Douglas A. Garofalo Fellowship - UIC calls for inaugural year applications.

The extremely talented Chicago-based architect Doug Garofalo died too young at 53, in August of 2011, after a long illness.

To honor his memory, the school where he taught, the School of Architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago, has created the Douglas A. Garofalo Fellowship, and is currently taking applications, through February 28th, from prospective applicants.

. . . this newly established nine-month teaching fellowship provides emerging designers the opportunity to teach studio and seminar courses in the undergraduate and graduate programs and conduct independent design research. The fellowship also includes a public lecture and exhibition in the spring.

You can find full specifications for applying on the fellowship's web page.

Goose Island for Obscura Day, Kalmbach's Grand Mansions, Buckley's Utopie, Doug Garofalo memorial - still more in April

We don't usually include tours on our calendar because there are just so damn many of them, but we did one to mention two:

Next Saturday, April 28th, is Obscura Day "an international celebration of unusual places" and Forgotten Chicago is offering a walking tour of Goose Island and Pulaski Park from 12:00 p.m to 2:30.

Goose Island is one of the more obscure areas of Chicago. Primarily industrial, it once contained a working class Irish residential enclave as well. We’ll discuss the history of much of the island, and examine remnants from its manufacturing and residential past.

We’ll also venture off the island to tour the once working-class neighborhood surrounding Pulaski Park. The area is dense with mixed architectural uses and history. Additionally, it has been shaped by various political forces over the years, from Progressive Era reformers to less-than-progressive machine politicians. We’ll check out some of the tangible physical evidence that reflects the area’s political history, and architectural oddities and other curiosities in the built environment.

The cost is $12.00, and with a limit of 35 participants, I'd expect it will fill up.  Get information and buy tickets here.

Then in May, architectural historian Sally Kalmbach will be offering From Grand Mansions to Luxury Apartment Buildings, The Story of the changing skyline of Lake Shore Drive, covering both the buildings, residents, and the architects, with an emphasis on Benjamin Marshall.  The tour is being offered Saturday May 19th and Wednesday May 23rd, both times from 10 a.m. until noon.  Cost is $25.00 per person.  For more information and to reserve your place, contact Sally Kalmbach via email.

And just to prove it's never too late to add to the April 2012 Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events, on Tuesday April 24th, 6:00 p.m. at the Graham, there's a lecture by Craig Buckley of Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture on Utopie: Encounters and Missed Encounters, followed by an open discussion moderated by Sara Knox Hunter.

Elsewhere this week, there's Digital Design at SOM at the Arts Club on Monday the 23rd, Peter Skosey discussing Bus Rapid Transit: Chicago's New Route to Opportunity, CAF lunchtime on Wednesday the 25th, SEAOI's Midwest Bridge Symposium, ULI Chicago's Rebirth of the East Loop and State Street, and Gunny Harboe's tour of Unity Temple, all on Thursday, the 26th.  And on Saturday afternoon, April 28th at the Hyde Park Art Center, there will be a "public memorial celebrating the life and work of visionary architect Doug Garofalo."

Check out the dozen events still to come on the April Calendar.

Stanley Tigerman remembers Doug Garofalo

Yesterday, we received this obituary from Stanley Tigerman,  remembering Chicago architect Douglas Garofalo:

Chicago’s cutting edge architect, Doug Garofalo, died at his home the day before his 53^rd birthday.

A Fellow of the American Institute of Architects, he received the AIA Chicago Young Architect Award in 1995 and was elevated to Fellow in 2003. He received his Bachelor of Architecture degree from the University of Notre Dame in 1981 and acquired his Master’s degree from Yale University in 1987. Doug was a tenured professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, serving as acting director from 2001-2003 and also assisted in the co-founding of ARCHEWORKS, an alternative design school focused on social cause. Shortly after receiving the Young Architect Award, he was published in Metropolis for an innovative project in the Chicago suburbs. I had always been enamored with Doug’s approach and was quoted saying, “He’s at once practical and theoretically charged, and [these traits] feed each other. Doug doesn’t compromise, but he’s able to use the crappy materials young architects get stuck with and make them look as if they were bearing fruit from the rich theoretical materials of his mind. Doug doesn’t come from a lot of money or pretension – he listens, he’s not dogmatic, he’s not attitude-laden… with a little luck, in 10 years he’ll be one of the architects to contend with.”

Doug was among the first in the United States to utilize computer technology in the design of buildings and was a lightning rod for young emerging talent. Among his built projects are the award-winning Korean Presbyterian Church of New York in collaboration with Greg Lynn and Michael McInturf, a project that gained international notoriety as the first building truly conceived and executed with digital media, and because it represents an alternative solution to adaptive reuse; the Hyde Park Art Center and numerous residential projects. His unbuilt designs include a gateway in VisionaryChicago Architecture, published in 2005; housing for Chicago’s 2016 Olympic Bid; and an urban design for Roscoe Village in collaboration with Xavier Vendrell in a forthcoming book and exhibition entitled Designs on the Edge: Chicago Architects Reimagine Neighborhoods, sponsored by the Chicago Architecture Foundation.

Recent professional honors include the “Emerging Voices” program at the Architectural League of New York in 2001; a one-person exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2006; Chicago AIA Distinguished Building Award and Driehaus Foundation Award for Architectural Excellence in Community Design for his Hyde Park Arts Center in 2007; being awarded a United States Artists Fellowship in 2008 and was named a University Scholar for 2009-12 by UIC.

Bob Somol, Director of the School of Architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is quoted saying, “In addition to his professional accomplishments and teaching excellence, Garofalo is tireless in his service to the University and larger architectural community… along with his increasing national and international acclaim, [Garofalo] continues to be one of the most generous and dedicated members of the University and School community.” Zurich Esposito, Executive Director of the Chicago Chapter of the AIA, added that, “Doug was a shooting star and always ahead of most. We are only just now starting to understand everything he was moving forward in design. His recent absence from the practice was palpable. His death is a huge loss for our community.”

He is survived by his wife, the artist Chris Garofalo, his parents, Armand and Carol Garofalo, of Clifton Park, NY, his brother, Brian Garofalo, of Washington Crosssing, PA, his sisters Karen Hassett, of Lancaster, PA and Janice Baldyga, of Clifton Park, NY, his nieces, Amy Garofalo and Kiri Hassett and his nephews, Ryan Garofalo, Max and Teddy Baldyga.

Chicago loses one of its best: Doug Garofalo dies at 53

Blair Kamin's Cityscapes blog this afternoon posted a letter from UIC's Robert Somol announcing the death, after a prolonged illness, of architect and educator Douglas Garofalo, one of the most talented and imaginative practitioners in the city. You can read the text of the letter, which provides a full appreciation of the man and his work, here.

click images for larger view

Doug was the subject of the second article I ever wrote about architecture, for the Chicago Reader, about his temporary 2003 installation at the Museum of Contemporary Art, and the wonderful way, with form and color, he counterbalanced the stolid, slightly totalitarian bulk of a building by Josef Paul Kleihues. Working with his students, he created a work that ragtag, improvisational and inspired, breaking apart the Museum Building's overbearing "This is the way it is" with a sequence of "or it could be this, or maybe this, or even this . . .", including an amorphous egg-yolk-like pod that dared people to lounge in it.

A year later, he led his students in filling one of the galleries in Stanley Tigerman's Ten Visions exhibition at the Art Institute, choosing again a transformative theme responding to the fact that then recently issued 2020 Plan for Chicago, as opposed to Daniel Burnham's plan of 1909, was all but completely devoid of imagery, a dry rustle of academic musings that Doug and his students strove to "illuminate" with an array of creative proposals, set in a gallery that showed Doug's mastery of innovative materials, including a floor of spun aluminum.

In 2006, he took an old industrial structure on Cornell and transformed into a vibrant, light-filled and colorful home for the Hyde Park Arts Center, making the very facade dynamic, with the upper level a giant projection screen, allowing the museum to literally wear its art - ever changing - on its very body.

Doug was as modest as he was talented, and very generous with his time both with students and an aspiring new writer. His loss is immeasurable, but if there's any consolation, it's in the wonder of how good architecture embodies the character of its creators.

The 2003 MCA installation was completed just as George Bush had taken us into Iraq. It was a dark time, just as today, with the nation taken hostage by the Jacobins of the extreme right, is a very dark time. Then, I had found relief in the delight of how "the Garofalo team's bright, insectlike structures stand to scamper across the impassive surfaces of the MCA in small, happy rebellion." I find relief today, through the sadness of the time, and of Doug's passing, in the thought of the spirit of his quiet creativity, of his very human-scaled, yet strong-spined rebellions against the stolid and the stupid, paying forward in the future efforts of all those he'll continue to inspire