From Guns to Steel Skeletons, Blanc to Mies: Interchangeable Parts and the Beauty of Design

As we've mentioned before, our current conditions, including architecture, derive from being at the culmination of the Age of the Supply Chain, whose defining impulse is bringing the widest range of goods to the broadest number of people over the farthest geographic range using the minimum of human labor.

One of the key components of this process is the standardized, interchangeable part.  It's expressed clearly in the modern architecture of the grid and skeleton frame.  A modern skyscraper is, at its essence, a collection of standardized, interchangeable parts, assembled into modules that in themselves are repeated to the compose the pre-defined extent of the building.

While Eli Whitney, with his cotton gin, may have been the first person to make interchangeable, standardized parts an integral part of design, he was not the initiator.  That honor most often goes to French gunsmith Honoré Blanc, who developed the basic idea but was met with an uniform lack of interest from his countrymen in making it reality.  No less than Thomas Jefferson invited Blanc to migrate to the United States to be able to carry out his innovation, but to no avail.  And so it's Eli Whitney in the textbooks.

There is no underestimating the role of war in furthering technology, and so it should not be surprising that it was in the context of creating reliable firearms that the idea of interchangeable parts first found fruition.

An assemblage of interchangeable parts at
Mies van der Rohe's IBM Building

Tomorrow, Tuesday, November 10th, curator Ashley Hlebinsky of Wyoming's Cody Firearms Museum will lecture on From Protector to Perpetrator: Demystifying Firearms, the last of a series of Taboo Subject lectures organized by School of the Art Institute Professor Ben Nicholson.

The design and manufacture of firearms stands as one of the great achievements of the Industrial Age. The process pioneered the "American System" of manufacture that standardized mechanical reproduction on a massive scale. Gun and ammunition design has its own logic and, when demystified, can inform other disciplines. Ashley Hlebinsky will discuss the ways in which firearms are stigmatized in culture and how those perceptions can lead to obfuscation of the distinction between firearms and firearms violence in history.

Yeah, I know.  My first reaction was a kind of dumbfounded "WFT?" as well.  Yet if the Defense Department gave us the Internet (sorry, Vice President Gore), as well as numerous other core technologies we all depend on, a look at guns from a design standpoint might be a fairly essential perspective in understanding how we got where we are today.

The lecture will be given in the SAIC ballroom, 112 South Michigan, from 4:15 to 5:45 p.m. tomorrow, Tuesday, November 10.   It is free and open to the public.

Archipalooza! Not One. Not Two. Three Chicago Schools Showcase Student Work on Friday

Exactly what are they teaching the kids in architecture school today?  Well, Friday, May 9th gives you the perfect opportunity to find out, as three major Chicago architecture schools will be showcasing the work of their students on the same day.

The School of Architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago will be holding its Year End Show at the galleries of the A and D Studios, 845 West Harrison Street, from 5:00 to 7:30 p.m. while in the building's south lobby, Friday and Saturday are the last days for Myth, the exhibition by Molly Hunker, winner of this year's Douglas A. Garofalo Fellowship.


Meanwhile, down at Crown Hall, 3360 South State, IIT's College of Architecture will also have it's annual Student Work Exhibition and Open House, kicking off at 5:00 p.m., with the presentation of the Louis Vuitton SPARK Award chosen from six finalists “from IIT's undergraduate and graduate Cloud Studio program reflecting the College's focus on the City of Chicago and ‘Rethinking the Metropolis.’”.  At 5:45 there will be the Spring Student Award Ceremony, followed by the Open House studio exhibition from 6:30 to 8:30.


Last but not least, at Sullivan Center (a/k/a the Louis Sullivan designed former Carson Pirie Scott

building), 36th South Wabash, 12th floor, from 6:00 to 9:00 p.m., you can take in SAIC's 2014 Thesis Show: Masters of Architecture and Masters of Architecture with an emphasis in Interior Architecture . .  .

The graduating class of 2014 in the [School of the Art Institute's] newly accredited Master of Architecture program invites you to a year-end exhibition of their thesis work.  Please come to meet the graduates, have some refreshments, and celebrate the 5th graduating class of Chicago's 3rd professional architecture program.

Make it into a pub crawl, going from show to show and downing a shot every time someone mentions parametricism.  After it's over, head down to the Palmer House, up to the Wit, or whatever's chacun à son goût for continuing lubrication and to try start a brawl debating the deficiencies and merits of what you've just seen.   

Flowers for an invisible hulk

The Chicago Flower & Garden Show opens on Saturday at Navy Pier, running through Sunday the 13th, and it includes a number of "unique feature" gardens that includes everything from Captain Bligh's notorious breadfruit trees, a "One Goal, One Garden" for a rabid Black Hawk's fan from Tony Butterworth of Christy Webber, and this proposal, from a  School of the Art Institute student design team under the direction of Odile Compagnon.  Garden #25 - Growing in a New Direction takes as its on-the-surface unpromising the electrical substation that stubbornly endures at 10 East Lake, between the Wit Hotel and Harold L. Washington college . . .

click images for larger view

. . . a large, barren court before a stripped-down neoclassic hulk, behind an unfriendly gate which you shouldn't chain your bike to.  It's so blank and receded, it's urban-invisible.  Hundreds - if not thousands - pass by it every day without seeing it. The SAIC students imagine a

garden climbing the walls up into the sun. Imagine dancing lights that showcase the architecture of surrounding buildings. And imagine all the lighting and irrigation powered by a wind turbine, by solar panels and by energy captured from the roaring passage of L trains. From walls of plants to a curtain of LED lights, from fescue and cyclamen to a neon lightning bolt, this garden suggests the lively ideas that erupt when artists, designers, schools, corporations, and industry put their heads together to create sustainable solutions for urban living.

hey, as Judy Tenuta might say, "It could happen!"  It would certainly provide a relief to glum substation's annual summer festival of pigeons.  There's no law that, just because you're in the shadow of the "L", you have to be dour and glum, as well.

More information on all the special gardens here.

I've never been to a Flower & Garden Show - maybe I should check this one out.  I, myself, like to press wild flowers, although, truth be told, no matter how hard I do, they usually still refuse to comment.  In any event, it's a sign that winter's long oppression is lifting, and that in just weeks we'll be seeing the likes of this again . . .