First Warm Day in April

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In which the long winter has left even the trees with frayed nerves, and the branches of the ferris wheel still mostly unbloomed.

 

 

 

 

 

Jeanne Gang updates Freud: Will Tell - Not Ask - "What Mammals Want" at the Logan Center

Sigmund Freud finally admitted he didn't have a clue . . .

The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is 'What does a woman want?'

Was it that he didn't know or that, push to shove, he wasn't all that curious?

Alexander Pope wrote, “The proper study of Mankind is Man” but his words became less an invocation for deepening human knowledge than a license for an geometrically accelerating stream of narcissistic rationalizations for our appetites and aggressions.  Now that our technology is giving us an unprecedented and frightening domain over the earth's ecologies, might we be better off, as we send species after species hurling towards extinction,  spending a little less time in infatuated self-contemplation and a lot more studying the living things with which we share not just the world but the fundamentals of our animal nature?

But I digress.

Studio Gang/s Peoples Gas Pavilion, inspired by a tortoise's shell,
at the Lincoln Park Nature Boardwalk

To sell a great story, a great headline is half the battle, and architect Jeanne Gang has certainly picked a provocative one for her April 28th lecture at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts on the University of Chicago campus.  The flyer, shown at the top of this post, sends mixed signals.  First it says seating will be first-come, first served, and then in the very next paragraph asks us us to click to respond to the invitation by April 23rd.  The flyer is a jpg, so clicking the link goes nowhere.  If we get more information, we'll pass it on.

Studio/Gang Architects, Chinese American Service League,
with titanium shingles like the scales of a dragon's skin

I have no idea what a lecture called “What Mammals Want” will be about.  Almost certainly it will nothing to do with my own musings.  But when an architect declares they are going to give a talk that has neither “Form”, nor ”Autonomy”, “LEED”, ”Theory”, “Parametricism” or even “Architecture” in its title,  and it references humans only by their parent class, well, that's a very interesting proposition.

Gang was last year's recipient of the U of C's Jesse L. Rosenberg Medal, recognizing achievement “deemed of great benefit to humanity.”  Yet, Gang will be at the Logan Center Performance Hall, 915 East 60th, at 5:15 p.m. on Monday the 28th, telling us - not about humanity - but about the Mammals.  And what they want.  And what it might have to do with us.

As Jeanne Gang is honored by National Design Museum, a walk through the seasons at the Lincoln Park Nature Boardwalk

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At a gala in New York City last Thursday, October 17th,  Jeanne Gang of Studio/Gang was recognized in the Architecture Design category of this year's National Design Awards handed out by the National Design Museum at Cooper-Hewitt.  Also among this year's honorees were landscape architect Margie Ruddick, interior designers Aidlin Darling Design, and architect and writer Michael Sorkin, with a Lifetime Achievement Award going to SITE's James Wines.

Gang was cited for her . . .

. . . Chicago-based collective of architects, designers, and thinkers practicing internationally. Gang uses architecture as a medium of active response to contemporary issues and their impact on human experience. Each project resonates with its specific site and culture while addressing larger global themes such as urbanization, climate, and sustainability.

We're still working on our piece on Studio/Gang's WMS Clark Park Boathouse, which had it's official opening last Saturday, but for now, what better way to celebrate Gang's mastery of merging structure and environment than by traveling through the seasons at one of my favorite places in the city, the Studio/Gang designed Nature Boardwalk at Lincoln Park . . .


Read More: 

Reimaging Urban Eden: Studio/Gang and the Nature Boardwalk at Lincoln Park Zoo

At Raw Point of Spring, a Journey through Chicago and its Architecture, Northern Excursion

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Last week, we offered a photographic excursion through the near South Side.  Today, we turn our attention north, to an exploration of the city as a flow of gestures - of construction, of art, of cultivated nature - creating a montage of visual incident in a continuity of ever shifting juxtaposition.

Even when you close your eyes the immersion persists.  You may, willfully, imagine yourself somewhere else, but in the reflections of sound and shadings of light, even through shut eyelids, the character of the exact GPS point at which you stand insinuates that moment of the city into your being.

This is the time of year when the constructed city, again in heat, is set off against rare, raw color, leaves an emergent neon green, branches overrun with blossoms red as an angry newborn's skin.

Continue the journey, after the break . . .

Revels and Respites: A St. Patrick's Day in Chicago Journey, to the North Side and Back

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 follow the rest of the journey, after the break

ArchitectureChicago Plus Cancelled: SNOW!

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All pending posts have been sent to the sidelines.  The city of Chicago reels shudders experiences acute disappointment as the city is pounded riled slightly tickled with an inundation heavy blanket dusting of the season's first major snow.  Mothers weep and newscasters rail as they battle bravely withstand stoically try to not look bored as blinding sheets sustained downfalls disassociated flakes combine with gale force winds chilly gusts annoying puffs of air to send Loop traffic towards a standstill increased travel times competitive hydroplaning, leaving the paralyzed crippled oblivious city a winter wonderland  silent ghost town sidewalk cocktail of slush and crud, with just a dash of dog urine. (at least I hope it's dog urine.)

 

Jeanne Gang awarded 2011 MacArthur Genius Grant

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Officially, they're called MacArthur Fellowships, but unofficially, they've come to be known as the "Genius Grants", $500,000 over five years, no strings attached.  This year, among the 22 recipients who've just received "one call out of the blue", as the MacArthur Foundation describes it (do I see a licensing deal for a TV series in its future?) was Chicago architect Jeanne Gang, whose work ranging from the new Columbia College Media Center, to the Lincoln Park Nature Boardwalk, and the already iconic Aqua tower has been remaking the profile of the city.

It was a good day for Gang.  Earlier, as reported by the Trib's Blair Kamin, she was named one of two architects, along with Chris Lee, who will work with IIT students to design four new $4 million boathouses, assisted by a $1 million EPA grant, announced by Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel as keystones in his efforts to increase recreational usage of the city's river.  Now if he can only jump start getting the funding to build Studio Gang's Ford Calumet Environmental Center, which has the same potential to make that neighborhood a recreational and tourist magnet.

Studio Gang also has a new website, designed by Bruce Mau Design.

For a Cool Fall Day: Three Summer Brides

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The Birds and the BeeInsect

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As Big Snow finally melts, looking towards to spring with Single Mom Duck Family

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Studio/Gang and the new Lincoln Park Nature Boardwalk. Part one: Raising the Dead - Necropolis as an urban eco-system

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Let's talk ecosystems.  When you come right down to it, anything beyond an amoeba is an ecosystem.  Each one of us is an ecosystem.  The worlds we find ourselves in, the worlds we create for ourselves, the obstacles and the fulcrums encountered on the way.  The family you grew up in, the relations of power between you and your parents, your siblings, your friends and adversaries, the house you grew up in, the neighborhood, the street, school and church. 

And no less than a bird building a nest or a rabbit digging out a burrow - if with a measure more ability and presumption - we also fabricate our own environments, in structure and landscape. Winston Churchill once said, "We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us."  That's an ecosystem.

It's easy to walk the site of the stunning new Nature Boardwalk, designed by Studio/Gang around the South Pond of Lincoln Park, and feel as if it must have been there forever, but in fact it, too, is a fabrication, the end point of a succession for urban interventions.

Read all about it here, pictures, in abundance.

A Summer Day's Odyssey in Chicago, October, 2010

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click Read More after the fourth picture to see photographs for the entire journey