Oh, uh, Just One More Thing: Arup's Mahadev Raman discusses The Design of Carbon Neutral Buildings at AIA Chicago August 21

No, it's not a Columbo gotcha, but what will (probably) be our last addition to the August Calendar

of Chicago Architectural Events (still nearly two dozen items to come).  It's a free lecture by Arup America Chairman Mahadev Ramen, at AIA/Chicago the morning of August 21.  Free light breakfast, check it out here.

Sour Disposition Friday: Vue53 and The 606

OK, I apologize in advance, but I just have to get it out of my system . . .

Valerio Dewalt Train does good work.  I've recently posted on their Earl Shapiro Hall, at the U of C Lab Schools, and I'm quite fond of EnV, across Wells from the Merchandise Mart.

click images for larger view

However, with apologies to the Infinite Monkey Theorem, I'm thinking that if you combined a roomful of architects with a roomful of community activists and let them loose on 3D rendering software for an infinite amount of time, the result would look something like this . . .

rendering:  Valerio Dewalt Train

This is Vue53, the end product of a lot of iterations and consultations with the Hyde Park community.  It replaces a Mobil gas station and car wash at 53rd, between Kenwood and Kimbark.  As you can see in this presentation, Vue53 meets all kinds of desirable metrics on affordable housing, minority participation, transit-oriented development and the avoidance of TIF funding.  Everyone appears to agree it's a wonderful thing.

Am I the only who finds this design, especially compared to the new construction in and around Harper Court, numbingly banal?  It looks like the alley end of a big-box store, spit up into the sky. 

rendering: Valerio Dewalt Train

My bet is this is the kind of building that, only a few decades from now, will keep a new generation of community activists very busy trying to figure out a way to get it torn down.

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Meanwhile, on the near northwest side, another hardy group of community activists is about to see their decade-long dream realized.  Work has begun on The Bloomingdale Trail, the conversion of an abandoned 2.7 stretch of rail line into a raised public park modeled after the wildly successful High Line that's revitalized New York City's meatpacking district.  A design team led by ARUP and including Ross Barney Architects, ARUP and Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, has created a striking vision . . .

It will be a great thing.  Even the name - roll it around on your tongue: Bloooooooomingdale.  Just that long vowel sound carries the promise of something wonderful.  The very word - Blooming - evokes images of all the wonderful landscaping, “Dale” the way it flows through the neighborhoods like a valley on a viaduct, and “Trail” the spirit of adventure that invites you to explore it.

Well, we can't have that, can we?

Members of the project's advisory board emitted the bureaucrat's native cry, “Bring on the consultants!” and a consultant appeared, charged with creating a new name for the project,  encompassing both the reconstructed viaduct and the five parks to be aligned with it.

And what was the  product of all their labors?  (Wait for it):

No, I'm not making this up.  It was unveiled this past June, and far more interesting than the name itself is the enterprise with which various participants began spinning, spinning, spinning the Emperor's New Clothes to convince themselves this wasn't a nakedly bone-headed idea.

“When it was first presented, we all sort of went, ‘huh?’ one participant told The Huffington Post. “And then when it’s explained to you, it makes an enormous amount of sense.” New Rule: If you need a personal briefing to even begin to figure out what a name means, it's probably not a good name.

The consultants said people didn't understand what the Bloomingdale Trail referred to.  And when we say “people”, we mean out-of-town donors.  Apparently it was felt it will be easier to raise money for “The 606”.  (Which, in case you haven't guessed, refers to the three-digit prefix of the zip codes used, not just in the vicinity of the Bloomingdale Trail, but across every last one of Chicago's 234 square miles.)

The new name is the work of the usually highly capable Branding Agency Landor Associates, which somehow didn't seem to notice the tenuous relationship between “The 606” and the firm's own Eight Principles of Naming.

1.  Make it memorable.
“The 606” is about as memorable as the serial number on the ticket you get from the dispenser at the deli counter.
2.  Fill it with meaning.  
“The 606” - Is it a highway designation? An area code?  A sign of demonic possession that lost its nerve?
3.  Say it out loud.
Watch people stare and wait for the men with the big nets to take you away.
4.  Don't wait to fall in love.
Fast forward right to the loathing
5.  Listen to your fear.
“I wrote a big fat check for this?’
6.  Stand out in a crowd
Right next to The 202, The 64, The 8 1/2 x ll, and The “You are number six . . .”

7.  Too much is never enough.
And “The 606” is the day you went home early because you didn't want to miss Jersey Shore.
8.  Expect its story to evolve.
Some day, Timmy, you could become The 606-A!

“The 606”,  devoid of meaning and belligerently generic, will stand with “We are Beatrice,” in the Pantheon of stupid naming tricks.

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OK.  That's done.  I'm going to go lie down now.

Dali Takes Singapore

So you think this is pretty neat ...........?

click images for larger view

Ok, now blow it up about ten times bigger and stick it atop a trio of 57-story towers as if it were beached in the subsiding of Noah's flood . . .

. . . and you get the Skypark atop Singapore's Marina Bay Sands resort complex, designed by architect Moshe Safdie, a long way from Habitat '67, with Parsons Brinkerhoff and the inevitable Arup taking on the structural engineering chores.  The project was brought our attention by our indefatigable correspondent Bob Johnson.

photograph: Wikipedia Creative Commons, CMGlee

This is what $8 billion will buy you these days: 2,500 hotel rooms, a shopping mall and convention center splitting up 2 million square-feet, an infinity swimming pool the length of a city block, two theaters - Lion King included - and a casino with 500 tables, 1600 slot machines. and no fewer than 14 cocktail waitresses named Agnes.  The lip of the two-and-a-half acre Skypark makes up what Arup claims to be "the world's longest public cantilever . . . constructed from a pair of tapering post-tensioned steel box girders up to 10 meters deep, supporting the concrete deck."

Running the show is the Sands Las Vegas Corporation, which could have fit more than two of the late architect Martin Stern, Jr.'s also late Sands Tower into each of the Marina Bay's three skyscrapers, and still have more than enough space left over for the egos of the Rat Pack.  While the Sands Tower bore a distant resemblance to a tubby Middle-Eastern minaret, the Marina Bay's design carries no regional design elements.  If it followed a school, it would have to be Mega Modern, High-Tech, High-Roller Bling.

photograph:  Wikipedia Creative Commons, William Cho

At the base of the complex is the recently opened ArtScience Museum, whose 21 galleries are housed in 10 metal-clad "fingers" - their tips cut off to allow in natural light that make up what is called "The Welcoming Hand of Singapore", open to currencies of all nations.  It's moated in a 40,000 square-foot lily pond.  (What I would give to hear what Alfred Caldwell's appraisal.)  Appropriately enough, among the ArtScience Museum's inaugural exhibitions is Dali: Mind of a Genius, which includes a massive mural he created for Alfred Hitchcock's film Spellbound.

Who knows?  Maybe Marina Bay is the what Dali would have done if he had survived into the 21st century - with a lot more money.

What's next for Cecil Balmond? (Balmond branded shelving at the Container Store? Or?)

The Architectural Record's Tim McKeough reported today that legendary engineer/architect/designer/polymath Cecil Balmond is leaving ARUP, the global powerhouse where, as head of the Advanced Geometry Unit (AGU), he partnered with prominent architects to create some of the most spectacular structures of the last decade, including Rem Koolhaas's Seattle Public Library and CCTV Tower, Daniel Libeskind's Imperial War Museum North, and Toyo Ito's Serpentine Pavilion, to name just a few.  (ARUP is also being sued for $10 million by the Art Institute for flaws in their new Renzo Piano designed Modern Wing, but we'll talk about that another day.)

Balmond has already been striking out as architect as well as engineer, most notably in 2007 with a stunning bridge in Coimbra, Portugal.  Now he's setting up his own practice, which will include both structures and products.  Think Phillipe Stark for eggheads.  I love to imagine having - and being able to afford - a Cecil Balmond watch, which probably wouldn't be a watch at all as we've come to know them, and might just as likely rethink the concept of time as tell it.  Let him loose on the design of a bra and support of the female breast might never be the same.  Seriously, though, Balmond's work has always been about amazing, one-of-a-kind creations, and it should be fascinating to see if he can translate his talent to the demands of a mass-manufactured product, as well.

I was able to interview Balmond at the time of his mind-blowing exhibition, Solid Void, at the Graham Foundation a couple years back.  Check out my consideration (copiously illustrated) of the war between the heroic and the reasonable, and the work, writings and ideas of one of most influential thinkers of our time here.