South Korean filled in nearly six square miles of tidal wetlands on a migratory bird flight path and turned them over to developers as a tabula rasa to create from scratch a massive city "built by companies for companies."

It's super green, and hyper-wired, and if the full-press PR blitz touting its wonders reminds you of the initial euphoria over George Pullman's 19th century versions of the perfect company town on Chicago's south side, you're not alone. But don't worry yourself; resistance is futile. In the time-honored tradition of academics who have found their own version of the future and can imagine no other, Kasarda sees the model of Songdo City as our future "whether we like it or not."

Kasarda, author of Aerotropolis: The Way We'll Live Next, will be discussing his work at an October 24th event sponsored by the Chaddick Institute.

It's one of two events just added to the October Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events. This Wednesday, October 19th, at Crown Hall, 11:30 a.m. IIT, Carsten Krohn will be discussing The unknown Mies, the "crypto-classical" houses of the architect's early career.

There are still over three dozen events to come this month. Check them all out on the October 2011 Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.