Color Jam's Stockholder, Arquitectonica's Spear, Bey, Anthony Wood, Archi-Treasures' Jewels - its the July Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events

So now it begins.  The holiday week is over and the July Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events is ramping up to warp speed.

While some organizations take the summer month off, others are taking their place.  With their new exhibition, Skyscraper: Art and Architecture Against Gravity, the Museum of Contemporary is offering a full roster of events, beginning this Tuesday with Color Jam's artist Jessica Stockholder in conversation with MCA curator Michael Darling.   This Friday, July 13th, Joanna Szupinska offers a curator's tour of the exhibition, and on Saturday Lee Bey offers his own perspective in a Skyscraper Gallery Talk, with Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat Executive Director Anthony Wood offering his own take on Saturday the 28th.. On Wednesday the 18th, Laurinda Spear of Arquitectonica stops by for a conversation with Margarita Blanco and Marisa Fort.

Elsewhere this week, on Thursday APA Chicago holds one of its event in its Daniel Burnham Forum on Big Ideas: The Next 50: Planning, Architecture and Landscape Architecture.

On Wednesday the 18th, Archi-treasures offers up its annual Jewels in July benefit at the DIRTT Green Learning Center, while on Wednesday the 25th,  APA Chicago offers up the mayors of Chicago, Gary and Milwaukee for its annual luncheon on the topic of The Cities That Work.  Saturday, the 28th, the Chicago Art Deco Society holds a benefit to support the Chicago Art Deco Survey at the elegant ballroom of the historic Art Deco Powhatan Apartments.

The bad news is that July 19th Pecha Kucha Less is More at the Society of Architectural Historians home turf, the Charnley-Perskey House, is already sold out.  The good news is that if you haven't already bought a ticket, you won't have to suffer through my presentation.

But wait!  There's much, much more!   Check out the over three dozen events still to come on the July Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.

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.

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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

Tonight at IIT: Jiang Jun, Reading Urban China in Five Dimensions, plus Louis Sullivan back at the Cliff Dwellers

Tonight, October 27th at 6:00, the IIT College of Architecture is sponsoring a talk, Reading Urban China in Five Dimensions, in Crown Hall, 3360 S. State by Jiang Jun, editor-in-chief of Urban China Magazine, which was been described as "An Encyclopedia of Chinese Cities in a Time of Junk"  The magazine is currently the focus of the exhibition Urban China: Information Cities at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art through April 3rd,  organized by NewYork's New Museum, where it was on display last winter.  According to the MCA . . .

For the past six years, Urban China has been engaged in a unique multidisciplinary inquiry into the rapid state of change in China, presented in the format of a magazine -- the only one devoted to issues of urbanism published in and about China. With offices in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou, and a network of correspondents and collaborators around the world who work under the guidance of its visionary Editor-in-Chief, Jiang Jun, its photographs, texts, and diagrams, as well as a growing archive of artifacts and images have become a repository of knowledge about the fastest process of urbanization ever recorded in human history.

The lecture is free and open to the public.  Information 312/567.3312 or on-line.

Louis Sullivan returns to the Cliff Dwellers

Tomorrow, October 28th, there'll be a showing of the new documentary, Louis Sullivan: the Struggle for American Architecture, as the kick-off event for the Block Museum's The American Architect in Focus film series.  The screening will be at 7:00 p.m., tickets are $7.00 and will be on sale 30 minutues before showtime at the museum 40 Arts Circle Drive, Northwestern University in Evanston.

And if you move quickly you may still be able to get one of the last remaining tickets for a unique showing of the documentary at the Cliff Dwellers, the artist's club where Sullivan was a regular and where at the end of his life he wrote The Autobiography of an Idea.  A few years ago, the Cliff Dwellers was forced out of its original location atop Orchestra Hall, but it's now right next door, at the crest of the Borg Warner Building at 200 S. Michigan.  Tickets are $20.00 at the door.

Both screenings are scheduled to be followed by Question and Answer sessions with the documentary's director, Mark Smith, and its composer, Michael T. McLean.

Information on-line.