How to build the Nakagin Capsule Tower out of Lego's

From Space, Time, Reality's Flickr photostream. Details here.

photograph Wiii, Wikipedia

No word if Kisho Kurokawa's original has been demolished yet. Check out the Lego Architecture and Design photostream here.

Fleeing Rome after the death of Ranuccio Tomassoni, Caravaggio hid himself away as a cab driver in a New World city

Click photo for larger view.

Chicago Streetscene: 2/27/2010

At the Water Tower Pumping Station. Lyndon LaRouche: the gift that just keeps on giving.

Pole Dance on Randolph: State of Illinois deconvenes panels.

Once upon a time this is what Helmut Jahn's Thompson Center looked like this . . .
Now it looks like this, the Dubuffet sculpture elbowed out by what appears to be the world's tallest stripper pole . . .
Along Clark Street, it looked like this . . .

photograph: JohnTheBear, tripadvisor.com

Now it looks like this, bare metal bracings seemingly waiting to be festooned with wet laundry being hung out to dry . . .
All the granite panels - and for those backing the free-standing columns, the structures that supported them - were decided to be of increasingly uncertain mooring, and have been removed to avoid creating pedestrian pancakes should one or more fall free.

In a very prompt response to my emailed questions, David Blanchette, a spokesman for the State of Illinois' Capital Development Board, promises us this is all only temporary:

The intent is to restore the exterior of JRTC to its original appearance. The Capital Development Board, the architect/engineer and the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency are investigating replacement materials (foreign granite vs. domestic granite vs. artificial stone) to determine the best match with original, while considering green footprint, budget, historic preservation regulations, etc.

We plan to begin installing replacement panels in June 2010. The underlying structure both for the freestanding columns and the arcade/fascia will most likely be replaced as part of the panel reinstallation project. The amount of time this will take will depend on when funding is available. The time frame will also depend on the source of the replacement stone (prep and shipping time). The project could be complete in 12-18 months, if all needed funds are available in June.

The area at the base of the free-standing columns has been temporarily filled in with grout to provide a level surface (no tripping hazard). This will be removed or covered when the panels are replaced.

The "will depend on when funding is available" is the part that gives pause. For a state that's $11.5 billion in hole, you have to wonder how far down this is on the priority list. Maybe if the process beings to really string out, we could turn to the government of China to help fund an arts project to give the columns a temporary applique mimicking this . . .
. . . .but with patterns incorporating the likenesses of indicted Illinois governors.

Reception tonight at IIT: Katsura: The Photographs of Ishimoto Yasuhiro

Tonight, Thursday, February 25th, there will be an opening reception, from 4:30 p.m., to 7:00 p.m., for an exhibition of the work by photographer Ishimoto Yasuhiro.

Ishimoto Yasuhiro studied with Aaron Siskind and Harry Callahan at the Institute of Design. In 1953, Ishimoto began photographing the Katsura Imperial Villa, which was built in Kyoto in the seventeenth century for the Japanese Imperial Family. Its buildings and gardens are created in a simple yet elegant style that has had an effect on many modern architects such as Bruno Taut. The 50 images in the exhibition, which is curated by Susan Aurinko, are from the book Katsura, published in 1960 by Ishimoto.

Tonight's reception will include remarks by George Hisaeda, Consul General of Japan and a gallery talk by Institute of Design Professor John Grimes.

That 1960 book, Katsura, designed by Bauhaus graphic artist Herbert Beyer, with essays by architects Walter Gropius and Tange Kenzo, is being republished this year by Yale University press.

The exhibition is in the Kemper Room Art Gallery of the Walter Netsch designed Paul V. Galvin Library, 35 West 33rd street. It will run through March 7th, 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m, Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday and noon to 5:00 p.m. on Sundays.

Chicago Streetscene: Contemplation

Click photograph for larger view.

House of the Floating Angel

Well, it's actually House H by Tokyo architect Sou Fujimoto, in one of a series of photographs by Iwan Baan. In the interview below from 0300TV, Fujimoto uses his book, Primitive Future, to help illustrate his ideas about design.

He cites Le Corbu and Mies as two primary influences on his work, Mies concept of architecture represented by Fujimoto as the stave's of a musical score, without any notes, which finds its counterpoint in the facing page with Fujimoto's cluster of tunes liberated from stave's.

A house by Corbu is likened to a nest - precisely arranged and fabricated. Fujimoto's preference in his own work is the idea of a cave, an existing, more random space, in which the inhabitant carves out his own place.
You can see the idea personified in the above photo of Fujimoto's Final Wooden House, which has something of the quality of a Jenga set, and puts me in mind of Ken Isaac's Microhouses of a half century before.
Fujimoto's House H, itself, is an amalgam of the serene and the surreal. Built in crowded Tokyo, it forgoes the usual courtyard for a relationship of large openings, exterior and interior, floor and ceiling, that blur the edges between outside and in, "boxes in boxes" bridged by a succession of wooden stairways that, in one case, goes absolutely nowhere, Escher via LeCorbusier.
In Baan's photographs, the house appears scarcely occupied, devoid of possessions. The family living there seems almost adrift in the large spaces and their bleached white walls and ceilings, Miesian stave's devoid of notes. The absence of particulars, the steep multi-leveling that seems anything but child friendly, remind us of the close co-habitation between the unsettling and the sublime.

Sou Fujimoto Interview / Sou Fujimoto Architects / Part 2 from 0300TV on Vimeo.

Correction: time for Divo Scholars Recital is 7:00 p.m.

NOT 8:00 as we previously reported. Tonight at the U of C. Info here.

Sterk and Pancoast move to Wednesday, Deconstruction added on Tuesday - over two dozen events this week

It may be the last week of February, but there's still over two dozen events left on the architectural calendar.

The Chicago Architectural Club event, Tristan d’Estree Sterk and Douglas Pancoast - The Quiet War: Architecture and Digital Technologies, moves from Tuesday to Wednesday night at the Flatiron, while the Chicago Chapter of the U.S. Green Building Council has added A Deconstruction Panel Discussion for Tuesday.

Also on Wednesday the 24th, Franz Schulze and Edward Windhorst discuss their upcoming major updating of the biography of Mies van der Rohe in Crown
Hall at IIT, David Swan discusses the recently published Autobiography of Irving K. Pond at Glessner House, and Jonathan Fine presents Preservation Chicago's 2010 Chicago 7 Most Endangered at noontime at CAF. Steven D. Fifield is at a Crain's forum, Joseph Schwieterman and Alan Mammoser discuss their book, Beyond Burnham at APA Chicago, Ruth D. Nelson talks about the Marquette Building's Tiffany mosaic at the Second Presbyterian Church, Alex Lehnerer lectures at the Graham, and the 2010 Marian and Leon Depres Preservation Awards are presented at the Hyde Park Historical Society's annual dinner. And there's more! Check all of these week's great events here.

The Orkin School of Architectural Ornament

Via Art Daily and other sources, we bring you Casatomada, a sculpture by Rafael Gomezbarros that covers the Columbian Congress Building in Bogota with 1,300 three-foot-long Fiberglas ants, representing "immigration, globalization and displacement." The installation joins a previous animated installation, Defecar Palomas, which explores the ongoing relationship between pigeons and classical outdoor sculpture.

Gomezbarros says that in June his creation will crawl out Columbia for an international tour that will see it taking up residence in Argentina, Mexico, Chile, and the U.S., among other countries. Can we all nominate the building we'd most like to see it on here?


Early next month, Chicago will add its own innovative artwork with the installation of Oso Hormiguero. In the vein of Cows on Parade, it will consist of 240 giant Velcro anteaters, each decorated by a separate artist, which will be affixed to the facade of City Hall and suck cash out the wallets of taxpayers walking down LaSalle Street. All proceeds will accrue to the West Loop TIF through 2029.

Atilla postscript: Philip Gosset collaborates with Muti, retires in style

Opera Chic reports that the great Philip Gossett, the University of Chicago scholar who has been a major force in creating critical editions of opera scores long mired in obfuscating revisions, has worked closely with Riccardo Muti to prepare a new critical edition of Verdi's Attila, restoring the "more characteristic elements" of Verdi's original scoring, that will be used in Muti's performances at the Met. "Under Muti's baton," Gossett tells Opera Chic, "the orchestra sounds simply splendid: a chamber-music quality everywhere." The opera opens this Tuesday, February 23rd, with a run of ten performances through March 27th. It will be broadcast on the Met's radio network, including WFMT locally, Saturday, March 6th at noon.

Gossett officially retires from the U of C on Monday, when he will be honored for his "singular and colossal contributions to Italian opera studies that have led to the complete realignment of the relationship between the musicology of ottocento opera and its performance" with an all-star symposium, Divo and the Scholars in the afternoon, leading into an 7:00 p.m. recital with Joyce Di Donato and Vivica Genaux accompanied by conductor/musicologist/impressario Will Crutchfield on the piano. Both events in Mandel Hall. What we owe you is beyond evaluation.

Gehry's Pritzker stoned and decayed, the Herzon & de Meuron Way - thanks, Atilla!

There's more than one way to skin a stage, witness the above two photos. The top picture may look a tad familiar: Frank Gehry's Pritzker Pavilion bandshell in Millennium Park. The bottom pic, stolen from courtesy the inestimable Opera Chic blog, is a stage set for the Metropolitan Opera's new production of Verdi's Attila, opening February 23rd with Ildar Abdrazakov in the title role and conducted by Chicago Symphony Music Director designate Riccardo Muti. Beyond the strong musical pedigree, this may be the most haute couture Hun of all time. Costumes by Miuccia Prada; sets by Herzog & de Meuron. Pelts by Blackglama*.

According to Jacques Herzog in this Met Opera video:

Atilla describes the moment in history where an old world, an antique world is collapsing and something new is rising out of the rubble of the old . . . Verdi's vision . . . basically, [is] based on two images. On one hand is the rubble, is the destruction, is the destroyed world, that we took very literally, even more literally than Verdi probably did, and [the other] is nature, represented by wild nature, very strong powerful nature . . . a forest that was both real, scary, symbolic, magical mystical . . . this romantic moment that you find some times in art, in paintings, where the wood is used as a wild energy that at the same time is something which promises hope.

More Opera Chic photo's of the sets and the production - oh, and some singers, too - here.

*note to litigators: reference for satirical purposes only.

It's in the hole!

Stand at the foot of the Lake Shore Drive bridge, on the west side, heading south across the Chicago River. Look down, across Ogden slip, and you'll see a huge, flat, empty expanse of earth. At its center, a huge, perfectly round, orange-ribbed gaping beckons, daring you to imagine how far down the black abyss descends.

It's the stuff that dreams are made of, specifically, the dream of a twisting, 150 story Chicago Spire, by Santiago Calatrava, redefining the city's skyline. Not that long ago, the site was crawling with construction equipment and workers, but they've long since departed. Only the hole endures. And with lenders putting the screws to the developer behind the dream, it may be there a very long time, a mystic talisman, a riddle on the dynamics of urban life.

The Chicago Architectural Club has taken the bit between their teeth and made the hole the subject of their 2010 Chicago Prize Competition. Mine the Gap

a single-stage international design ideas competition dedicated to examining one of the most visible scars left after the collapse of the real estate market in Chicago . . . There is no set program for this competition; your definition of the program is part of the design problem. There is no requirement to replace the program intended to be accommodated in the original 150-story tower proposal . . . Although this project is located in a context where the tower is one of the dominant typologies, we are not necessarily looking for an investigation in this field . . . This competition is, in part, about looking for new ways to construct both the city and the programs within it. If real-estate speculation is no longer the driving force, what new techniques and actors can fill this space?

You can find full instructions for the competition and download materials here. First prize is $3,500, second $1,500 and third $750.00, with up to 3 Honorable Mentions awarded. Entries can be submitted from March 22nd to May 3rd. Registration is open now, with entry fees of $30 for CAC members, $50 for students, and $90.00 for professionals. The jury is scheduled to include Preston Scott Cohen (pending confirmation), Martin Felsen, Jeanne Gang, Robert Somol, CTBUH's Anthony Wood and - God save us - me.

Dainty Fingers

A steam shovel extracts threads of metal from the great ruined globs of demolition debris at 211 E. Grand, an 1887 bullhead of a building that's making way for a new home for the Ronald McDonald house.

Since 1977, it's been housed in a former 1880's mansion at 622 West Deming that is just a few blocks away from the current Children's Memorial Hospital.In 2012, the hospital is scheduled to move to its new billion-dollar facility at 225 E. Chicago, just blocks away from the Ronald McDonald facility on Grand, which is expected to be completed in 2011, dramatically increasing the number of beds, to 95.

The blandness of Antonovich & Associates' design for the house is a long way from the historic charm of the building on Deming.In a way, it's like the equally uncharming 19th century structure now being demolished, just extruded and updated to our own age's idiom of inoffensive mediocrity.

John Ronan, Jon Langford among presenters unveiled for Pecha Kucha Chicago Global Day for Haiti February 20

There'll be more players to be named later, but a number of names have already surfaced as part of an all-star roster for this Saturday, February 20's special afternoon edition of Pecha Kucha Night Chicago, part of a Global Day for Haiti with all proceeds benefiting Architecture for Humanity's reconstruction efforts in that country. Presenters will include Katherine Darnstadt of Architecture For Humanity, Nadia Lemoine Andre - speaking passionately of her homeland, musician Jon Langford, architect Andy Warfel and designer Mark Taylor from the U of I, Champaign Urbana, architect John Ronan. Stayed tuned for more names later.

Tickets are $25.00, with special VIP seating at $100.00. Again, all proceeds going to AFP's work in Haiti. Doors open at 1:00 p.m. at Pecha Kucha Chicago's usual home, Martyr's at 3855 N. Lincoln, with the program beginning about 2:00, which makes this a rare all-ages event. Tickets can be charged by phone: 800.585.8499, or purchased on-line. Information on-line.

For February 23rd, a correction and an adjustment. The Community Interface Committee: Inaugural Meeting at AIA/Chicago actually begins at 6:00 p.m., and a scheduling adjustment has pushed back the Chicago Architectural Club event, Tristan d’Estree Sterk and Douglas Pancoast - The Quiet War: Architecture and Digital Technologies, one half hour - reception at 6:30 p.m., program at 7:00.

There are 30 great events still to come on the February architectural calendar. Check them all out here.

Even on their Day, Presidents looking a bit grim

Could they pondering what we've done with the place?

First Chicago Showing of Louis Sullivan: The Struggle for American Architecture, March 14

Following an L.A. screening earlier this month, the long-awaited documentary Louis Sullivan: The Struggle for American Architecture, will have it's Chicago debut at the noon Sunday, March 14th, at the Gene Siskel Film Center.

The enticing excerpts from the 94 minute work from first-time director Mark Richard Smith screened in the fall of 2008, for both AIA Chicago and for the Chicago Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians, used placeholder music from composers as diverse as Philip Glass (in the trailer above), Ralph Vaughan Williams and Richard Wagner. As you can tell from the trailer, most of the borrowed scoring was deft and haunting, although the use of Siegfried's Funeral Music for the images of the Auditorium captured less the joy of Sullivan's triumph than a sense of impending doom.

Now there's a new score by composer Michael McLean, whose work The Elements was recorded for Delos in 2006 by violinist Brian Lewis, with Hugh Wolff conducting the London Symphony, available on iTunes. On Facebook you can see this excerpt of the film, stripped of the narration, showing off McLean's music. Momentarily giving fright by starting off in that familiar, reductive Ken Burns kind of mode, it soon evolves into a much richer aural landscape.

photograph: Doug Snower

The ambitious production took cinematographer Peter Biagi from Buffalo to Owatonna and points in-between to photograph Sullivan's surviving work. A 50-foot crane was deployed to capture up-close shots of the architect's inimitable ornament and stenciling in Chicago's Auditorium, the Wainwright in St. Louis, and Guaranty in Buffalo.

The documentary has its own website here, and Facebook page here. Only 200 seats are available for the March 14th showing at the Siskel, so tickets will probably go quickly. They can purchased via PayPal here. Suggested donation is $15.00.

Please tread on me

The Hubbard Street walkway that connected the Plaza of the America's, protected by its oversize statue of Benito Juarez, to Wabash Avenue, could never be called the height of elegance. Simple metal railings, a narrow catwalk, dangling uneasily above Rush Street below, with charming views of surface parking lots, shadowed streets, and the butt end of a large parking garage.

Still, it was a wonderful amenity. For being a flat city, Chicago has many man-made changes in elevations, often stitched together in the clumsiest way imaginable. Instead of noble transition, as in the Spanish Steps - in Rome, or in the proposal to unite Michigan Avenue with the upper level plaza of Illinois Center - we get side stairs, and back-alley bridgeways. Still, they work.
In place of grace, the Hubbard Street walkway fell comfortably within that abject pattern, but it maintained a nice feel of urban grit. For over a year, it's been shut down and barriered off.When I recently noticed men working on the walkway, and saw its now exposed supporting beams, cantilevered from the parking garage that also housed the now closed Lake Shore Athletic Club, I was thinking more of dismantlement than repair, but it turns out the walkway is to be fixed up and re-opened. The workman I ran into told me he was scoping out the support structure for a new steel surface he was soon to install.

Holy Souls' End

The chapel looked a lot older than it was. It was constructed in the 1940's, in the traditional style, to serve the nuns of the Society of Helpers of Holy Souls, which made its home in an adjacent mansion on Lake Shore Drive and Barry. A cold, drear day of a winters that feels like it might never end seems a good time to recall the story of the great mansions of Wellington Street and the death of a sacred space, documented in a series of remarkable photographs by Susanne Schnell, here.

Fix on conserving outdoor sculpture (today) and Alex Lehnerer on Grand Urban Rules - two more February events

We now expect the February calendar to be completed somewhere around March 10th. Two more great events:

Today, February 10, at noon, in the SAIC ballroom at 112 S. Michigan, the appropriately named Karen J. Fix will talk about Conservation and Restoration of Outdoor Sculpture for the Historic Preservation Program of the School of the Art Institute.

Then, on Thursday, February 25th, at 6:00, the Graham Foundation will welcome Alex Lehnerer, partner in Kaisersrot, the Zurick-based collaboration of researchers in the field of architecture, urban design and computational technology, and Associate Professor at the School of Architecture, UIC, who will discuss his new book, Grand Urban Rules, "a tribute to the city's will to form, manifest in its vast number of steering regimes . . . We read cities by their rules!"

Lee Bey has a new blog. it's good (dammit!)

It's on Vocalo, WBEZ's latest bid for cultural dominance, and it's called Lee Bey's Chicago. Today Lee serves up a great story on the 1892 Yale Apartments, one of the early Chicago developments designed to make apartment living respectable.

Juliet to return to Michigan Ave? Montgomery Ward balconies are back.

Courtesy of our indefatigable correspondent Bob Johnson, the condo rehab of Schmidt, Garden's 1898 former Montgomery Ward building at 6 North Michigan appears to be nearing the end of its long restoration. In May of 2008, the top was still a long way from finished.
Now, the tracery and ornament have been restored along the windows, and the loggia has regrown its balconies.
It's a very handsome reconstruction, but we're still a long way from the original loopy yet majestic crown. Now the preface has become the entire book. Still, I suppose a handsome crew cut has its own charms.

The Quiet War: Architecture and Digital, plus the Marquettes Tiffany mosaics - 2 more February events

Yeah, I know we were just here yesterday, but now we've got two more great events added to the February calendar:

The iSpace Gallery on Franklin is dead (moment of silence), so the Chicago Architectural Club is moving it's Tuesday, February 23rd event, Tristan d’Estree Sterk and Douglas Pancoast - The Quiet War: Architecture and Digital Technologies, to the Flatiron Building at Milwaukee, Damen and North. "Long ago a quiet war sent the deepest core of western beliefs into battle with the natural world." Has a sort of Lord of the Rings ring to it, no? Will there be droids? Reception at 6:00 p.m, program at 6:30.

Two nights later -Thursday, February 25th, 6:00 p.m., reception, 7:00 p.m, program, at the historic Second Presbyterian Church on south Michigan, art historian Ruth D. Nelson will lecture on Money Was No Object: The Tiffany Mosaics of Chicago's Marquette Building, mosaics which depict the story of 17th century French missionary explorer Pere Marquette in the lobby of the classic Holabird and Roche building named after him.

Check out the over fifty great events on the February calendar here.

One more event which doesn't fit on the calendar, but is important nonetheless, this Thursday, February 11th, the U of C's Arnold Randall and 5th ward Alderman Leslie Hairston has set up a community meeting to present possible design features and sites for an expansion of the university's Laboratory Schools. 6:30 p.m., in the Laboratory Schools' Large Group Room, 126 Judd Hall, entrance through double doors on Kimbark, just north of 59th street.

Frank Lloyd Wright still dead, Marian and Leon Depres Preservation Awards, casting plaster and Steven D. Fifield - additions to the February calendar.

Four great additions to the February calendar of Chicago architectural events:

On the evening of Thursday, February 18th, noted scholar Anthony Alofsin will lecture on Frank Lloyd Wright: A Golden Anniversary, in one of the architect's greatest masterworks, Unity Temple in Oak Park. Saturday morning, February 20th, the Great Lakes Chapter of the Association for Preservation Technology will be offering a Hands-on Plaster Workshop. On Saturday night, February 27th, the Hyde Park Historical Society will be presenting its 2010 Marian and Leon Depres Preservation Awards at its annual dinner, And on Tuesday morning, February 23rd, Crain's Chicago Business will be offering a forum with Steven D. Fifield, one of Chicago's most successful developers and serial creator of mediocre architecture on a large scale.

There are over a dozen events just this week. Check out the very full February calendar here.

A construction for a construction: Design a house for Lady Gaga

Inspired by the intricate structure worn by the singer to last week's Grammy Awards, Evanston's ICARCH Gallery has just announced a competition, A House for Lady Gaga . . .

The more she hides, the more she exposes. And vice versa.

We reflected on the strange dialectics between hiding / exposing, as illustrated by Lady Gaga. Quite often she seems to want to hide away... her hair, her masks, her veilings betray a very high interest in hiding, in concealing...

Even her use of umbrellas, when outside it is sunny...!?

And the fact that quite often she hides her face behind her hand, when photographed (as if she is guilty of something, almost like Adam in the famous painting by Masaccio "Adam and Eve banished from Paradise"), does show the same thing... and the meaning of her video Paparazzi seems to be the same: an intense. almost neurotic questioning of the violation of privacy that contemporary life seems to be unable to avoid.

The competition joins a roster of similar imaginings of houses for everyone from Chopin, Eric Rohmer and the Egyptian God Anubis. The entry fee is 50 bucks, 25 for students . . .

payable by PayPal to admin@icarch.net. We will display all the works received on our website: www.icarch.net. We will display all the works received on our website: www.icarch.net. We will also forward them to Lady Gaga, for her consideration.

From this point on, you're on your own.

Animating Architecture: Burnham Pavilions by Spirit of Space


It begins with a single, small boy running through the scoops of the Ben van Berkel/UNStudio pavilion that stood in Millennium Park last year, and ends with a time sequence of the Hadid Pavilion at night, transformed by Tracy Dear's lighting. The movement of human form through structure illuminates in a way no still photo can.

At yesterday's formal opening of Studio/Gangs Columbia College Media Production Center, I had a chance to meet Red Mike of Spirit of Space, a multimedia company consulting company that makes films about architecture. “We both saw how the camera can capture and convey the emotions involved in spaces,” partner Adam Goss told the Architectural Record.

Peter Zumthor's Baths at Vals, Switzerland, one of the most admired structures of the last century, is usually depicted as at the Galinsky website here, carefully composed shots, devoid of humanity. Spirit of Space's video, on the other hand, actually gives you a feel for how Zumthor's work is actually experienced, complete with people, even those not so fashion-model-perfect as their surroundings. With watery handprints, they leave their mark, however fleetingly, on Zumthor's stone. It concludes with a lovely shot of Zumthor's masterwork, in it's verdant natural surroundings, being enjoyed by a solitary women of a certain age, her face, in a frilly pink bathing cap, floating serenely above the waterline.

Spirit of Space's videos, many of which you can see here, help point to a new way of understanding architecture. Avatar, schmatatar, this is a form that cries out for 3-D.

images

Twirling Rotini and Green Indulgences meet in a River North self park

In the old days you could buy an indulgence for your sins. Not much has changed. Today the accepted currency for indulgences is still green - just not as in cash, but as in sustainability. Green is to architecture as "low-fat" is to junk food, a label too often used to divert attention away from the usual trespasses.

You can't get much greener than the new parking garage at Kinzie and Clark. The Greenway Self Park proclaims its virtue in its very name. The design actually includes "educational plaques" scattered through the garage to enlighten its users on "how to live green."

Read all about it - and see all the pictures - here.