Daniel Burnham/Jane Adams/St. Vincent DePaul Grudge Match, Archeworks Open House this week

Okay, so it's not actually tag-team wrestling, as entertaining as that might be, but what promises to be a fascinating panel discussion Daniel Burnham Meets Vincent De Paul and Jane Adams, which DePaul University is sponsoring at the Cliff Dwellers Wednesday evening, July 15th. It's one of two events we've added to the July calendar, the other of which is Archework's Summer Open House, beginning Thursday the 16th at 5:30, which will include a lecture by co-director Martin Felsen. There are more than a dozen great events - from Reinventing Public Investment to Benjamin Marshall: Architect and Bon Vivant, the Jewels in July fundraiser for Architreasures on Wednesday, and much more - this week. Check them all out here.

Felsen and Sarah Dunn are also scheduled to speak at WorldFuture 2009 Innovation and Creatvity in a Complex World, which runs July 17-19 at the Chicago Hilton and brings together deep thinking futurists from across America. A cautionary note about futurism can be found on the organization's home page, where they commemorate the passing of board member and former secretary of defense under JFK Robert S. McNamara, whose career was an object lesson in how the future has a bad habit of careening out of control in ways you never anticipated.

Also, a reminder that this is the last week for Prairie Avenue Bookshop's spectacular Summer Sale, which ends on the Saturday the 18th and offers savings that start at 20% off purchases of $10 to $49, and top out at a full 50% savings past the $100 mark. Not be left out, the shop at the Chicago Architecture Foundation is offering a 15% discount on all regularly priced merchandise through July 31st. And, as always, yummy and affordable ArchitectureChicago PLUS jams and jellies remain on sale in our lobby.

Chicago Streetscene: Constructed Sky

Chicago Streetscene: Voyagers

David Woodhouse wins Burnham Memorial Competition

David Woodhouse Architects has been announced as the winner of the Burnham Memorial Design Competition. More images here. Graphics of all 20 invited entrants and several unsolicited ones here.

Edward Lifson's wedding party, Piano included

As someone who carries their outcast status around with them like a carapace, who has never been married and is unlikely ever to be married, I hate weddings, but, as anyone who follows my blog will attest, I love wedding parties in public places. I get to be the flaneur at one of the key moments of other people's lives. I can leave when I get bored or roughed up. I love the costumes, the flowers, the interplay with architectural tableau's and interiors.

And so, apparently - and, I'm sure, with a much healthier attitude - does critic Edward Lifson, who has put an incredible series of photos up on his blog of a bride and groom at Renzo Piano's new Modern Wing at the Art Institute, at one point providing a compelling comparison between the rushing bride and Gerhard Richter's famous painting, Women Descending the Staircase, which is actually hanging on a wall only steps away from her.

To get the full effect of Lifson's great shots, make sure you click on each one to see them in higher res. To me, the most amazing of the lot is this one, taken in the wing's Pritzker Garden.
It's a painterly composition, the bride posed with her legs extended, bare feet curled, over the lap of a groom who's looking in the opposite direction, almost as if he were unaware (unable to handle?) her relaxed but assertively sensual presence, accented by the cast-off sandals criss-crossed atop each other on the ground to her left. The reflection of Ellsworth Kelly's sculpture White Curve hovers over their heads like a chuppah, and as you pull back, the supposed intimacy is shattered by the presence of two more figures, photographers pairing off with their subjects - male,male to the left, female, female to the right, capturing the ceremonial exhibitionism of the occasion. The male photographer is like the groom - close to the earth, head on; the female photographer on high, gazing down on the couple as if she were God checking out the progress of her creations.

Indeed, the groom seems so detached in most of these shots that you fear for the future of the relationship, until you get to another stunning shot set against a seemingly infinite white wall. Edward sees this as their purity reflected "by the pure white room." I see it as a cautionary tale of how Piano's overwhelming whiteness threatens to overpower everything it comes into contact with.

Again, you have to click on the photograph to view it at a resolution where you can actually see it. I've cropped a bit here for emphasis.
The backstory I see here is that the overwhelming nothingness all around them finally turns the two lovers back in to each other. It's them against the world. The groom is still standing there stiffly, arms folded, legs planted far apart as if he's expecting to be toppled at any moment, but he's smiling, completely softened by the way his bride leans in to him. The geometry is wondrous. The line of her chin extends to the sloping of his left shoulder; the line of the slant of the groom's head extends down the back of the bride's dress. The fullness of her dress provides the secure grounding that the spareness of the triangular perch of his pants legs does not. The richness of her bare arms, the gentle touch of her hand that seems to be going directly to his heart - you get the impression this marriage may turn out OK after all. See all the photo's in Edward's remarkable set here.

Chicago Streetscenes: The Bad and the Beautiful

It's the 6th of the month: Time for the July Calendar!

The pace may be slowing as people are remanded to the countryside for summer, but there are still over three dozen great events on the July calendar. Pecha Kucha goes out on the road for Volume 10, down to Doug Garafolo's Hyde Park Arts Center, where they promise to make use of those spectacular projection screens. (And because it's not at a bar, the event is both free and open to all ages.)

If you missed Dennis McClendon talking about the Plan of Chicago for Friends of Downtown on the 2nd, he'll tackle the subject again for APA Chicago on the 21st. Elsewhere, there's Rachel Crowl and Julie Fisher of fcStudio inc at a CAF lunchtime lecture on the 8th, where Steven Monz talks about Benjamin Marshall on the 15th, David Swan discusses the Fine Arts Building on the 22nd, and Mary Woolever takes on Edward Bennett on the 29th. Also at CAF, there's a big symposium, Reinventing Public Investment, on 14th, Architreasures has there Jewels in July 2009 benefit at Room and Board on 15th, and AIA/Chicago has events with Edward Torrez talking about Howard Van Doren Shaw's Marktown on the 8th, and Peter Janko on the restoration of the stunning Palmer House Grand Ballroom chandeliers on the 9th.

But wait - there's more! (Did I mention kickball) And, no, I'm not putting all the hyperlinks in this post. Check out all the great July events here.

The Last Great Oak Falls - a response from Andrew Patner

Chicago Sun-Times and WFMT critic and commentator Andrew Patner sent me a very thoughtful and thorough response to my post on the passing of Norm Pelligrini, which I want to post here, with his permission, in its entirety. Some of the more obvious mistakes it references have been corrected.

Andrew's comments are quite eloquent. I would make just a few responses (not numbered in the same order as his):
1. Although I can see that my sentence construction could be read in various ways, my reference to the station's full boil being brought down to room temperature was in no way a direct critique of Andrew's commentaries, which are in the great tradition of Claudia Cassidy and Herman Kogan, but to the overall direction of the station.
2. To me, 43, as 86% percent of the total, qualifies as "close to fifty" in a article that is not meant to be a legal brief.
3. I made no reference to Rita Jacob's complaints about the number of ads because I understood fully that they were legally mandated, today just as then. I referred, instead, to her complaints against what she stated was an over-reliance on syndicated programming.
4. Steve Robinson may, in fact, be WFMT's general manager, but that is not his official title, and it is the way the present titles reek of corporate bureaucracy that, to me, symbolizes, WFMT's current status.
5. To say that the cutting of Sunday newscasts had nothing to do with staffing or costs seems bizarre when the result was completely automated Sunday programming where live announcers were no longer anywhere in evidence.
6. I see little comparison between Rita Jacobs seeking contributions from listeners when the station had a basically non-existent budget and zero dollars in the till with an institution with millions in annual revenues and a surplus of upper level Vice Presidents, whom I seriously suspect all pull down very substantial salaries, doing the same. Ray Nordstrand was brilliant in leveraging current possibilities to create a self-supporting organization. In today's admittedly very different times, current management has not. Is it really impossible, or do we just not have the same level of thinking?
7. Two primary things we agree on: firstly, as I wrote in my original post, WFMT remains "a Chicago treasure"; and secondly, the magic - and innovation - created by the Jacobs, Nordstrand and Pelligrini were something that happens once in a lifetime, if that often. As Andrew himself writes, we shall not see its like - or their's - again.

Now, on to Andrew's response:

Dear Lynn,

I think you know of my admiration for you, your writing, your websites, and your tireless advocacy for the city's architectural and cultural legacies as one force or another takes a whack at them. And I absolutely share -- and have expressed at my own site and elsewhere -- the very same general sentiments as you have here about Norm's death and the history and continued importance of WFMT.

But I have to point out a few things in this post that are either incorrect or might benefit from some additional context:

1 -- Norm was program director of WFMT for 43 years, from 1953 to 1996.

2 -- Richard Dyer-Bennet is spelled thus, with one "t." The song of his that closed "The Midnight Special" for many years is "Lonesome Valley," which has no "lonesome river," although "Jordan River" is the subject of one verse.

3 -- I do not think that anyone could find any "unraveling" from the station's earliest days through the attacks some 33 years later by the CETA, now WWCI, board beginning in the mid-1980s and the sale of the magazine in 1986. The earlier sale of the station to WGN Continental Broadcasting in the late 1960s and the subsequent gift/transfer to CETA in 1970 resulted in no management or format changes. (Rita [Jacobs] Willens complains in Bob McClory's 1987 Chicago Reader article that you link to that there were to many "political ads" -- Bob should have pointed out that these were and are mandated by the FCC.) WFMT and WFMT, Inc., parent of the station and Chicago magazine then, functioned separately and without interference from CETA/WTTW. The bureaucrats took over in the mid-1980s, NOT in 1970 or at any earlier date. (My late father, Marshall Patner, worked with Len Despres on the WGN/TribCo purchase issue and I worked full-time at WFMT, Inc./Chicago magazine from 1981 to 1983 and observed the management of the station first-hand. I rejoined WFMT in 1998, at the invitation, as a matter of fact, of then WFMT chief Dan Schmidt, now the head of the whole WWCI/WTTW.)

4 -- Steve Robinson's title has changed several times since he joined the station in 2000, but he is in essence the station's General Manager, functions as such, and frequently refers to himself by that title.

5 -- The cut of Sunday newscasts was not a staff- or cost-cutting move. But I agree that it was and is not a good move either and I hope that the Sunday newscasts will be reinstated.

6 -- Is the current "state" of the station "compromised" or simply a reflection of the reality that if we refuse to take recorded commercials and jingles -- and we should refuse these absolutely, we present only announcer-read advertising copy -- and if we do not have the income that we once had from the magazine, then we have to come to the listeners for assistance, just as Rita Jacobs did in 1952. "Endless" pledge drives? We come to the listeners just three times a year and have eliminated evenings, nights, and Sundays from those three membership drives.

7 -- Thanks for the shout-out and link (which brings up my own initial tribute to Norm, with a great photo of Norm and Ray Nordstrand at the station in the early 1960s). If you found the commentary that you heard this afternoon on my "Critic's Choice" feature "veering towards the tepid" there's no one to blame but me. I was under some bad congestion and allergies on Tuesday when I tape it. No one dials my "creative boil" up or down but me. In fact, for the 11-and-a-half years that I have been doing these commentaries no one at the station has ever told me what I could or could not say or talk about or how I might talk about my topics. Nor has anyone ever heard, let alone edited, my commentaries before they are broadcast. The only change in the last few years perhaps did effect the level of "boil" for the better: Program Director Peter Whorf and Steve Robinson asked me to deliver these little talks without a script and ad lib as Peter and Steve thought that that would make them livelier and have more edge and that's how I do them now.

8 -- No, Steve is not Norm. And certainly I am not Studs Terkel or Claudia Cassidy or Harry Bouras. And no one is Jim Unrath. We won't see the likes of those folks again. But we are people who are trying to do our best and to live up to the history and principles of Norm Pellegrini. I hope that listeners such as you will continue to hold us to those standards and I hope that you might also recognize what we get right and when we do so.

Thanks!

Andrew Patner, Critic-at-Large, 98.7WFMT Radio and wfmt.com

viewfromhere.typepad.com

The Last Great Oak Falls - Norm Pellegrini is dead

I feared something was up when I started to see a number of hits to my website that came off of Google searches for Norm Pellegrini, and late last week, the fears were confirmed: Norman Pellegrini, program director for Chicago fine arts station WFMT for nearly fifty years, died on Thursday at the age of 79. For years, I would see him taking his lunch at, of all places, the food court atop Chicago Place. He was legendary for his outbursts of temper at FMT, but when I dedicated a contribution I made to a Lyric Operathon in his honor, I received not long thereafter a handwritten note from him thanking me.

He was the last survivor of a group of often contentious individuals, all now gone - Bernard and Rita Jacobs, Ray Nordstrand, Studs Terkel - who created one of the golden eras in Chicago's cultural history: a radio station that reinvented the very idea of classical music broadcasting into something that adhered both to the highest standards and most democratic impulses. No, I didn't go to college. I almost felt that I didn't have to. WFMT was my higher education, my introduction to the world of classical music and opera, Beethoven and Mahler and Verdi, and, through a special series, contemporary composers, as well. It's through FMT that I first encountered Job and Godot, and through Studs, people like journalist James Cameron and the voices of Hiroshima's survivors, through the Midnight Special, the great American musicals, Steve Goodman, and that the unearthly falsetto, as chill as death, of Richard Dyer-Bennet, taking us across that lonesome valley, a new baptism at the close of each week.

What went out over the air sounded seamless and perfect but, as chronicled by the Chicago Reader's Robert McClory all the way back in 1987, what went on beneath was apparently not entirely unlike Italy under the Borgias. Everyone had their own ideas of what made the station great and how to keep it that way. Rita Jacobs despised those taped transcript ions of performances of the Big Five orchestras and San Francisco Opera that I loved, that brought such soul-changing events as Tennstedt's first Beethoven with the Boston Symphony, and Giulini's Mahler 9th with the Philadelphia.

It all had started to unravel even before I became a listener. Ill health forced sale of the station, and a citizens group that included Nobel-prize winning author Saul Bellow, who I always remember poking fun at an FMT announcer's pronunciation of the word fondue in one his novels (Humboldt's Gift?), scuttled the station's purchase by WGN. Instead, the station was turned over to WTTW, where it's been in the hands of bureaucrats ever since. The management structure there, shared with WTTW, lists no fewer than eight Vice-Presidents - they threaten to eventually out-number the ranks of on-air talent. The titles, themselves, are masterpieces of obfuscation. Not one identifies anyone as general manager for either FMT or TTW. Steve Robinson, who used to have the title of WFMT General Manager, is now EVP for "Radio & Project Development". For TTW, there's a "SVP and Chief Television Content Officer." It's hard to imagine any place on such a roster for what was, for decades, Stud's official title: "Free Spirit."

The worst fear of the 1980's - that the station would be sold - has yet to come to pass, but many others have: - the sale of Chicago magazine without creating an endowment, a risible staff-cutting announcement of ending Sunday newscasts positioned as a gift of providing an untroubled Sabbath to listeners, followed by putting the day on autopilot, leading to one Sunday where an entire hour of programming was lost without anyone in management seeming to notice.

To be sure, even its compromised state, combining the worst of commercial radio (commercials) with that of public radio (endless pledge drives), WFMT remains a Chicago treasure - I've just heard Howard Shore's The Fly from the L.A. Opera, I'm listening to Andrew Patner as I write this - but brought down from a creative boil to room temperature, veering towards the tepid. There seems to be a lot more talking down, a lot more of the idea that everything has to explained to listeners.

Although I see him regularly at various events, I've never met Steve Robinson. He seems a very nice man, and I have no doubt he is very dedicated, but when I look into his eyes I don't see the fire I could see in Norm's even in a brief encounter at the food court when I told him how much I enjoyed still being able to hear his voice, that inimitable voice - warm, assured but approachable, inquisitive, and, always, almost breathless with enthusiasm - on the Lyric Opera broadcasts. Even now, it still hangs in the air. I strain my ears to catch every last trace. I don't want to let him go.

Last Two Days for great Edge of Intent - don't miss it.

In the time-honored Lynn Becker tradition of reminding you of something special just seconds before it's gone, one of best Burnham related events I've encountered is a superb exhibition at the Columbia College Museum of Contemporary Photography, Edge of Intent, which you have only two more days to see - today, Friday, the 3rd and Sunday the 5th (the Museum is closed on the 4th.)

On one level, the exhibition is completely tangential to the Burnham centennial celebration, with few overt references to the man and his celebrated 1909 plan, but at a deeper level, it's one of the most direct engagements, exploring the dynamics of urbanism in utopian/distopian viewpoints of often stunning visual power.
Andrew Harrison takes a roadmap of his native New Jersey and reconstitutes it within the contours of plans of perfect cities, from Burnham, to Atlantis, El Dorado, The Radiant City and the Plan for Brasilia, exploring the imposition of an abstracted, idealized order upon a terrain that has already been abstracted through mapping.
Simon Menner presents a series of high-res photographs depicting the homeless in very individual conditions from Mumbai to Paris to Chicago, where a shot of the homeless sleeping in a small park near where the Congress Expressway crosses the river appears almost cliche until you notice that they share the park with a family of nocturnal rabbits.
The photos of Tim Long begin almost like a travelogue on kayaking the Chicago river, but as it evolves you see you're on an eloquent journey, all the way to the Mississippi, that tracks the various landscapes of urbanism from the sleek towers of downtown, the raw industrial outskirts, the trashed outlying districts and the slow depacing as density dematerializes pre-despoiled landscape.
Perhaps the most cautionary and disturbing echo of the great expectations Burnham and his plan engendered can be found in a stunning series of photographs by Eric Smith of the abandoned Michigan Central Train Station, designed by the same architects - and the despairing doppelganger - of New York's Grand Central, a hallucinatory ruin of eviscerated grandeur and decimated ambition.

There's not a clunker in the bunch of the ten artists exhibiting - it's the best Burnham-related show I've seen so far. You can see descriptions of photo's of each artist's contribution here. The museum is free, and it's open today, Friday from 10 a.m., and 5 p.m, and Sunday from noon to 5 p.m. Conveniently located at 600 South Michigan and just on your way to Taste of Chicago and the fireworks. Try to carve out a half-hour or so of your holiday to check out this extraordinary show - you won't regret it.

Uncle Dan Wants YOU! A Burnham 4th - new edition of 1909 Plan, celebration at History Museum

July 4th, the day the Adams died (Jefferson, too), is not only the 233rd anniversary of our nation's birth, it's the day that Daniel Burnham and Edward Bennett officially unveiled their 1909 Plan of Chicago. As part of an enormous range of events the Burnham Plan Centennial Committee has co-ordinated to celebrate and contemplate the plan, at 1:00 p.m., the Chicago History Museum will be including a "Daniel Burnham historical re-enactor", Living History Theatre’s R. J. Lindsey, presenting a slide show titled, inevitably, Daniel Burnham: Make no Little Plans, in the History Museum's Rubloff Auditorium. It's free, and part of the museum's 50th 4th celebration, which takes place from 10:00 a.m. to noon on Uihlein Plaza behind the museum at 1601 N. Clark. At 11:00, there will be a "keynote oration will feature members of the Burnham and Bennett families in honor of the 1909 Plan of Chicago." Muskets will be fired, declarations will be read, faces will be painted, and at 10:45 a.m. children's costume parade promises "the world’s tallest Uncle Sam".

The Museum's celebration will also mark the presentation of the Great Books Foundation just-issued new edition of the Plan, available in paperback for $39.95, with an introduction by Carl Smith, author of The Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of the American City, and what is promised to be better quality illustrations than those found in the hardcover reprint of the Plan issued by Princeton Architectural Press, which has its own excellent introduction, by Burnham scholar Kristen Schaffer, and carries a list price of $85.00. A a paperback edition on Amazon is listed for $38.90 on up. Great Books is also publishing their version of the Plan in a "special hardcover collector's edition", complete with a hair from Burnham's moustache (or perhaps not) for $125.00. Both editions are available for purchase directly from the foundation, and at various venues, including the museum store, throughout Chicago.

Another new book is The Plan of Chicago @ 100, published by the Ely Chapter of Lamba Alpha International, made up of scholars and activists in the land economics field. You can see the list of topics and authors, which includes people such as Lawrence Okrent, Joseph P Schwietmann, and John Norquist, below. The book is also available at the Chicago History Museum, or directly from the publishers for $19.95 plus shipping and handling, here.

Chicago Streetscene: The Phantom of the Opera Tower

The 45-story Steuben Club Building, 188 West Randolph, 1929, Vitzhum & Burns, whose work also includes One North LaSalle, St. Peters on Madison, and Painters District Council 14 on Adams.

Not Pritzker perfect, but a new South Loop park a welcome addition to State Street

This is what it looked like in 2006, a flat, usually deserted expanse of fenced-in lawn:
This is what it looked like just this past February:
Now Pritzker Park, at State and Van Buren, is finally open, shorn of its unwelcoming fencing. The trees and the plantings still look a little sparse, but with time they should fill in. Last Saturday, there was only one other person taking respite in the quarter-block space, but with DePaul just across the street, you'd like to think it will become more popular, especially once all its amenities are in place.
The concrete edgings for the planted spaces are inscribed with quotations from a large and eclectic group of writers which ranges from Richard Wright, to Carl Sandburg, Walt Whitman, and that jolly Nazi philosopher and prince of polka Martin Heidegger. Poor Walt - his words are partially obscured by a garbage receptacle, but he still fares better than Indira Gandhi, whose name is covered over with black tape, as is that of Sandra Cisneros, whose name was misspelled "cisenos."
Right across from the library, and no one could find a proofreader?

"You can never have too much sky," is the Cisneros quotation. The park's planners have apparently came to a parallel conclusion that you can never have too much flat concrete. Although the northern half of the park is generously landscaped, the southern half is disturbingly barren. All the tall trees that lined Van Buren were uprooted and removed. Reports are that a large chunk of the expanse is to be turned over Chicago's bus shelter king JCDecaux for concessions and a cafe to be designed by New York's Robert A.M. Stern Architects. Let's hope Stern comes up with something more graceful than his stubby-limbed bus shelters strewn throughout Chicago's streets. "Removable seating" is also promised, on the website of park designers HoerrSchaudt landscape architects.
Even in its current schizoid, unfinished state, however, the new Pritzker offers a welcome change from a site that suffered from not-so-benign neglect until the city transferred ownership to the Park District in 2008. The old fencing and abutments basically negated the value of the openness by shearing it off from the surrounding streetscape. Now, movement flows unimpeded, and both Thomas Beeby's Harold Washington Library and the re-emerging beauty of Holabird & Roche's 1894 Old Colony Building get a welcome frame of space and perspective.

Even more importantly, Diane Legge Kemp's brawny Library Loop L station, which previously seemed uncomfortably shoehorned between the library and the fencing, now has room to breath, and the station and its rustic arcade offers a graceful hem-like transition from the park to the library's massive facade.

Trash Buckingham Fountain: Just Eight Bits a Day!

Chicago just spent a lot of money completely upgrading the surface paving all around Buckingham Fountain. A lot more will be spent after the fountain shuts down this fall to restore it to its original 1927 splendor. Reported cost: $25,000,000.

But for a mere dollar a day, you can turn all that work and beauty into a mere backdrop for your promotional appetites.
In a city where services continue to contract even as taxes and fees skyrocket and the mayor hordes billions into his slush fund TIF's to finance his beloved Olympics, the recycling bins you see here are being marketed as a solution for a city grown incompetent to provide adequate receptacles in its public places. Just throw up your hands and toss the problem over to an entrepreneur who provides the containers - free! - in exchange for getting carte blanche - if the situation at the fountain is any example - to paste advertising messages all over city landmarks. Couldn't we just persuade the mayor to get GoldenPalace.com tattooed on his forehead and be done with it?

Manny Renzo Leg and Wing

for non-Chicagoans: the item annotated and explicated.

On the Uptown Theater's Past - and Future, plus Under the Buckingham

"The best theater in Chicago that you can't see" is how one speaker describes the Uptown Theater in the documentary Portrait of a Palace, to be screened at a lunchtime lecture at the Chicago Architecture Foundation next Wednesday, July 1st. The 4,000+ seat Uptown, opened in 1925 at a reported cost of $4,000,000, was one of the city's very grandest movie palaces for over 50 years, but it's now been shuttered and rotting for almost 30, despite fervent efforts of activists to save it. Last July, finally, it was acquired by concert promoter Jam Productions.

On Wednesday, Friends of the Uptown's Andy Pierce will pair up with Jam founder Jerry Mickelson to show the 26 minute documentary, and after it will discuss "discuss the theater’s history and its planned renovation." The free presentation is Wednesday, July 1st, 12:15 p.m., at the Chicago Architecture Foundation, 224 South Michigan.



Under the Buckingham - today, Friday, June 26th, is the first of what is being touted as Fountain Fridays, half-hour tours of the operational underpinnings, including its underground pumping works, of Chicago's iconic Buckingham Fountain, which will be offered every Friday from July 10 through September 4, when the fountain will be closed for the first complete restoration since it's 1927 opening. The $50.00 cost of the tour ($30.00 for this Friday's preview) supports the Buckingham Fountain Restoration Project, which is funding essential repairs that range from plugging the leaks in the lower basim slab, securing crumbling Georgia marble, and replacing the corroded screws that keep the bronze seahorses from swimming off to New Zealand.

Make reservations via the Parkways Foundation at 312/742/5368 or at RSVP@parkways.org.

David Woodhouse makes a building disappear at DuSable Harbor

It's Where's Waldo, the architecture edition. Can you spot where the building is here? David Woodhouse Architects tames congestion and clutter at DuSable Harbor with a graceful unmatched set of the contemporary and the pastoral. Read all about it and see the pictures here.

Rare Showing: Lola Montès : Gene Siskel Film Center, Wednesday and Thursday

When we wrote about a rare showing of Max Orphuls' Lola Montes last year, we didn't think this intimate and epic - and painstakingly restored - 1955 film would be back so soon, but you have three more chances to see it, at the Gene Siskel Film Center, 6:00 and 8:15 p.m., today, Wednesday, June 24th and 6:00 p.m. Thursday the 25th. It's on your way home from work; don't miss it. Courtesans and circuses, irresistible beauties, Bavarian kings, revolution and Franz Liszt - my take on this amazing, visually ravishing film - and the dramatic story behind it - here.
You can see another Orphuls masterpiece, The Earrings of Madame de . . , with Charles Boyer, Danielle Darrieux and Vittorio De Sica, Saturday, the 27th, at 3:00 p.m. and Thursday, July 2nd, at 6:00 p.m.

A film I haven't seen, but that is being called "a mesmerizing and eloquent essay" is Of Time and the City, from director Terence Davies, whose haunting, unforgettable The Long Day Closes knocked me on my ass in 1992. Of Time and the City is a return to the Liverpool of Closes and Davies' youth, "a love song and a eulogy" and his first documentary. "I wanted to cut it as if it were fiction," says Davies in an interview which you can view here. The film is also in its last two days at the Siskel, 8:15 p.m. on Wednesday, 6:15 on Thursday.


The Gene Siskel Film Center is at 164 North State, 312/846.2600.

Great Advances in Elevator Design: Hell to Heaven in just 20 floors

Imagine leaving your swanky hotel room, entering the elevator and descending into hell. No, we're not talking about the trip down to the mall level at Illinois Center. It's actually an incredible installation, Civilization, created by video artist Marco Brambilla, working with Toronto's Studio Crush, that can be seen on an HD display through a viewing port in the elevators of André Balazs' swanky new hotel, The Standard New York, designed by Polshek Partnership Architects for a meatpacking district site straddling the newly opened High Line, from which views of guests having sex in the hotel's windows has apparently become a major competing attraction.

The 1920 x 7500 pixel video is composed of 500 clips from 400 sources - from stock, film (no doubt you'll recognize many of them) and original content - combined to form a spectacular tableau of six main sections: hell, lower purgatory, middle purgatory, upper purgatory, heaven and upper heave/lower hell. Yes, the damn thing loops, so you're constantly moving from the highest point of heaven, only to plunge right back to the depths of hell. Kind of like my average Friday night.
Brambilla and Crush Senior Artist Sean Cochrane discuss the project here.

View the entire video, and see photos of how it's mounted in the elevators, here.

A Park for People? No way. A Park for an Office Building? Here's $7 million

The irony is irresistible. Although a 2007 presentation by John Buck development head Greg Merdinger claimed they had offered the parcel on two separate occasions, the city refused to raise a finger to acquire the beautiful park adjacent to Kenzo Tange's AMA Building on State Street that Buck had spent millions to maintain over a decade and a half, despite the fact that it was the only real park space in the eastern half of River North, where residential population has exploded over the last decade with a building boom in condo, rental and hotel towers. Buck, whose original plan was always to have a companion structure next to the AMA, finally had enough. The park was destroyed, and a skyscraper hotel is now nearing completion on the site.

Now, however, the city is spending $7 million in TIF money to demolish three buildings and create a new 9,600 square foot park at Franklin and Randolph specifically to support John Buck's latest office tower right next door, with Buck kicking in the balance of the estimated $20 million price tag.

One can certainly understand why Buck would prefer to have something other than this . . .
at the end of the grand arcade of the Goettsch Partners designed, sleek new, 46 story 155 North Wacker.
So now the end structure on Franklin is undergoing demolition, the tiny 1870's Showmen's League Building,
which always seemed almost custom scaled for the diminutive Harry Heftman, who had been serving up hot dogs and snacks there since 1954. Heftman celebrated his 100th birthday in March, and Mayor Daley stopped by for a final hot dog and to extend his congratulations to the man whose business he was taking away in April.

The elephants that once graced the tympanums above the windows . . .
. . . have all been removed . . .
. . . and a century of history is being reduced to rubble. Harry, himself, has moved on to another gig, working for someone else for the first time in over sixty years.
In a recent newsletter, 42nd ward alderman Brendan Reilly published the site plan for the new green space, generically labeled the "Randolph Pocket Park," which will no doubt also benefit those residents of the handful of new developments in what remains an office-dominated district. If there's any justice in the world, it will quickly be renamed Harry Heftman Park. Maybe he'll even stop by for the dedication, with the mayor serving up hot dogs for everybody.