David Adjaye and a few close artist friends' offer up inspired debate over Architectural Grad Student's provocative Question

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 The first Chicago Architecture Biennial doesn't begin until October 3rd, but already things are already heating up with events relating to the opening last Saturday of the Art Institute's blockbuster exhibition, Making Place: The Architecture of David Adjaye.  Last Wednesday, the Tanzanian born, Britain-based architect was in conversation with exhibition curator Zoë Ryan, and on Saturday, Adjaye  and Ryan were back for a panel discussion, The Art of Architecture - David Adjaye's Collaborations with Artists. 

Other participants included Studio Museum in Harlem director Thelma Golden, artists Lorna Simpson, Chris Ofili and Chicago's own Theaster Gates, and Okwui Enwezor, director of Haus der Kunst in Munich, which co-curated the exhibition.

Lorna Simpson

It was an engaging discussion, which we hope to draw upon when we write further on this dazzling show, but for now I wanted to concentrate on what happened at the end of the main program when  a student at the University of Washington in St. Louis asked a question that immediately caused the panelists to sit up and take notice.

A rush of energy spread throughout the room and fueled deeply engaged responses from each panelist, which began with issues of race, moved on to the questions of how a young person makes their mark in an indifferent world, and ending with a a spirited exchange on the origins of creativity. I'm sure for most of my readers, this is shear TLDR, but I found the discussion fascinating enough that I'm recounting it here in my imperfect transcription.

This is the question from which it all began:

“I look around at the audience here, very different from what I experience at home in St. Louis, especially as one of the only Afro-American males in the graduate program at Washington in Art and Architecture."

“Just don't give up,” responded Adjaye.

“Well, I'm glad you say that, because that's what my question is pertaining to, everyone on stage and everyone in the audience. How could you suggest and offer information to young people to help them stay guided on the path to achieving their goals? Defying the odds, creating spaces for themselves in communities where there is no Theaster Gates, where there is no Thelma Golden to stand there and have a community of people around her to show that it's possible. I've lived in St. Louis for maybe seventeen years and it's quite detrimental to live in an environment that's so segregated. "

"What could you guys share with us to let us know that we can do this? And I'm not just speaking for myself but also for other current graduate students here in the audience."

Theaster Gates, David Adjaye,Zoë Ryan

Adjaye: You know, I think - and I congratulate you on going into a profession where you don't see role models, and you don't see other professionals. That says a lot about who you are.

"You on the stage. I can see you on the stage. I get to travel to Chicago or to New York as a graduate chancellors fellow for the university , I'm paid to be there. But I want to be at home, also. How can I help my home a cultural center for black people to know that it's OK?

Okwui Enwezor: When David and I started at the Royal College, it wasn't like a sea of black people . (laughter)

Adjaye: FYI - and there were no people on the stage either.

Enwezor: If you need to do it, do it on your own. Don't look for your posse, do you know what I mean? Just get on with it.

Adjaye: What is so important is that you are becoming or want to become someone who works in the built environment. You don't know how much of a purpose that is. Okay, I know that it's difficult when you're doing it. It's always difficult when you're at the front of a surge. Think of yourself as the tip of a spear, and kind of make an opportunity - manifest yourself in your community. Actually start to do things. I mean Theaster was not always Theaster Gates. He was a guy, just doing things.

(at this point Gates got a big laugh from panel and audience alike as he stood and mimed the transition from a stooped, close-to-the-ground early Theaster Gates to the ultimate straight-postured, fully-evolved "Theaster Gates")

He became Theaster Gates. Because he did things that people recognized. So, you know, the models are there. The models are there.

Lorna Simpson, Theaster Gates, David Adjaye

Theaster Gates: You know, also, I think there's something interesting to me between what Chris is saying and what David is saying . One part of the "get on with it" is what Black Brits told me when I came to London when I was very young, kind of talking about the challenges of being black in the United States.

I think that in a way because black Brits came to London with a kind of autonomy, the question of blackness or blackness in relationship to a white Brit, that was never really the kind of anxiety. There were other things like, I just need work. So there's a way in which black anxiety that we deal with or black trauma that not everybody has that same kind of psychological load. How do you start to shake off some of that psychological load so that you can just kind of get on with it? But shaking off that psychological load is actually the complex part and I don't know if there's anyone that can help - there might be tactics that can help you shake off the psychological load , but if you're the only . . .

I'll give the example of black girls at the Art Institute who want to talk about hair and white faculty members who don't want to talk about black hair, So if you're in those situations where . . . your autonomy isn't empowering , your autonomy is constantly being a kind of barged in upon by an oppressive force, I think that in those moments , that's where strength lives. That's where you gird up and you're like - I'm gonna talk about hair. And never neglect the potential power of your colleagues no matter who they are. In fact, there's fuel all around you waiting to help propel the work and that fuel ain't racial fuel. It's just diesel.

Chris Ofili, Thelma Golden

Thelma Golden: . . . you're sitting on the stage, and there are a whole lot of first and onlies, right? And in a certain way, exceptionalizing like that gets a little boring after a while, right?  Because you do have to get on with it. But I also think that what you understand is that when you're looking for community, and you're looking for support, for your ideals, to not think of it in a localized way.

We've been talking today about collaboration, and the professional relationships, but on this stage there is this huge personal relationships that have crossed different cities. London to New York, or to Munich, to Trinidad, back to Chicago, and finding the idea of community as not being local. Of being able to understand your vision and your aspirations in this wider group of people, who . . .  are there to support the sort of individual efforts, but also what are the mutual efforts, and the mutual ideals that we all might have.

Enwezor: I think that what is very crucial for any . . .professional, you have to begin by asking yourself what kind of contribution you want to make in your discipline. Whatever it is, it's really about your discipline.  The reason I became interested in David's work is not because he's a fellow West African. I think it's important that you begin with how do you contribute to your discipline? And at the same time, to reflect on the fact that when you ask that question, it's going to be an uphill battle.  I think it's a battle between the context and yourself . . . you have to learn most simply to be a guest, but also to be a host. And that means there's a kind of give and take in that sense.  Because if you start becoming a host, you start beginning to invent a world, an ecology of possibility.

So maybe the point is that you shouldn't really stay in your neighborhood . You should venture out, in that sense. And I think that doesn't mean that you cannot return. But I think you have to start at that possibility of uprooting yourself.  You have to imagine [that] cosmopolitan idea. Because that's how ideas travel.  That is how you enter into broader conversations, that's how you gain the benefit of really bringing your own world into the conversation.

Okwui Enwezor, Chris Ofili

Chris Ofili: I think that David's managed to find a practice that allows him to explore himself, in relation to the world, in relation to his own industry, in relation to his own possibilities. So I refuse to separate person from the work. I think it's like taking the air out a balloon and expecting it to go up.

I think that David is who he is and I think that if people chose to see that as an affliction, that's their problem.

Enwezor: That's actually not what I mean. My interest is that on the very highest level of practice, I'm interested in David's work. This other connection is also central in understanding the depth of that practice.

Chris: Well, OK, it's not an argument, but actually I feel quite strongly about it than you that in trying to understand what the work is, the root is through the person,

Enwezor: Oh, absolutely.

Chris: And I think that what we're seeing unfolding in time is a person in the form of architecture. That's my - maybe because I'm close to David - but that's what I see. That's the way I view it. I'm not saying this to you, but I think that there's a theoretical approach that can see it other ways, and separate those parts, but I can't.

Enwezor: I think it's an interesting point.  Nevertheless I don't see David's practice purely from an autobiographical lens. And I tell you what, because for me it's very interesting in the discussion about his relationship to African abstraction.  David is looking at this storehouse of references that people are not using. And he said, if people are not going to use it, I am going to use it. And of course, that has to do with his relationship to a place but that recognition is not writing an essay that is only autobiographical. It's to say there is a cultural archive, that has depth, that has incredible complexity. That you can take this cultural archive and be able to read it in a way that emerges to become a universal language.

And this is what, I believe, if you look at the building in Washington [The National Museum of African History and Culture], from this kind of naturalistic form of the Yoruban column that ends up in this abstraction of the bronze Corona, [it] is magical. And I think what I see there is not David's personality. It's his intellectual distillation of this thing happening.

Chris: Then why would you want to separate the personality from the intellect? I don't see the point. (laughter)

Rahm, Gates, Gang and more - A Photo Portrait of AIA Convention Thursday

Thursday morning was the big keynote of the American Institute of Architects 2014 convention in Chicago, featuring introductions, awards, a benediction by Mayor Rahm Emanuel, and talks by Theaster Gates and Jeanne Gang.  We'll proably be writing more about what they had to say later, but for now here's what it looked like on the scene . . .

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Arie Crown Theater, the cavernous barn of an auditorium that didn't have the decency to burn down with the rest of the original McCormick Place back in 1967;

AIA President Helene Combs Dreiling

Rahm talked about Chicago's architectural heritage as “the home of modern architecture”, and the newly announced Chicago Architecture Biennial, to take place in October 2015.  “It will be the largest convention of architects and designers and people thinking about the future of architecture in cities in all of North America”

The Mayor was wearing a colorful handmade “Peace” wristband sold for $1.00 by a six-year boy at a North Side Wal-Mart. Sun-Times columnist Michael Sneed reported that Emanuel “urged the boy to charge his bodyguard $2 for a bracelet.”  Which may go a long way to explaining why those CTA stations are costing so much.  Or am I reading too much into this?

The AIA's 2014 Topaz Medallion for Excellence in Architectural Education was awarded to Harrison Fraker, who founded what is now the Princeton Environmental Institute and is a pioneer who “pushed the academic study of energy use in buildings to the forefront of the sustainability movement.”

Ivenue Love-Stanley was the recipient of this year's Whitney M. Young Award.  In 1977, Love-Stanley became “the first Afro-American woman to the first African-American woman to graduate from the College of Architecture at Georgia Tech in 1977. She later became the first African-American woman to become a licensed architect in the Southeast. In 1978, she co-founded Atlanta-based Stanley, Love-Stanley with her husband, William Stanley, FAIA, who received the Whitney Young Award in 1995. Love-Stanley and Stanley are the first husband and wife to ever have both received the Whitney Young Award.”

“I asked myself this morning,” said artist and activist Theaster Gates, ”what does it mean to talk to the field of architecture as an artist? What does it mean to have this captive audience to think with me about how our cities look and feel?”

In his keynote Gates answered with a overview of two recent projects - 12 Ballads for Huguenot House and the Stony Island Arts Bank, but only after saying ” I really want us to forget about those buildings and imagine that we're talking about process, that I'm talking about the capacity for the field of architecture and the field of design and the arts to re-imagine how cities function and to re-imagine the agency that we have as design professionals to change the world.”

Gates talked about neighborhoods like those on Chicago's South Side “People forget about them.  [Their architecture] at one time may have been ambitious, the people who live there [now] may have real lives and real ambition.  There's just no reason to talk about it, because it seems like nothing's happening there .  The building that we're looking at is at 69th and Dorchester .  It's one of those buildings.  In my artistic practice, a big part of it is about re-imagining how spaces are activated.  Sometimes I take abandoned buildings.  I perform in them.  I sweep them.  I mop them.  I rehab them.  I do things like an architect . . . like an architect.”  

“I am calling this talk ‘Purpose is Process’, said the mornings second keynoter, Studio Gang's Jeanne Gang.  ”Now when I first heard about the title I wondered, how do you get purpose?  Do you just wake up one morning and find ouy you have a purpose?  It's really not like that.  It shouldn't be a marketing slogan and it shouldn't be something you have to concoct .  It really is something you develop over time. It's a process.  Maybe another way to put it is:  Does architecture correct social change, or    . . . is it social change that determines architectural space?

This launched into Gang providing a history of Northerly Island, including a visual demonstration of how much of the site and its environs were not a green space, but an almost interrupted sea of concrete.  She contrasted that with her design for the Northerly Island Framework Plan for returning it to the public as a 90-acre recreational space, a process that is rapidly nearing completion.  

To underscore how Studio/Gang's practice is based on process and research, Gang concluding by discussing her latest project, creating BLUEprint, a strategic plan for the National Aquarium in Baltimore, which has resulted in Gang learning more about the oceans than most of us could ever hope to know.  

“As architects you never really think that you can begin a project that has to do with the ocean, but in fact I think our skill sets are really attuned to this. . . . The way that we used to perceive the ocean back in Greek times it was one ocean, not multiple seas.  And now today it is a contested space.  It's very heavily harvested for all kinds of different resources and materials.  Only 2% of the whole ocean is protected, which is very different than on land.  When you think about that, it's pretty scary.  Nobody's watching it.  Nobody's caring for it.  There isn't any planning.”

Gang talked about how unknown the oceans actually are.  While 563 astronauts have visited space, there have been only 4 descents into the deepest level of the ocean.  While NASA spends over $17 billion a dollar a year exploring space, the budget for oceanic exploration was listed as under $25 million.    Much of the ocean floor remains unmapped.  As vast as it appears, the almost alarmingly finite nature of the oceans - on which all earthly life is so completely dependent - was demonstrated by an incredible graphic of an earth stripped of all its water, and the entire cubic volume of that water orbiting the earth in a tiny ocean-blue moon only 860 miles in diameter. 

Tribune architecture Blair Kamin talking with Stephen Cheung at the Architect Live booth.

Walgreens Manager of Sustainability Jamie Meyers draws a crowd at the AIA Chicago  Lounge. (Heads up from a reliable source: Karen Erger and Eric Singer reportedly make the topic of Residential Risk Redux: Managing Risk in the New Economy -12:30 -1:30 p.m. Friday - not only informative, but a lot more entertaining than you might imagine.)

Stairway to Heaven

NeoCon and AIA National Convention - Smith, Gang, Gates, Lai, Tigerman, Happy City and more - Lots still to come on the June calendar

 June is a big double-header for the Chicago Calendar of Architectural Events.

While NeoCon is wrapping up, the big news is the national convention of the American Institute of Architects 2014 meeting here in Chicago at the end of the month, not just in McCormick Place, but in a wide range of convention-related events that we're still getting a handle on.

By the time you're reading this, Adrian Smith and Tom Eich have probably already delivered their early-Wednesday morning NeoCon keynotes, but tomorrow at the Chicago Architecture Foundation, Charles Montgomery will be talking about his book, Happy City, while at the Bridgeport Arts Center, Friends of the Parks 2014 Benefit honoring Richard Hunt.  This weekend, MAS Context and others is offering a two-day symposium on Our Public Space: Who Owns It, Who Shapes It, and Who Benefits from it, with lectures on Saturday and a workshop at the Lathrop Homes on Sunday.

Next  Tuesday, the 17th, Lane Kendig discusses Walkability: Fact or Myth at APA Chicago, while Wednesday lunchtime at CAF, Anne Sullivan talks about Understanding Historic Building Technology, and in the evening CREW Chicago takes a look at Beautiful and Effective Public Spaces, focusing on Pioneer Court and the recently restored Wrigley Building Plaza. Thursday, the 19th, Larry Booth discusses Trailing Louis Sulivan: The Restoration of Ganz Hall at the Auditorium, while over at the Second Presbyterian Church, William Tyre offers A Look Back: Chicago and the World in 1874, at CAF, Jimenez Lai is in conversation with Stanley Tigerman, and over at the Pritzker Pavilion you can see a giant-screen showing of the new documentary Jens Jensen The Living Green (which airs on WTTW at the exact same time.)

Heading into AIA convention week, the Royal Institute of British Architects is sponsoring a series of lectures at the Apple store on Michigan Avenue, AIA keynotes are delivered by Jeanne Gang, Theaster Gates, Stephen Chung, and Tony Hsieh, with Architecture 2030's Ed Mazria offering a panel.  There's a special Design + Dining Pecha Kucha at Martyr's, a lecture by futurist Melissa Sterry on Learning from Life: The Biologically Informed City, and a AIADIV/Chicago Women in Architecture Global Inclusion Reception with a keynote by former Ambassador John F. Maisto, at Hafele Chicago.
Resiliency Dream Team

And that's just scratching the surface of the dozens of great events still to come this month.  Check them all out on the June Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.

Wong and Gates Monday, Ron Klemencic Tuesday - fragments of the April Calendar

Rumors of the appearance of the April Calendar of Chicago Cultural Events persist, even as we wish to apologize to those of you who may have wanted to hear architect Thomas Leeser, whose firm just completed a warmly received expansion of the Museum of the Moving Image in New York, when he spoke at UIC last Friday, but missed it because we didn't report it.

Here are two events for today, Monday, April 4th:

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At the intriguing start time of 5:50 p.m., in the lower core of Crown Hall at IIT, Ernest Wong of the Site Design Group, Ltd., whose work includes the striking and new Mary Bartelme park at Adams and Sangamon, pictured above, will lecture. Information here.

At 6:00 p.m. at Archeworks, 625 North Kingsbury, there will be a lecture by Loeb Fellow Theaster Gates "will talk about the relationship between his art practice, myth making and urban stewardship and how slippery these relationships are. He will engage the audience and discuss the challenges of the design industry with implications toward pedagogy and emerging practices. By the end of the night, he will create a new design firm with members of the audience." Followed by in-fighting over job titles. RSVP requested.  Information here.

Then on Tuesday, April 5th, [NOTE:  this event is now SOLD OUT] at the Chicago Architecture Foundation, 224 South Michigan, the Structural Engineers Association of Illinois will offer up How’d They Do That?!, a talk by Ron Klemencic, President of Magnusson Klemencic Associates, whose work includes such modern marvels as the Rem Koolhaas/Joshua Prince-Ramus Seattle Public Library, shown above, and Studio/Gang's Aqua.  Klemencic will "present a fast-paced, visual tour through the structural design of some of the more interesting and challenging structures in the world today. The advances in design and construction technologies, materials, and communication capabilities that make these projects possible will be highlighted." The evening begins with a cocktail reception beginning at 5:30 p.m., followed by the lecture at 6:30 and a QandA at 7:30. It's free, but registration is required. Information here.