Chicago on a Spring Morning: Architecture and Nature interact

click images for larger view (recommended)

 

 

 

 

 

 Finish the journey, after the break . . .

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.

 

 

 

 

 

Snarckitecture added, Studio/Gang back at Expo Chicago for 2013

I hate to be the one to break it to you, but summer's ebbing away.  We're only about a month away from this year's edition of Expo Chicago, the big arts show, featuring 120 international galleries, that will again be at Navy Pier, September 19-22.  Last year's design by Studio/Gang will also be back, not something new, but a refinement. The press release quotes Jeanne Gang . . . 

This year’s design amplifies our previous experiments using suspended large-scale sculptural elements to define distinct areas for gathering and relaxing, while simultaneously creating an exciting optical experience of the art and activity that shifts as visitors move through the space. Refining the expo floor’s organization (a grid cut through by a strong diagonal pathway) will also increase ease of navigation and further enhance the art’s visibility. 

New this year will be the work of Brooklyn's Snarckitecture, with Bend, “a series of upholstered foam cylinders that bend, twist and drape over one another to create a reconfigurable seating environment. Inhabiting a world between collapse and animation, the elongated cylindrical forms create a shifting landscape for relaxation.” Snarckitecture will also be designing a pop-up bookstore for the MCA.

Read More:

Expo Chicago Announces Design Highlights for 2013 (official press release)

 Big Shiny Things: Studio/Gang at Expo Chicago at Navy Pier

Mana Contemporary launches satellite show during Expo Chicago at new Pilsen artist studio and support facility

Bloomingdale Trail, Cramer, Goldberger and Bey ponder Does Modernism Still Have Meaning?, Navy Pier, Kingscote, Williams and Tsien: May calendar blooms

We continue to add to the May 2012 Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.

This week starts out today, Tuesday, May 8th, with a discussion of The Bloomingdale Trail at AIA Chicago at noon, and Archeworks Final Presentation + Review at Access Living at 6:00.  At 7:30 SUNY's Jack Quinan talks about Frank Lloyd Wright's Darwin D. Martin house at Unity Temple in Oak Park.

On Wednesday, the 9th, lunchtime at CAF, the Park District's Gia Biagi and Paul Seck and Matt Urbanski from Michael van Valkenburgh Associates talk about the plans for the renovation of North Grant Park.  At 6:00 p.m., at the Driehaus Museum, a/k/a Nickerson Mansion, Caitlin Emery talks about Stanford White's Kingscote Dining Room. (a repeat version of this lecture on Thursday is already full.)

And Thursday is logjam day, with Critic's Challenge: Does Modernism Still Have Meaning, a panel of Architect Magazine editor Ned Cramer, Lee Bey, and Vanity Fair architecture critic Paul Goldberger at Harry's Weese's Seventeenth Church of Christ Scientist going up against another great Chaddick Institute panel with  Larry Booth, Reuben Hedlund, Rick Fawell, John Schmidt and Jerry Butler offering up a Beyond Burnham Roundtable Discussion: Re-Envisioning Navy Pier, at CAF.

Over at the Merchandise Mart, there's this year's A-can-emy Awards Gala and Cocktail Party benefiting the Greater Chicago Food Depository.  Our indefatigable correspondent Bob Johnson has already scoped out the entries, and provides us the photograph of Mr. Peanut seen here.

Friday is Friends of the Parks 202 Parks Ball 23rd Annual Gala; Saturday the Second Annual Clarke House Museum History Symposium.  And that's just some of the events this coming week.

Coming up later in the month is Stanley Tigerman talking about Architecture and Education at AIA Chicago, Larry Shure on the Typography of Courtyard Apartments in Rogers Park for Landmarks Illinois at the Cultural Center, Tony Smith on TIFs at APA Chicago, and Michael Marshall of StructureCraft Buildings talking about bravura heavy timber construction of the new Arena Stage in DC and other structures making innovative use of wood.   

Ted Wolff talks about the Landscape Renovation at Graceland Cemetery for CAF on the 30th, and on the 24th Tod Williams and Billie Tsien will be part of a panel at the Art Institute to talk about their new Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts at the U of C.

It's a safe bet there'll be still more, but even now there are over three dozen great items still to come on the May Calendar  of Chicago Architectural Events.

Last week for AIC Goldberg shows, plus Japanese 1960's projects, Kenneth Frampton, Re-Envisioning Navy Pier, Landscape Design with Lurie Garden staff and Roy Diblik - a dozen new items for the January calendar

See, we'd told you there would be a lot more.  We've just added over a dozen new great items to the January Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events, including two new exhibitions.

On Monday at Crown Hall, IIT opens a new show, Struggling Cities: From Japanese Urban Projects in the 1960's, which runs through the 31st.  The Metabolists are back with a vengeance, and Struggling Cities includes work by Kiyonori Kikutake, Kisho Kurokawa, Masato Ohtaka, Fumihiko Maki,  Noboru Kawazoe and Arata Isozaki, whose  “Cities in the Air” is pictured here.  In conjunction with the exhibition, there will be a lecture at Crown Hall this Thursday, the 12th,  at 6:00 by critic and historian Kenneth Frampton, Ware Professor of Architecture at Columbia.  (There will also be a February 25th appearance by Peter Frampton at the Chicago Theatre, but we're hearing this may be an unrelated event, more about music than an actual lecture.)

Over at the ArchiTech Gallery, there's a new show, Architectural Drawing: From Europe to America, that runs through April 28, 2012 and features work by Louis Villeminot, George Mann Niedecken and Alfonso Iannelli, among others.  Hours are Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday from noon to five, "or by chance or appointment on Monday or Tuesday."

Elsewhere, we've added this month's events from the Chicago Center for Green Technology, which is branching out with a morning session on Landscape Design Series: Part 1 featuring the staff of the Lurie Garden and Roy Diblik at the Chicago Cultural Center on Saturday the 14th, and a Wednesday January 25th session on Green Roofing for the Homeowner and DIY-er at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum, as well as its usual programs at the Center, itself.

Crain's Chicago Real Estate Daily has a morning panel, Residential Forecast, on Wednesday the 18th moderated by Alby Gallun and featured Stephen Baird, Andy Konovodoff, Buzz Ruttenberg and Steven Fifield.  If there's a Q&A, maybe someone can ask Steve Fifield if his projects, like the ironically named Left Bank, really have to suck so much.

On Friday, the 20th, DePaul's Chaddick Institute has a panel on Re-Envisioning Navy Pier with Larry Booth, Gerry Butler, Michael Emerson, Reuben Hedlund, Cherri Heramb and Larry Lund.

And lastly, this is the last week to see two essential shows on Bertrand Goldberg at the Art Institute, Bertrand Goldberg: Architecture of Invention, and the uniquely expressive Inside Marina City: A Project by Iker Gil and E.G. Larsson.  Both are must-see exhibitions, and you have only through next Sunday to catch up with them.

Check it out:  There are still over three dozen events on the January Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.