Four Finalists for MCHAP Emerging Architecture award to present at Crown Hall Tuesday, winner to be announced that evening

UPDATE [5/22/14]  Pezo Von Ellrichshausen has won the inaugural MCHAP for Emerging Architecture,  for Casa Poli on Chile's Coliumo peninsula.

A benefit dinner this Tuesday, May 20th, will see the announcement of the inaugural winner of the new Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize for Emerging Architecture “awarded to an outstanding built work in the Americas by an emerging practice completed within the preceding two years.”  The prize comes with $25,000 cash and an IIT professorship for the coming year.

The 47 submissions, which included Jeanne Gang's Aqua, have been whittled down to four finalists.  This Tuesday afternoon from 1:00 to 3:00 p.m., each of those finalists will be in Crown Hall presenting their projects, followed by Vedram Mimica leading a round-table debate with the architects plus Phyllis Lambert, Sarah Whiting, Wiel Arets, Dirk Denison, MCHAP Nominators Robert McCarter, Franco Micucci, Susan Conger-Austin, Marshall Brown, Sean Keller, and the audience.

The four finalists include . . .

photograph: Cristobal Palma - click images for larger view

The Kiltro House in Talca, Pencahue, Chile, by Juan Pablo Corvalan/Susuka/Supersudaca

photgraph: Oliver Hess

Maximilian’s Schell in Los Angeles by Benjamin Ball and Gaston Nogues

photograph: James Brittain

 OMS Stage in Winnipeg, Manitoba, by 5468796 Architecture

photograph: Cristobal Palma

and Poli House in Tome, Bio-Bio Region, Chile, by Pezo von Ellrichshausen.

The Emerging Architecture award is the warm-up for the main event, the MCHAP Award, for which there is 225 nominees (pictured here) of “built works, completed between January 2000 and December 2013 . . . within the North and South American continents.”

Mansueto Library

The list is a who's-who usual suspects of big profile projects, again including Jeanne Gang's Aqua, as well as Gang's WMS Boathouse at Clark Park,  Helmut Jahn's Mansueto Library, Rem Koolhaas's IIT McCormick Tribune Campus Center, Renzo Piano's Modern Wing at the Art Institute of Chicago, Zoka Zola's Pfanner House, John Ronan's Poetry Foundation and Gary Comer Youth Center, Perkins+will's Rush University Medical Tower, David Hovey's Sterling Ridge, and - in an act of supreme irony - Tod Williams/Billie Tsien Architects' 2001 American Folk Art Museum, which the Museum of Modern Art is currently in the process of demolishing.

Rush University Medical Tower

The MCHAP Award “will laud those built works that recognize the altered circumstances of the human condition. It will honor those projects that consider how we might elevate the quality of our built environments by extending our interests beyond the proverbial four walls. It will endorse those who acknowledge the interdisciplinary nature of our new ventures. Above all, it will recognize those who have invested their work with the mystery and power of human imagination. The objective is to reward the daring contemplation of the intersection of the new metropolis and human ecology.”

The Americas Prize comes with a $50,000 cash award, a year as MCHAP Chair at the IIT School of Architecture, and a perpetually re-stocked bowl of blue-only M&M's.  The winner  is scheduled to be announced this fall.

today's daVinci or merely the future of British Architecture? Thomas Heatherwick at Crown Hall this Thursday

click images for larger view

It was the architectural sensation of Shanghai 2010 Expo - the Seed Cathedral, the UK Pavilion designed by Thomas Heatherwick 

a 20-metre high building, constructed from 60,000 transparent 7.5-metre long optical strands, each of which has embedded within its tip a seed. The interior is silent and illuminated only by the daylight that has filtered past each seed through each optical hair.

In August of that year, roaming scholar Edward Lifson had a great piece in Metropolis on the Seed Cathedral, including a Q&A with Heatherwick, of London's Heatherwick Studio, who says that the project brief was "exactly the same brief that every other designer of every other pavilion has been given.".  Lifson's article shows how what they got was anything but ordinary.  Don't miss Lifson's end photograph, which is super-cool.  Make up your narrative (but the one combining languorous eroticism and Sunkist jellies is already taken.)

In a last-minute coup, the School of Architecture at IIT is bringing Thomas Heatherwick to Crown Hall this Thursday, January 26th, for a 6:00 p.m.,  lecture, Current Work, in which we expect the architect will talk about such spectacular projects as the London drawbridge that doesn't just rise up, Chicago bascule fashion, but actually bends back and curls up into a ball.

 There's also a streamlined resign of the classic London red double-decker bus, and this . . .

. . .  Bleigiessen, the spectacular piece pictured above, in the 8-story atrium of the London Headquarters of The Wellcome Trust.  Bleigiessen refers to a German/Austrian New Year's tradition is which small amounts of lead are melted in a spoon over a candle and then dropped into a bowl of cold water, where they quickly harden into shapes that are then read, like tea leaves, to foretell a person's future for the coming year.  Heatherwick and his associates repeated this process to create over four hundred "extraordinary and complex forms in a fraction of a second."  Finally they came up with a single final form as the building block for the installation . . .

142,000 glass spheres suspended on 27,000 high tensile steel wires; 15 tonnes of glass and just under a million metres of wire. The spheres, made in Poland in a spectacle lens factory, were the result of a collaboration with Flux Glass, their shifting colour and brightness coming from a layer of dichroic film set between the two hemispherical lenses that make up each sphere.

Something like this could be perfect for the tall Macy's atrium not covered in Tiffany - are you listening, Terry Lundgren?

Heatherwick has been called everything from the daVinci of our time, to the man who could be "the future of British, if not world, architecture."   No pressure there.

In the current edition of Intelligent Life, there's a great profile of architect, The Designer Who Makes Buildings,  by Bryan Appleyard - the same guy who hinted at Heatherwick as architecture's savior. Heatherwick's entrance?

Finally, a dark, curly-haired, slightly bearded man appears with a wide-open, ecstatic expression, a bit like Harpo Marx when playing the harp.

An ecstatic Harpo Marx?  Can Crown Hall's minimalist sobriety endure such subversion?  Will it dissolve into a mist?  Beams of metal in spontaneous meltdown, reborn as a galaxy of shimmering spheres?  Stop by Thursday at 6:00 and find out for yourself.

Friday News from All Over: Queen Recrosses, Lost Panoramas Regained, IIT Dean Reset

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The news about Grant Park just keeps getting better and better.  The Children's Museum plot to jam their bunker of a building into the park is dead.  There's a great new plan for the Daley Bi rehab emerging from Michael van Valkenburgh.  And in today's Chicago Tribune, Jon Hilkevitch is reporting that the city is in the process of reversing the 2005 shutdown of the crosswalk at Queen's Crossing that turned the route from Buckingham Fountain to the lakefront promenade a complete dead end.

The action, put in place almost overnight without discussion and debate, was one of the rotten fruits of the increasingly imperious last years of the reign of Richard M. Daley.  (One worker putting up the obstruction told a neighborhood resident it was because the mayor had been ticked off hitting the red light on the way to his Michigan summer home.)

According to Hilkevitch, the new stoplight will be activated only when pedestrians push a button, and it will include a countdown clock to keep them from getting stranded halfway across the drive.

The reopening of the crossing unsevers what should be one of  Chicago's great promenades - an echo of the 1909 Burnham Plan - down Congress Parkway, between the Bowman and Spearman gateway, to Buckingham Fountain, and to Lake Michigan, itself.

Read: Restoring Burnham's Vision for A Grand Gateway to the Lake

Lost Panoramas Regained
Elsewhere, we've added two more events to the November Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events, both revolving around the publication of The Lost Panoramas: When Chicago Changed its River and the Land Beyond, which includes 150 never-before-published photographs from a stash of over 20,000 glass plate negatives taken in 1894 to document the mega-project that reversed the flow of the Chicago River.  On Monday, the 14th, the authors will be at the DePaul Art Museum, and on Thursday, November 17th, at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum an event marking the re-opening of the exhibition showcasing a number of the images blown up to a size where you can really appreciate the scale of the project and of the Chicago of that era.

Deansearch, IIT Edition
Meanwhile, architect and IIT professor John Ronan has set out an email seeking candidates to succeed the School of Architecture's Donna Robertson, who has resigned effective at the end of the Spring 2012. semester after 15 years as Dean. Robertson's tenure included the first major construction on the Mies van der Rohe designed campus in decades, bringing it into the 21st century with the addition of Helmut Jahn's State Street Village, and Rem Koolhaas's McCormick Tribune Campus Center, and keeping the faith with the restoration of Mies's iconic Crown Hall . . .  

. . . the College of Architecture has launched a search for our new Dean.  IIT’s College of Architecture is at a critical point in its history and the new Dean will have the opportunity to lead the school in an exciting new chapter.

Through its deep commitment to a rigorous architectural education and its historic contributions to the legacy of modernism, the IIT College of Architecture enjoys an unparalleled international reputation. The College is one of the largest and most international architecture schools in the United States, with over 800 students from fifty countries and more than 100 full and part-time faculty members. With a pedagogy based in the synthesis of practice and research, IIT offers B.Arch., M.Arch., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in architecture, as well as a recently accredited M.L.A. degree . . .

. . . The new Dean of IIT’s College of Architecture will have the opportunity to set the next vision for the school.  The Dean is the chief academic and executive officer of the College of Architecture and is responsible for all matters related to the management of the College.  In response to the College’s recent growth in students and faculty, the Dean will have an opportunity to oversee both administrative reorganization and the expansion of the tenure-track and tenured faculty.

We are seeking an architectural educator of the highest quality, with a deep understanding of architectural practice and its needs, with an internationally recognized body of experience in practice, research, and/or scholarship. The Dean will have a clear vision for leading the school to greater excellence by building on the existing strengths of the College and by thoughtfully expanding into new areas of education and research . . .