
Since it was opened ten years ago, Gensler's Chicago office has grown to 225 employees, spread out over four floors in their current Inland Steel location. The move to
Previously, in October of 2006, the School of the Art Institute's

A daily blog on architecture in Chicago, and other topics cultural, political and mineral.
Click on the COMMENTS link under each post to join the discussion.
In a culture that struggles to grasp a deep or broad understanding of the power and delight of architecture, Tigerman has been a remarkably influential and effective advocate of the profession we love and the work we do,” wrote Jane Weinzapfel, FAIA, principal of Leers Weinzapfel Associates in her nominating letter. “Tigerman is a nonpareil instructor whose impact on the students he has taught formally and informally for so long is magnified many times over by the informed and passionate love of architecture those students, now teachers and practitioners themselves bring to the world.Previous recipients of the award include Lance Jay Brown (2007), William G. McMinn (2006), Denise Scott Brown in 1996, Henry Cobb in 1995, and Charles Moore in 1989.
Legendary novelist Norman Mailer may have left behind a mountain of prose, but he also left behind a ton of Legos: a 15,000 piece "City of the Future."The image of such a construction popping up, Rosebud-like, in a warehouse of the late author's belongings sent me back to my copy of Mailer's 1966 Cannibals and Christians, in which the following photograph, by Simeon C. Marshall, forms the frontispiece.
If we are to spare the countryside, if we are to protect the style of the small town and of the exclusive suburb, keep the organic center of the metropolis and the old neighborhoods, maintain those few remaining streets where the tradition of the nineteenth century and the muse of eighteenth century still linger on the mood in the summer cool of any evening, if we are to avoid a megalopolis five hundred miles long, a city without shape or exit, a nightmare of ranch houses, highways, suburbs and industrial sludge . . . then there is only one solution: the cities must climb, they must not spread, they must build up, not by increments, but by leaps, up and up, up to the heavens.And so Mailer, working with Eldred Mowery, Jr., created an expression of his vision in a 7 foot high model constructed out of 20,000 Legos, a "vertical city of the future more than a half mile high, near to three-quarters of a mile in length, with 15,000 apartments for 50,000 people." Far from offering up a classicist's idyll, it out-Jetsons anything Wright or Corbu ever envisioned. Mailer wondered whether "a large fraction of the population would find it reasonable to live one hundred or two hundred stories in the air." Garrett Kelleher is probably pondering that same question this very moment.