You have only through Sunday to see weird, wacky, very fun, but far from frivolous The Plastic Bag Store at the Wrigley Building. The "anchor attraction" of this year's Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival, The store is stocked entirely with very real looking fruit, vegetables, fish and pastries, and packaged goods for parody brands - all made of washed and repurposed plastic bags and trash.
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Friday, January 28, 2022
It's Delicious! It's Colorful! It's Fun! It's Plastic! Only through Sunday, The Plastic Bag Store comes to the Wrigley Building.
You have only through Sunday to see weird, wacky, very fun, but far from frivolous The Plastic Bag Store at the Wrigley Building. The "anchor attraction" of this year's Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival, The store is stocked entirely with very real looking fruit, vegetables, fish and pastries, and packaged goods for parody brands - all made of washed and repurposed plastic bags and trash.
Thursday, June 17, 2021
The Nine Lives of St. Boniface - Historic Church Architecture at the Crossroads
Saturday, June 12th, developer Zev Salomon gave the Noble Square neighborhood a last chance to view the ruined interior of St. Boniface before it's gutted to create The Boniface, 18 condo units within the church's structure.
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Image courtesy Alex Fries, Pipe Organ Database, https://pipeorgandatabase.org/organ/50501 |
In 1990, St. Boniface was among the 28 parishes closed by the Archdiocese of Chicago. The windows were boarded up, the 1908 Hann-Wangerin-Weickhardt organ removed.
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Image courtesy Alex Fries, Pipe Organ Database, https://pipeorgandatabase.org/organ/50501 |
The history of the next 30+ years was a roller-coaster leading nowhere, extensively documented on the Saint Boniface Info website here. The building was under the jurisdiction of two successive aldermen. It was listed as a "Most Endangered" structure by both Landmarks Illinois (1999) and Preservation Chicago (2003 and 2009), who teamed up with community groups in ongoing efforts to save the building.
In 1999, the Archdiocese announced plans to demolish the church. 250 people showed up in the rain at a "Stop the Demolition" rally, organized by The Coalition to Save Saint Boniface. A hold was put on demolition. An ordinance for the city to buy St. Boniface goes nowhere. In 2002, the Archdiocese announces its attention to sell the property. They demolished the parish school and put the facade into storage.
In 2003, The Archdiocese holds a design competition with submissions from such prominent Chicago firms as Booth Hansen, A. Epstein, Brininstool+Lynch, and Studio/Gang, whose concept coupled new residential towers on the side of the now demolished school with saving the actual church space as a meetings and event space.
At a 2005 reunion mass and dance, an Archdiocese representative declared none of the competition's entries were viable, no money would be spent on St. Boniface, and community organizers could have it if they'd just cut a check for $3,000,000.
Later in 2005, Smithfield Properties unveils a plan that would involve building a high-rise on the school site. Representatives of the Coptic Church reveal interest in the property. They are allowed to tour St. Boniface, but two years later in 2007, after being unsuccessful in communicating with the Archdiocese, a letter is sent to Cardinal George asking for action on the Coptic Orthodox Church's proposal. It is responded to with a pre-printed form.
A year later, in December of 2008, the Archdiocese rejects the Coptic Orthodox Church's proposal, and applies for a permit to demolish the church. As St. Boniface is listed "Orange" in the city's Historic Resources Survey of potential landmark buildings, a 90-day hold is put on the demolition request. At the end of that period, a demolition permit is issued, but the city continues to negotiate.
In 2010, a deal is reached where Institutional Project Management will build senior housing within the facades of the church. Storage of elements of the demolished school's facade are now warehoused by IPM, but will not be used
Four years later, in 2014, after developers are unable to obtain tax credits from the state and city, the senior living proposal is declared dead. The following year, Carefree Development announces a plan to build 56 one and two bedroom rentals within St. Boniface's facades. Another request for a demolition permit is made, and put on automatic 90-day hold, which is extended by the city.
In 2016, the developer announces a 10 story tower to be built on the site of St. Boniface. In April, the hold on the demolition permit is continued as the Chicago Academy of Music presents a plan to use St. Boniface as a music school and performance center. In October, the Academy enters a deal with Stas Development to purchase St. Boniface. It includes landmarking the church and converting it to 15 condominiums. The proposal is approved by The Chicago Plan Commission in April of 2018.
For the balance of 2018, and 2019, and 2020, mostly the sound of crickets.
Last April, it was announced that Zev Salomon's ZSD Development had bought St. Boniface. On June 12th, they opened the church to let neighborhood residents in to get a last look at the interior, cleaned up of the debris and much of the graffiti that had accumulated down through the decades. (There was also free ice cream, very welcome on a very hot day.) Representatives were on hand and renderings and floorplans on display for potential buyers of the condos of The Boniface, which will range from $750k to $1.5 million. The open tops of the bell towers will become private terraces for the pricier units. Reps said 3 units had already been sold.
Construction starts this week
It's no small miracle that St. Boniface survived these three, troubled and contentious decades to finally be saved, if not as a community and spiritual resource, then at least as an outstanding architectural marker of its time and place.
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Corpus Christi Church, 4900 South King Drive, Joseph W. McCarthy, architect, 1916 |
As church attendance and the number of priests continue to decline, consolidations, abandonment and demolitions continue. In January, the Archdiocese announced a new round of closures, including St. Alselm, St. Ambrose and the spectacular Corpus Christi (shown above), whose last mass will be later this month. Whether Chicago will ever find a viable solution or continue to allow our architectural heritage of historic churches to simply vanish remains an unanswered question, but that's a story for another time.
For now, here's some links, and more last images of St. Boniface's interior before it disappears.
August 29, 2003: Sins of Demolition, The St. Boniface Architectural Competition
September 14, 2008: Archdiocese puts St. Boniface Out for Bid
January 21, 2009: Archdiocese to St. Boniface: Die! Die! Die!
April 11, 2010: St. Boniface: Saved?
January 7, 2013: Heavens to Purgatory: Imploding Churches Flatten Chicago
St. Boniface, Our Lady of urban photography explorers, photographs of Brian Bobek
Behind the Scenes of St. Boniface Church Photoshoot, Matt Wilhelm
Saint Boniface Church, Eric Holubow: urban exploration photographer
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Photograph courtesy Brian Bobek, https://thechicagoambassador.wordpress.com/2014/10/21/st-boniface-our-lady-of-urban-photography-explorers/ |
Sunday, September 23, 2018
Bobbing for Mies - Robert Venturi at IIT
In the fall of 2005, Pritzker Prize-winning architect Robert Venturi came to modernist shrine Crown Hall to out Mies van der Rohe as a closet symbolist and attempt to define the architecture of our time. (Originally published in abbreviated and far better edited form under the title, Live by the I Beam, Die by the I Beam in the December 16th Chicago Reader.)
“There will be nothing new in what I say, but maybe it will have a new twist” Robert Venturi, speaking at Crown HallRobert Venturi, the architect who launched the post-modernisn assault on Miesian glass-box
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Lest anyone think the 80-year-old enfant-terrible was growing soft, however, Venturi's major thesis was to unmask Mies, known for minimalist structures free of the type of applied ornament that Louis Sullivan loved, as a bit of a hypocrite, not above choosing symbolism over substance when it came to creating an architecture that expressed the industrial age of his time. “Ultimate irony,” observed Venturi, “Mies, like other modernists, enjoyed abstraction as an aesthetic, yet also employed symbolism as an aesthetic.”
For Mies, that meant keeping structure visible and exposed, but Chicago's strict building code requires that the steel frame of multi-storied buildings be fireproofed within a concrete casing. When you look at a classic Mies skyscraper like the IBM Building at Wabash and the River, the exterior may appear to be structure, but the structural steel is actually buried in concrete fireproofing, and what you're actually seeing are the anodized aluminum plates covering that concrete.
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IBM Building, now 330 North Wabash |
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Crown Hall, IIT |
Venturi put up a slide with his comparison of “Mies” and “Bob”.
Mies Midcentury
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Bob Post Mid-Century
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Classic |
Eclectic
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Symbolic (industrial) | Symbolic (iconographic) |
Not acknowledged | Acknowledged |
Minimalism | Complexity and Contradiction |
Not aesthetically expressed | Aesthetically expressed |
Aesthetic cover-up | Aesthetic celebration |
not mannerist | mannerist |
Less is more | less is a bore |
To Venturi, simplicity is an iron maiden; mannerism a sign of life. The fact he finds Mies a closet symbolist is, to Venturi, a good thing, but the fact that Mies wouldn't acknowledge it himself disqualifies him form the mannerist pantheon.
“I think that the job of the architect is to create shelter,” said Venturi, “and to give a space a
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“There's been a book [The Place of Narrative: Mural Decoration in Italian Churches] out recently by a great art historian - Marilyn Lavin . The thesis is that we look at Italian Renaissance and the Baroque era murals , we look upon them as art. They are only incidentally art, according to her thesis. They were essentially there for the message given. The content was important. They taught you about Christianity and they did it in such an artful way that they are art. But they were incidentally art. They were essentially done as signs.”
“The idea of using symbolism and signage is a constant one in the history of architecture. The Gothic church, the façade at Amiens or Rouen, it is a three-dimensional billboard. The Sphinx in ancient Egypt had a great meaning independent of art. At the time, most of people couldn't read.”
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Franklin Court ghost structure, Robert Venturi, William Rauch and Denise Scott Brown National Parks Service photo |
Venturi essentially sees mid 20th-century modernism as an aberration in architecture's long history. “We're no longer in the industrial age,” he says. “We're in the information age. We're also in the electronic age, . . . and to make architecture look like industrial buildings and to make architecture be abstract is no longer appropriate. The architecture that's being built today is this awful historical revival, the neo-modern modern revival. They're being just as historical in their revival as they would be if they were reviving Renaissance architecture or Gothic architecture.”
Venturi looks to the restoration of symbolism for today's electronic age. ““How about,” he suggests, “electronic pixels as applied ornament rather than the industrial rivets as applied
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What Venturi describes as the information age that I've written about as exemplified by Frank Gehry in a possible new era that could be called the Techno-Baroque, where content is king. In the 1920's, the great German critic Walter Benjamin wrote of German literature that, “'Baroque' is the only fitting way to describe the heaped-up crassness of its subject matter . . . the predominance of content.” Content over form.
The age of content raises as many challenges for architects as it does for a Newscorp or Viacom struggling to fill an almost countless array of cable, internet and new media channels. Venturi's Shanghai towers, which appeared in the renderings he presented at the lecture to transmit nothing more than light, may already be retro. Perhaps the best expression of the content aesthetic can be found in an updated perennial, New York's Time Square, where high-tech signage is an integral part of the architecture, in the form of ever-larger “reader boards” that include everything from a massive electronic stock ticker on the Morgan Stanley Building, and nine bands of electronic color above ABC's street-level studios carrying both text and video.
For an architect, the issue of obsolescent content has the potential to age a building far
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Venturi and Scott Brown have created some the past century's most essential texts in understanding the architecture of their time. His IIT lecture indicates that he's a point where he's gotten out the revelation business, and more into an autumnal refinement of his basic concepts.
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© Copyright 2005 Lynn Becker All rights reserved.
Monday, July 09, 2018
Six Bad Arguments for the Exploding Costs of CTA Stations
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CTA Damen Green Line Station, Perkins and Will |
"Even if the stations could be built more economically, it doesn’t matter because infrastructure is expensive." Tell that to those on the short end of the giant TIF con, in which phony-baloney TIF's carved out of affluent areas generate – and retain - billions of dollars to make them even denser concentrations of wealth, while TIF’s in capital-starved neighborhood generate crumbs far insufficient to their needs. Well-managed cities have capital plans. Irredeemably corrupt ones have TIF's.
“Added cost = good design” Really? Reasonable (and often unreasonable) constraints are the mother’s milk of creative architecture.
"It’s still cheaper than New York City’s new subway stations. Yes, but then so is just about everything short of the Burj Kalifa.
“We deserve it.” A perfect expression of the kind of civic balkanization the TIF system encourages.
"Other things - Jane Byrne interchange, O'Hare expansion, etc. - cost so much more!" So if we can't come to our senses, let's repeat the mistake as often as possible at slightly smaller scale.
"We need this - the CTA tends to be so shabby." Shabby indeed, but . . .
a. A station on a tighter budget does NOT have to be shabby. That's the talent good architects bring to the equation.
State and Lake, Loop L
b. If we overspent less on the pork barrel stations, we’d have more for basic maintenance. While Red Line-Wilson got over $200 million, the Sheridan station – which boards slightly more passengers – has been allowed to be a decrepit mess for decades, just as for decades State and Lake has been a civic disgrace of peeling paint, creaking floorboards, curated pigeon droppings and general slummery even as $75,000,000 was found to build a new Washington and Wabash station to support about the same number of boardings. The fact that rehabs for those stations only now have been announced doesn't make up for decades of willful neglect.
We think of ourselves as rational, progressive people, but at heart, we’re kittens distracted by a piece of string, the latest pretty bauble that bewitches and clouds our intellects. It's big! It's shiny! It’s expensive! Ergo, it must be good; it must be swallowed without a second thought. Except, there is no good architecture without fitness to purpose.
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Cermak, Green Line |
The new Cermak Green Line station is visually spectacular, and the poster child for construction overkill. Costing $50,000,000, it was to be the new gateway to McCormick Place and an emerging Motor Row, but so far it remains lightly used, generating less than a half million boardings a year. Multiply that by 50, for a projected 50 years until the next necessary major rehab, and it still comes out to $2.10 – more than the CTA’s basic fare – each time a passenger enters.
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Original Fullerton Red/Brown Line station |
To be sure, those original stations had drawbacks - not the least of which access for the physically challenged - that newer stations - all newer stations - must and should address. Elevators, wide platforms, longer platforms to accommodate longer trains, are among functional improvements that are a welcome addition to all new and rehab construction. Unwarranted, relentless monumentality, perhaps not.
We need a forensic breakdown on the costs of these mega-stations. How much for the basics - structural support, platforms, stairways and elevators - and how much for all the bling?
If we're going to spend money on gateways, structures that define and help develop their communities, why would we be putting the big bucks into those that people spend only seconds rushing in and out of, and most of their time on the platform immersed in their smartphones waiting for the train to arrive? Wouldn't it be better to spend more of that money on signature public spaces where people are actually encouraged to linger, enjoy and interact with the neighborhood around them?
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Morgan Street, Green Line |
As a lover of architecture, I delight in the design of Morgan, Cermak and Washington (Wilson, not so much). They're among the few bright spots in a city where the mediocrity of more and more new construction threatens to make a cruel joke of our reputation as a city where architecture matters. As a citizen of Chicago, however, I can’t walk by without smelling the reek of pork - fat contracts for the connected, even as greater needs are left to starve.
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We've gone from $38,000,000 for Morgan Street, to $50,000,000 for Cermak to $60,000,000 for Damen, a 58% inflation in just 8 years. |
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Wilson Station, Red Line |
We’re in thrall to a binary system. Dazzling displays of spending to give the beaming politicians ribbons to cut, or chronic neglect of facilities used by millions more but lacking in press opportunities. Shabby and/or derelict, or blingful and extravagant. There has to be a middle way.
Less is more. Ever hear of it?