OD'ed on Outrage: The Donald's Sign is Very Bad. The Circus of Distraction is Worse.

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Call it the Facebook syndrome.  The noxious flower, originally cultivated on television by Fox News, has exploded, through social media, into a blanketing culture of perpetual outrage.  No topic is too fallacious or inconsequential to inspire a tsunami of angry screeds - Obama's birth certificate, vocal fry in young women, lap dancing squirrels . . .

And what is Chicago really, really mad about right now?  A set of five 20-foot-high letters that Donald Trump is affixing to the riverward side of his elegant 1,170-foot-high telescoping tower, designed by Adrian Smith when he was at SOM.

 And it's true, the sign scars a handsome building.  You normally don't want to bring attention to the continuous strip of metal louvers of a service floor interrupting a sleek glass curtain wall facade but that's exactly what the 141-foot-strip of letters does, drawing your eye to a visual interruption that would otherwise be subsumed into the larger mass of the building.  We still have to see how the sign will be affected by the LED back-lighting that's part of the design.  It might soften the blow.  It might make it worse.

Update:  Get out your sunglasses.  I'm going for worse . . .

What's evident even now, however, is that the actual letters look astoundingly cheap, like those you'd find in a child's magnetic letter set, bleached of color.

Controversy over the sign has been building ever since it was announced this past February,  but once the actual letters appeared in a couple stacks on the lower level of the Trump Tower riverwalk early in May, the topic has built to a viral meme of increasingly hyperventilating outrage.  Everybody has to get their two cents in.   Chicago Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin has taken on a Bob Green-like obsession with the topic, writing column after column and making himself the star in an epic battle with the irascible  developer, who has taken the bait by referring to Kamin as a third-rate architecture critic who he thought had been fired.   The Sun-Times's Neil Steinberg felt compelled to enter the fray with his own lengthy screed, calling the sign “noxious” and comparing Trump to Oxymandias.  You get the idea. 


Although it took several weeks after the sign going up for him to finally notice it, Chicago Mayor Emanuel has “smelled the meat a'cookin” and moved himself to the front of the anti-Trump line, pre-empting the battle into a “faceoff" between billionaire and scrappy mayor that has taken the media carnival national.   It's send-in-the-clowns time, with idiots of all stripe appropriating the Trump sign as a piece of evidence certifying whatever's their personal scandal-du-jour, with a special Looney Tunes award to right wing pundit Jeffrey Lord, who blithely proclaims “This is about zapping Donald Trump the Obama opponent who dares to intrude on the private political preserve that is the President’s hometown.  There’s nothing more to this little if telling episode than that. ”

Trump has responded in kind claiming what he's doing is no different than the beloved Hollywood sign, only better.  He compared his sign to the one on the old Chicago Sun-Times building, which Trump Tower replaced, referring it to ”the ugliest sign Chicago has ever seen”, echoing a tweet 42nd ward alderman Brendan Reilly issued to defend his own non-action on the sign . . .

They're both banking on everyone's lack of memory.  In fact, the Chicago Sun-Times sign was actually a not-inelegant relief from what was essentially a metal-faced services bunker at the top of a unfairly-maligned structure that was a showcase building of its day . . .

photo courtesy The Chuckman Collection

The unending commentary on Trump's sign has become like one of those amusement park attractions where you poke your head into a hole in a wooden flat imprinted with the images of various celebrities so you can have a picture taken of yourself inserted into the scene.  As important as they may be to those in the frame, there's only so many of those pictures you can see before wanting to shoot yourself.

And what does it all accomplish?  To send Donald Trump into a seventh heaven.  Once again he gets his inane observations and sour visage plastered across media stories throughout the world.  He's the
the idiot-King whose empire is kept flourishing by a capable staff who have mastered how to work around their boss and and extract the random good ideas from the daily mound of egomaniacal manure.

Trump is little different from the street performers you see on Michigan avenue, soliciting spare change from  passersby by dancing, pounding on plastic bucket drums, or painting themselves gray and posing as statues. He just does it on a far larger stage, a trash-talking, cuckoo's nest-crowned living billboard, running on hyperdrive 24/7,  a king-of-all-media busker trolling for attention.  Attacking Donald Trump is like whipping a masochist - the intended victim winds up enjoying it far more than you ever could.

While social media is an infinitely expandable resource, newspaper space and television time are not, and it is a sign of our bread-and-circuses time how so many outrages and problems of much greater import than Trump's stupid sign are thrust into invisibility by our self-gratifying orgy of disapproval.  If you ever wanted a demonstration of how the culture distraction works, this is it.

You want outrage?  Start with this, right beneath that sign.  When Trump Tower opened, it gave the city a superb new riverwalk, featured truly outstanding and unique landscaping by Hoerr Schaudt featuring plants native to our area.  Little more than a year later, Trump ripped it all out for a cheap generic replacement featured large swatches of rocks.

Want more?  Go down two levels and look at all the Trump Riverwalk's storefronts.  None of them have ever had a tenant, nor, does it appear, are they likely to anytime in the future.  In 2012, Trump told Alby Gallun of Crain's Chicago Business that he basically intended to keep everything empty until the kind of upscale retailers who could meet his rent fell into his lap. “I'm in no rush,” he proclaimed, and now, two years later, nothing has changed.  While the Wrigley Building plaza has undergone a stunning restoration that has made it a magnet for new retail, Trump's stores remain empty.  Trump seems willfully blind that his Riverwalk's primary users are not the Portofino crowd he imagines, but normal people like you and me boarding a water taxi or tour boat.  God forbid we have a place where we could sip a cappuccino on the terrace or get a (gasp!) ice cream.

Rahm and Forrest Claypool are pleased as punch that we're exhausting ourselves in a frenzy of disapproval over Trump's sign, so we won't notice how they're about to decimate the Lakeview neighborhood around the Belmont ‘L’ stop with a wide-swatch demolition of buildings for an ill-conceived roller-coast overpass.  Could we slice off just a bit of the Trump outrage for this?

This week's Chicago Reader has a great report by Maya Dukmasova on how the CHA is pushing redevelopment of the landmark-quality Lathrop Homes to push out the poor and make the area safe for affluent developers.  I wrote about it two years ago, and nothing has changed.  If not actual outage, could we at least peel off a modicum of interest amidst our all-consuming obsession with really big letters?

Then there's the way that Rahm, facing potentially bankrupting pension costs, is assiduously emptying out Chicago's TIF accounts for things like sports stadiums, city-owned hotels, and still another $60 million selective-enrollment high school to make sure not a penny is left to help us out on the city's financial crisis.   A little outrage might be in order here, but you can be sure Rahm is more than happy if we prefer, instead, to be watching him and the Donald slug it out.

Or how about the fact that Chicago is on the cusp of a new residential tower construction boom that's awash in architectural mediocrity, with not a single one of the buildings looking to add anything to Chicago's global reputation.  Couldn't we get mad about that?  Just a little?

I'd write more, but I have to stop to check out Facebook and Twitter for the latest on the Trump brouhaha.  I suppose I should be outraged, but mostly it just leaves me a little sad.

Chicago: City of Light? Mayor Rahm Sees Luminous Future for his Town's Architecture

Image: City of Chicago

Mayor Rahm Emanuel says Chicago needs another 9 million people - at least if they go back home after they give us their money.  Yesterday he gave a speech on the importance of tourism to the city and its economy, and touted the boost in visitors from 40 million when he took office to 46 million a year today.  Now he wants to pump it to 55 million by 2020, projecting it will translate into 30,000 new jobs.

Efforts begin with stretching this year's Chinese New Year celebrations from January 31 through February 14 and from Chinatown and the Loop to throughout the city.   The expectation is that once word gets around, large numbers of citizens on the Chinese mainland will be rushing to the nearest airport - if they can find it in the smog - to get the next flight to Chicago to see those amazing New Year's festivities they've heard so much about.  As one legendary Chicago performer would say, “It could happen!”

Image: City of Chicago

The second part of Rahm's initiative kicks in later this month with the launching of “an international competition to light the city at night.  The competition will seek entries from artists, architects, planners and designers from around the world.  It will begin with the river and extend throughout the city and activate Chicago at night, allowing tourists more opportunities to enjoy the city and presenting another reason for people to visit Chicago."

I love competitions as much as the next guy, but I can't help wondering why Emanuel doesn't just pick up the phone and call in Chicago's extraordinary lighting designers.  It's not like our city is somehow bereft of striking architectural lighting.  Somewhere along the way, Rahm must have noticed the way the floodlit Wrigley Building has anchored Michigan Avenue for the better part of a century, or how the tops of such landmarks as the Hancock Center, 900 North Michigan, the Wrigley clock tower and now even the Hotel Intercontinental shine with nocturnal color that actually changes in hue throughout the year.

Images courtesy David Davies Design Studio

There's no shortage of local talent.  Perhaps the most spectacular lighting transformation of any Chicago building was John David Mooney's transformation of Mies van der Rohe's IBM Building - with David Davies as production manager - deploying 5,000 floodlights to make each of 7,200 windows an individual pixel in an enormous dynamic canvas of geometric color.  Chicago theatrical lighting design firm Schuler Shook has also had a hand in creating striking exterior illumination, including that for the original Chicago Water Tower.  Architect Helmut Jahn has worked with lighting designer Yann Kersalé to create color-shifting illuminations for his Deutsche Post building in Germany.

Rather than private buildings, however, Rahm seems to be placing an emphasis on lighting public infrastructure, which falls within the sweet spot of another Chicago designer, Tracey Dear, who rescued the grubby decrepitude of the pavilion designed by Zaha Hadid for the Burnham Plan Centennial with beautiful nighttime lighting.
Dear's debut project was actually a colorful illumination of 11 bridges across over a mile of the Chicago river. Imagine the procession of those lit bridges showing up in one of those aerial shots that have become the hallmark of Sunday/Monday night football broadcasts.

Luftwerk, Luminous Field, at Cloud Gate

Then there's Luftwerk, whose show SHIFT just closed at the Cultural Center,  and whose 2012 installation Luminous Field, transformed Anish Kapoor's Cloud Gate sculpture in Millennium Park in mesmerizing patterns of color.

In yesterday's press release, Emanuel united his two initiatives under “the Elevated Chicago” banner, and his use of the world “Elevated” leads me to something I've been proposing - to absolute silence - for years.  Wabash Avenue has traditionally been considered the problem child of the Loop because of its falling beneath the shadow of the Loop L.  Most recently, the Chicago Loop Alliance, in partnership with Civic Artworks - has been soliciting ideas for their campaign, How Would you improve Wabash Avenue?

To me, the primary answer has always been obvious.  Stop trying to ignore the L and start looking at it.   Ultimately, the Loop L is not just historic infrastructure - it's the largest piece of sculpture in Chicago.  Take the time to look at the pillars, girders, trusses and struts, and you'll find amazing, intriguing and - yes - beautiful webs of form.  It's like an enormous Richard Serra, with delicacy and detail added in.

This isn't just a tourist thing.  It's about countering the drear cold darkness of winter in the city, and bringing out the best in its architecture and infrastructure even at night.  Yes, Chicago - it's schools and government institutions - need bread, desperately, but no city survives without the circuses that give the heightened sense of life that makes people want to live there.

During the day, it's pretty easy to see the L's potential but right now at night, it's lost in the shadows, a great, unending blob of darkness that casts Wabash down into the gloom.

Let Mooney or Dear or Kersalé loose on it.  Let them light it up in all its exquisite detail, and - I guarantee you - Wabash at night will become one of Chicago's premier attractions, drawing tourists to its glow like bugs to a zapper.