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 Hall

Robert Venturi, the architect who launched the post-modernisn assault on Miesian glass-box

modernism by countering Mies van der Rohe's famous dictum, “Less is More” with his own “Less is a Bore,” was at IIT's restored Mies masterpiece Crown Hall last month to talk about “Mies is More: Learning from Mies,” part of the 2005 Chicago Humanities Festival. 

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. 

IBM Building, now 330 North Wabash

To call Mies's bluff on another affection - the vertical steel I-beams that he loved to use as mullions between the continuous strips of windows on his buildings - Venturi quoted Tom Wolfe's diatribe against modern architecture, From Bauhaus to Our House. “Sticking things on the outside of walls,” Wolfe wrote, “wasn't that exactly what was known in another era as applied decoration?” 

Crown Hall, IIT

Ironically, the building in which Venturi made these observations is the one place where Mies was able to express his aesthetic without subterfuge. Crown Hall, because it's a one story building, didn't have to be fireproofed. The steel you see is not what Venturi calls an “appliqué”, but the actual structure. It was sandblasted down to the bare steel during this summer's restoration, and painted a revelatory deep and glossy black that observers who were there for the 1956 opening say replicates the building's original appearance. 

Venturi put up a slide with his comparison of “Mies” and “Bob”.

Mies Midcentury	Bob Post Mid-Century
Classic	Eclectic
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

kind of symbol.” He spoke of some of themes of Venturi and Scott Brown's latest book, Architecture as Signs and Systems : For a Mannerist Time. “All architecture of the past,” he observed, “had symbolism and signage except for this 20th century past. The hieroglyphics all over the architecture of ancient Egypt . . . the buildings were signs as well. You read the hieroglyphics. The architecture in the pediments of Greek and Roman temples had statue figures in them . . . essentially explaining to you about the Gods that who were being honored and worshipped. The early Christian architecture . . . the basilicas, and the same with the Byzantine architecture had all the mosaics - all of that was signage explaining what it was.” 

“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.” 

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

ornament that are fashionable today?” At least some of the architects he would seem to fall place his modernist revival category, however, appear to be way ahead of him. For his elegant new Deutsche Post tower in Bonn, Helmut Jahn collaborated with lighting artist Yann Kersale to create a changing color sequence of red blue and yellow that plays across over 55,000 square meters from dusk to sunrise and accentuates its dual-skin design. It doesn't really seem all that far from a project for a pair of skyscrapers in Shanghai, designed by Venturi in collaboration with his life and work partner Denise Scott Brown, which look rather Miesian except for the strips of red LED's forming a grid overlaying much of the façade. 

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

faster than any physical decay. How long until visitors to Millennium Park's Crown Fountain began to get bored with the same 1,000 faces projected digitally on the fountain's two towers? In the future, will a building be viable only so long as it has access to fresh content for its digital displays? Taken to its logical extreme, facades of traditional glass, steel or stone may become obsolete - all materials will come to incorporate light-emitting elements. “Modernizing” a building will no longer mean changing its physical structure. By simply changing the feed to the digital boards, a building's appearance will be completely transformed. The fact that this will be no easy feat is reflected by Venturi/Scott Brown's own website. It's an engaging- and award-winning -construct of distinctive typography, whimsical symbols and day-glo colors, but its projects timeline doesn't appear to have been updated since the year 2000. 

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. 

Venturi, of course, is the guy who championed the idea of buildings as “decorated sheds,” and in response to a question he fielded after his lecture, he said he saw Frank Gehry's Pritzker bandshell in Millennium Park as carrying on “the idea of the great American loft tradition. His buildings . . . are essentially a loft with applied ornament, which are these potato chips,” Venturi said, referring to the billowing metallic forms that mane the stage. “So I feel at home when you acknowledge that his architecture is not only the potato chips, but the potato chips applied to a loft, and Frank was more than happy when I said that. “ J

 © Copyright 2005 Lynn Becker All rights reserved.

Six Bad Arguments for the Exploding Costs of CTA Stations

CTA Damen Green Line Station, Perkins and Will

The blowback – largely on Twitter – to my post about the $60 million cost of the new Damen and Lake station on the CTA green line is a dispiriting demonstration on how politicians play us like a violin.  The discussion revolves around a few basic arguments:

"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.  

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.

Original Fullerton Red/Brown Line station

I never thought I’d write anything nice about Charles Yerkes and the other traction crooks, but they understood budgets. The stations they built were cheap and aggressively efficient, but often not only simply but graciously designed.  They were not mini-Grand Centrals, but they had newsstands, a washroom – often even shops. And in most cases, they supported equal or even larger passenger loads than the CTA handles today. Many of these original stations have been preserved as important pieces of architecture, standing in constrained, silent contempt of the bloated counterparts that took their place.

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?

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.

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.

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?

A New Website Showcases Chicago - its architecture, vistas, events and people. Introducing Lynn Becker Gallery

[September 18, 2010] Father Time

Over the past fifteen years, I've taken over 175,000 images, mostly of my thumb.

Some are of San Francisco, even fewer of Washington and other cities, but almost were taken in Chicago.  Slowly, I've been going through those hundreds of thousands of photographs and picking out or my newest website, Lynn Becker Gallery. 

Here you'll find the images in a large, full-page format, far more expressive than the sizes to which I'm restricted to in this blog and on social media.  Often, they'll be accompanied by a short essay providing the story behind what's in the day's photograph.

I'll be adding new pictures several times each week, and just to get started, daily this week, with a bonus image on this original post.

I hope you'll find them enjoyable, and I welcome your comments.

For your troubles, today's bonus image:

(April 10, 2010) Drummond Place stalked by purple dinosaur.

© Lynn Becker, 2003-2015.  All rights reserved.  Reproduction without permission strictly prohibited.

Spartacus, Newly Relevant in the Time of Trump, two rare 70mm showings at the Music Box

Spartacus in 70mm will be shown twice at the Music Box Theater, Saturday, July 8th at 6;00 p.m., and 2:00 p.m., Thursday, July 13th.

"As those slaves have died, so will your rabble... if they falter one instant in loyalty to the new order of affairs. Arrests are in progress. The prisons began to fill. In every city and province, lists of the disloyal have been compiled. Tomorrow, they will learn the cost of their terrible folly."     -Marcus Licinius Crassus 

It's not only the most overtly political of the great Hollywood epics, it's also newly relevant - a film created in the shadow of McCarthyism, being revived in a time of authoritarian restoration via the alt-right and its bouffanted Crassus, the current President of the United States.

When the Kirk Douglas/Stanley Kubrick film Spartacus returns to Chicago as part of this year's edition of the Music Box Theatre's always incredible 70mm Film Festival, it will to the best of my knowledge be the first time it's been shown in 70mm here since the picture's original 1960 release. (A short run of the restored version ran at Piper's Alley in the 1990's, but not in 70mm.)

I was lucky enough to be in L.A. back in 1991 when the million dollar restoration premiered, and was able to see it with a demonstrably appreciative audience at a Century City cinema.  Before the 1960 release, censors had forced numerous cuts, and even more were made for reissues and television.  The original negatives had decayed to the point of being useless, and the restoration had to be created from color separations.

The 2010 Blue-ray transfer was infamously flawed. A 2015 4K version supervised by Robert A. Harris appears to be much better, but here's a chance to see it - maybe for the last time? - in the original 70mm.  Why pass it up?

As with Lawrence of Arabia, Spartacus is made up of two very distinct halves.  The first is largely made up with extended set pieces - Spartacus becoming a Gladiator, the climatic match between Spartacus and Draba, the takeover and escape from the compound, the assembly and training of the slave army.  The emphasis is on action.

The second act, again as with Lawrence, is much more telescoped, with a strong counterpoint between the march of the slave army and the politics in Rome, reaching a climax in cross-cut scenes of Olivier's speech his character Crassus has been made dictator by a fearful Rome, and Spartacus addressing his followers on the eve of battle.  Crassus speaks in the Forum, with all the pomp and architectural Rome as his backdrop.  Spartacus speaks from a bluff overlooking a seemingly boundless array of people in which Kubrick's sure use of 70mm makes the crowd not anonymous but a sea of individuals.

Saul Bass not only designed the film's striking title sequence, but also served, as he often did with Hitchcock, as the film's visual consultant, designing the gladiator school and storyboarding the climatic final battle between the armies of Spartacus and Rome.  The massing of the opposing armies across a vast physical expanse can truly only be fully appreciated in 70mm.  The ultra-wide shots of the movement of clotted masses of humanity seen from a great distance rare a visual representation of the appreciation of abstraction that both Bass and Kubrick shared.


 It is the political maneuverings of the second half of Spartacus that give it its lasting character.  The book on which the film was based was written by Howard Fast, whose renunciation of his flirtation with communism did nothing to dim his radical sensibilities.  Very early on, when it became apparent that the screenplay Fast was hired to write was essentially unfilmable, Dalton Trumbo was brought on as a rush replacement.   Trumbo would write the screenplay under the name Sam Jackson, one of a series of pseudonyms he used to continue a (diminished) living as a blacklisted radical banned from working in Hollywood (including, as Robert Rich, winning an Academy Award he couldn't show up to collect for 1956's The Brave One.) . It was Trumbo's Spartacus script the helped Douglas get the cast of British acting royalty he was looking for - Laurence Olivier, Charles Laughton, and Peter Ustinov.  (In the original concept, the slaves would all have American accents, the Roman patricians would all be - and sound - British.)

But there were still more changes to the script to come.

In an interview for Criterion Collection, Ustinov - who would be the only person ever to receive an Oscar for acting in a Stanley Kubrick film -  says Olivier joined the shoot a week before the others, and had used the time to coral Douglas into rewrites.  When everyone assembled for the first table read, Ustinov and Laughton found themselves acting out a script far different from the one they had originally been given.  Laughton, believing that his part was being diminished, was enraged.  He threatened to sue Douglas, and Ustinov says he walked through the production essentially "waiting to be offended."

As a placation, Ustinov and Laughton were allowed by Kubrick to rewrite the scenes in which they appeared.  Steven Spielberg has said those scenes are his favorite part of the picture.  And they define the political content.  ""I'd rather have a little Republican corruption, with a little Republican freedom," Laughton's Gracchus proclaims to a Senate contemplating giving Olivier's Crassus dictatorial powers, "than rule by Crassus and no freedom at all!"  It is not the strongman Olivier but the amiably corrupt Gracchus - corpulent, indecently wealthy, indulgent of his own appetites and those of others, and comfortable with the mechanics of power and persuasion, who, second only to Spartacus himself, is the hero of the piece.  

If you have not seen Spartacus, do yourself a favor.  Stop reading here and go so it.  If you already seen it, proceed on.

For a 100th Anniversary, Chicago becomes the Lions den.

Note: to see the photographs in full size, click the first one below.  You will then be able to use the thumbnail bar at the bottom of the window to move through the pictures, either by clicking or using your right arrow key.

When I heard the music coming from the street below, I had no idea what was going on.  By the time I got downstairs, I was immersed in one of the most amazing parades ever.  Lions Club International was holding its annual convention in Chicago, where it was founded by insurance agent and Business Circle activist Melvin Jones at the LaSalle Hotel in 1917, and celebrating its centenary in a big way.

23 marching bands joined an estimated 24,000 Lions Club members representing over 100 countries and an overall membership of nearly 1,500,000 people constituting was claimed to be the world's largest service organization..

The result was an incredible pageant of visitors from throughout the U.S. and all around the world, often in colorful native dress.  The Lions last met in Chicago ten years ago.  After operating out of Melvin Jones office, it moved to the six-story post-fire building at the northeast corner of Michigan and Lake, which was remodeling in the early 1920's by Jarvis Hunt, and then again with its facade getting a concrete modernization in the 1950's.  For twenty years, the  Lions purple and gold emblem placed on the blank southern facing wall proclaimed the Lions presence, until the organization sold the building to Metropolitan Structures and moved to a new headquarters in Oak Brook in 1972.  The structure was demolished to make way for Fujikawa Johnson's 205 North Michigan, the easternmost component of the massive Illinois Center development constructed on the Illinois Central's old railyards.

Jones set the mission of the Lions in service for others, saying "You can't get very far until you start doing something for somebody else," a commonsense statement under mounting assault in a current society that seems evermore obsessed with greed and cruelty.

According to an article by Joyce Russell Joyce in the Times of Northwestern Indiana, this mission found focus after Helen Keller addressed the 1925 convention, heeding Keller's call for the group to become "knights of the blind" their mission.  It's said a Lions member created the first white guide cane, and in 1939 members of the Detroit Uptown Lions opened one of the first schools for training guide dogs.  The Lions collected prescription eyewear for redistribution, and sponsored a series of vans and buses for vision testing.

I remember encountering volunteers on the street for Lions Candy Day, collecting contributions and passing out rolls (now pouches) of Lifesavers. The tradition continues to this day, and accounts for a large portion of Lions operating income.

Membership in the Lions remains by invitation only - you have to be sponsored by an existing member.  Women were not admitted as members until 1987.  (The majority of the Worcester England club resigned in protest.) Judging from Saturday's parade, they've made up for lost time.  Similarly, while it took 14 years before an annual convention took place outside the United States, and until 1969 before a convention was held on the Asia continent, Japan, Korea and China today constitute the Lions fastest growing areas.  Since 2002, conventions have been held in Osaka, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Busan and, last year, Fukuoka.

Saturday's parade was sprawling, marching from Wacker all the way down to Van Buren, with staging areas all along Wacker, to Franklin on the West and Wabash on the East.  While Chicago has a habit of inflating crowd estimates, the Tribune reported the 1967 Chicago gathering as even larger - 50,000 Lions and 18,000 in the parade marching before a quarter million spectators. Mayor Richard J. Daley watched from the reviewing stand on State Street just north of Balbo.  Scheduled for 4 hours, the parade actually took five and a half to finish.

Today the Lions claim to be represented on every continent accept Antarctica, in over 200 countries and geographical areas. The emphasis on vision remain, but  the Lions mission has expanded to such issues as youth mentoring, protecting the environment, and disaster relief.  This year there are new programs addressing diabetes awareness and education.

While countless "Lions" were on view, actual "lions" appeared to be limited to participants such as these.