Today: Landmarks 2011 Preservation Excellence Awards, Okrent's Chicago from the Sky

As usual, we're working to complete the September calendar (and it's packed), with the month really starting after the Labor Day holiday.

Two Thursday events day, however, kick off the month.  Today at 10:00 a.m., at the Sidney Yates Room at the Cultural Center, the Commission on Chicago Landmarks will hold the Awards Ceremony for its 2011 Preservation Excellence Awards, with the honorees including both a book, The Complete Architecture of Adler & Sullivan; an exhibition, Louis Sullivan's Idea, and such renovation projects as the White Castle #16 on Cermak, Jens Jensen's 300 West Adams, the McCormick Double House on Rush, among others.  The usual monthly meeting of the commission, Prentice still not included, takes place at 12:45 in City Hall chambers.

Also at the Cultural Center, at 12:15 in the Millennium Room, Friends of Downtown's September session will feature urban planning consultant and photographer Lawrence Okrent discussing and showing images from his book, Chicago From the Sky: A Region Transformed.

A Brigadoon Moment at Adler & Sullivan's Auditorium

click images for large view

When our indefatigable correspondent Bob Johnson sent us the above photograph of the progress of VOA's stunning new 32-story. 469-feet-tall, glass walled "Vertical Campus" (naming rights still available) for Roosevelt University, we were reminded that a minor bit of history has just been rediscovered.  And it's already living on borrowed time.

For the last forty years, the Vertical Campus site was taken up by the late, unlamented Herman Crown Center, an infelicitous 19-story high design by Mittelbusher & Tourtelot, a firm perhaps best known locally for their work on the Krannert Art Museum at the U of I, Champaign/Urbana.  The Crown Center completely covered the north wall of Adler & Sullivan's 1889 Auditorium Building.

Over eight decades earlier, however, on Bastille Day, 1887, developer William Giles entered into an agreement with the fledgling Chicago Auditorium Association working out the details for the party wall that his 1875  Giles Building, a six-story, mansard-roofed structure designed by architect Otis L. Wheelock, would soon be sharing with the Association's massive new, Adler & Sullivan designed home.

With the Crown Center demolished, we're now able to see - for a brief period of time - a bit of architectural archeology.  The Auditorium's north wall is now exposed.  Most of it, that part butting up against the Giles, is alley brick.  At the top however, above what was then the roofline of the Giles, a section of the Auditorium's north wall has a full finish, topped by a mini-loggia which mirrored that of the Auditorium tower,  from which Adler, Sullivan, and Frank Lloyd Wright in their offices could look down - probably on multiple levels - on the Giles.

Soon this facing will again disappear, this time behind the new VOA Vertical Campus, which has its own, pre-made party wall.  While the renderings of the new structure almost all emphasize the shimmering glass walls on three of its elevations . . .

. . . the northern elevation is quite different, and far more utilitarian, with what appears to be a shear, blank concrete wall rising for half the structure's height.

Obviously, this is anticipating future development to the north, on what is now a surface parking lot.  Let's hope that the economy revs up fast enough so that we won't have to be staring at that towering mass of bare concrete for the next few decades.

I won't claim it merits a special trip, but if you happen to be in vicinity of Wabash and Van Buren, it might be worth looking up to grab a time travel glance at a Adler & Sullivan remnant that's again about to vanish into the steel and glass mists.

Adler & Sullivan at Charnley House, The Fountainhead and John Lautner at the Block, Grant Park plans unveiled, Jarzombek, Woltz and more: new additions to the November calendar,

We've just added some big items to the November calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.

Tonight, Friday, Evanston's Block Museum screens King Vidor's The Fountainhead with Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal, part of their series, The American Architect in Focus, which will also include Infinite Space: The Architecture of John Lautner next Thursday, the 18th.

Tomorrow, Saturday, November 13th, at Sullivan and Wright's Charnley-Persky House on north Astor, John Vinci and Ward Miller will be signing copies of their spectacular, must-have book, The Complete Architecture of Adler & Sullivan.  Reserve ahead to make sure there's a copy for you to buy.

The other big event is this coming Wednesday, November 17th's unveiling of Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates' concept plans for the Grant Park Renovation Project, which will include the presentation of a large-scale model and images.  I'm taking my mom to see The Lion King that night, so I wont be able to attend, but if any of you do, please let me know where the model's winding up and give me a report of your impressions.

Monday, the 15th, MIT's Mark Jarzombek lectures at the School of Architecture at UIC, and back on Wednesday the 17th, it's another logjam night, with not only Grant Park Renovation, but  ULI Chicago offering up a panel on Real Estate Forecast 2011 at the Hyatt Regency.  That same evening, AIA Chicago and the Consulate General of Sweden Chicago will be presenting two panels on From Brownfield to Urban Oasis, talking about post-industrial plans for Chicago's South Works site.  The panels will include SOM's Phil Enquist, the Chicago Department of Environment's Dave Graham, Gunnar Söderholm, Head of the Environment in the City of Stockholm, and a host of others from both the U.S. and Sweden.

Then on Friday, the 19th, the Harry Chaddick Institute of DePaul will be presenting a panel, Reinventing Community: Branding, Rebranding and Economic Development, moderated by Urbanophile's Aaron Renn, with a keynote by Claudia Sieb giving a national perspective on branding, and Carl Wohlt offering up "cutting edge techniques being used to brand local communities."

I don't think it's really what Renn, Sieb and Wohlt have in mind, but lately in Chicago, branding seems most lately to have devolved into trying to sell off naming rights for everything from L stops to fire hydrants to anyone willing to kick a few bucks into our depleted civic coffers.  Can we get alderman to pay for their own salaries by having GoldenPalace.com tattooed on their own foreheads?  Can we train our pigeons to choreograph themselves in Busby Berkeley-like formations to promote Birdbgone?  And really, why have we let them call it the Viagra Triangle all these years without shaking down Pfizer for some really big bucks?  But I digress.

On Monday, November 22nd, landscape architect Thomas L. Woltz will be lecturing at Crown Hall, IIT. And Wednesday through Friday, the 17th through 19th, the Greenbuild 2010 International Conference and Expo will be taking over McCormick Place

There are over two dozen great events still to come in November.  Get the details on all of them here.