One Month to St. Patrick's Day, Fourth Presbyterian Goes Securock Green

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The big real estate ambitions of a couple of Chicago's most prominent houses of worship took a big tumble, and we're all the better for it.  After a plan to build a 67-story Canyon Ranch skyscraper behind St. James Cathedral on Wabash fell through in the real estate collapse, the expansive plaza it was meant to replace not only survived, but it's now undergoing an ambitious makeover.

The Fourth Presbyterian Church also wanted to put a condo tower - 700-feet-tall - behind its gothic-styled 1914 North Michigan Avenue home, but abandoned the idea when those plans met with spirited resistance from both the community and successive 42nd ward aldermen Burton Natarus and Brendan Reilly.  Instead, they're building a five-story 82,000-square-foot addition to serve both the church and the community with classrooms, multi-function spaces and a 250-seat chapel.

The design, from Gensler, with Halvorson and Partners as structural engineers, features glass curtain walls along the block-long facades to the east and west, with a cladding of weathered copper panels.  The large window on the Chestnut facade denotes the chapel, bringing those staggering out of Ditka's a few steps closer to salvation.

The facade on Delaware appears windowless, but for the moment it's taken on a Christo-like aura, subverting the staid architecture of the streetscape with a big, day-glo green cube, courtesy of the mounting of USG Securock, a fiberglas/gypsum sandwich protecting from moisture, itself disappearing behind a layer of white Air-Shield, another vapor barrier. 

So check it out now - it probably won't look like this long.

Deus est aeternus, clara viridi tantum temporaria.

Aerialists and composers, gondolas and exposers, minimalists, subliminalists, Jakob, Wright, Mansueto, Shaw, lots maw - February Architectural events Tonight! (and at other hours, as well)

With snow-related cancellations, it's become a month shortened at each end, but the February Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events still has over three dozen great events.

An aerialist in Mie van der Rohe's Carr Chapel? Check.  The gondola as Venice's chariot in its race against Las Vegas? Check.  Did you know they've proposed a monument to Frederic Chopin in Grant Park?  We didn't either, but they have, and there's an event for that.

Plus Dominque Jakob at the Art Institute, Frank Lloyd Wright's SC Johnson Research Tower at CAF, Absolute Sullivan at the Cultural Center, Halvorson and Partners exposed, a hand's-on, day-long festival of engineering for kids, Ragdale, Men in Public Housing, a First Tuesday Happy Hour hung over into the second, a tour of Hoerr-Schaudt, Louis' Jewelbox Banks, engineering the subterranean, glass-domed Mansueto Library, Summit's Testa Produce, and - as they say - much, much more.

Check out all the who, when and where's for February here.

Barn and Board: Halvorson and Partners, Studio/Gang Wood Design Awards

WoodWorks, an associations of North American wood associations, has recognized two Chicago firms in their 2010 North-Central Wood Design Awards.

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Halvorson & Partners receiving an Engineering award for its work reconstructing a 1913 round barn into a home for the Bolingbrook Farm Museum. "The structural system included a plywood reinforced shear wall core within the original center silo and custom scissor roof trusses able to adequately support snow loads and resist wind forces. The final reconstructed structure captures the essence of the original round barn."

Studio/Gang received an Innovative Design award for its Peoples Gas Education Pavilion at the new Lincoln Park Nature Boardwalk. The strcuture was "inspired by the tortoise shell, [and] consist of a series of pre-fabricated pods inter-connected to give global curvature to the surface."