Sunday, December 06, 2009

Gang Nifty, Valerio Gothic, three centuries of type - Sunday reading

Jeanne Gang is number 22 in the New York Time's Style Magazine Fifty 50: The Names of America's Up-and-Coming ("for your guest list or cocktail patter"), citing Aqua as "Chicago's coolest new skyscraper." (Teddy Cruz is number 14) Page 90, online non-html mag here. We're promised an expanded version of the profiles in January at nytimes.com/tmagazine.

And in the inevitable pushback department, Aqua's sinuous balconies are criticized for being heat sinks leeching energy out of the building (I live in Marina City; touch one of my external columns on a sub-zero day - I dare you), and an architecture student at Drury University claims Gang copped a "I'm better than this place" attitude when she sat in on a critique. But he still thinks Aqua is beautiful.

25th Anniversary issue
of Chicago Life, bundled with the Times, includes Lois Weisberg interview with a great story of how John D. MacArthur helped fund her first major project, a 1956 George Bernard Shaw Centennial celebration. There's also a neat Joe Valerio article on the U of C and Gothic architecture. (Henry Ives Cobb originally pushed for the Romanesque.)

Bauman Rare Books ads on back cover NY Times Book Review features copy of Robert F. Kennedy To Seek a Newer World inscribed by the author in perfunctory fashion to "Herm" Kogan. Yours for $4,000. Also, review of The Complete Lyrics of Johnny Mercer will leave you never hearing That Old Black Magic quite the same way again. Taschen's brought out A Visual History of Typefaces and Graphic Styles, Volume I, 1628-1900. But what about Kabel?

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