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.

Spatial City ends March at the Graham; Studio/Gang's Reveal parties in April at Stop Smiling

You'd think that by six days before the close of the month, the March calendar would be pretty much complete.

And you'd be wrong.

Just added: Spatial City: An Architecture of Idealism, at the Graham Foundation, next Thursday, March 31st, at 6:00 p.m.  Laurence Gateau, Director of French Fonds Regional d'Art Contemporain (FRAC), Nicholas Frank, Curator of the Institute of Visual Arts (INOVA) at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Luis Croquer, Director and Chief Curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD) and will discuss the exhibition that gave the catalog it's name, which toured America in 2010, including an extended stop in Chicago at the Hyde Park Arts Center.  The show took . . .

the work of utopian architect Yona Friedman—and particularly his idea of the “spatial city”—as a point of departure from which to explore contemporary art within the FRAC collections. Spatial City brings together an international, multi-generational array of artists—with an emphasis on artists living in France—whose work contends with utopian thinking and, in counterpoint, the retreat of optimism in the face of pragmatic reality.

More information - and the link to RSVP - here.  Also, check out all the great events still to come in the last of March here.

And a heads up for next month's calendar, which we hope to have up by the end of June, April begins - no kidding - with a launch party for Reveal, Studio/Gang's superb new monograph of their work, which includes an interview I did with uber-developer and Aqua patron James Loewenberg.  It's  at the Stop Smiling Storefront, 1371 N. Milwaukee, next Friday, April 1st, from 7:00 p.m., on, kicking off with a 30 minute interview of architect Jeanne Gang, a book signing (books will sold at discount), and a "DJ's after-party til the wee hours".  The first 30 patrons will be allowed a brief smile as long as they remain facing the wall.

Barn and Board: Halvorson and Partners, Studio/Gang Wood Design Awards

WoodWorks, an associations of North American wood associations, has recognized two Chicago firms in their 2010 North-Central Wood Design Awards.

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Halvorson & Partners receiving an Engineering award for its work reconstructing a 1913 round barn into a home for the Bolingbrook Farm Museum. "The structural system included a plywood reinforced shear wall core within the original center silo and custom scissor roof trusses able to adequately support snow loads and resist wind forces. The final reconstructed structure captures the essence of the original round barn."

Studio/Gang received an Innovative Design award for its Peoples Gas Education Pavilion at the new Lincoln Park Nature Boardwalk. The strcuture was "inspired by the tortoise shell, [and] consist of a series of pre-fabricated pods inter-connected to give global curvature to the surface."

Gang Weave, Nature Boardwalk Preview, and What to Do This Weekend

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Last week marked the opening of the spectacular new Lincoln Park Zoo Nature Boardwalk that has replaced the previous, bemucked, concrete-lined lagoon.. We expect to be writing a lot more about this, but for now, we present just a few shots of the pond and of the equally remarkable Peoples Gas Education Pavilion, designed by Studio/Gang, in the hopes you'll take the hint and do yourself the pleasure of checking it this holiday weekend.