In Chicago today, It's So Hot . . .

Thursday News Edition: AFH rebuilding Moore OK, Landmarking the Ashland Bridge, awards to Hartshorne, Gang

News and links recently received.  Please use the comments section to add your own rumors and gossip

Rebuilding Moore:  

Architecture for Humanity  is “working with local and regional construction professionals to begin
assessments and support rebuilding work after an F-4 tornado ripped through the heart of Moore, Oklahoma and surrounding communities.  Get more information and donate here.

Landmarking for Ashland Avenue Bridge?  

The Chicago Art Deco Society is drumming up public support for the landmarking of the 1937 Ashland Avenue Bridge over the North Branch of the Chicago River, whose striking art deco sculpted bas relief panels, by Scippion Del Campo, each depict a personification of Chicago. Del Campo's also designed the reliefs for the now demolished Ogden Avenue viaduct.  A selection of these panels can be seen at the architecture garden at St. Ignatius . . . 

relief from Ogden Viaduct, now at St. Ignatius

relief from Ogden Viaduct, now at St. Ignatius

CADS says the bridge will be recommended for designation at the June 6th monthly meeting of the Commission on Chicago Landmarks.

Hartshorne Plunkard wins AIA Illinois 2013 Honor Awards

Two projects by Hartshorne Plunkard Architecture (HPA) have received top prizes at the 2013 Honor Awards presented by AIA Illinois. The evening’s highest project honor, the Louis Sullivan Award, went to Randolph Tower in Chicago. This adaptive reuse project successfully transformed the landmarked Steuben Club Building into a mixed-use residential community within the heart of Chicago’s Theater District.

HPA won a second award, the Crombie Taylor Honor Award, for the Hairpin Lofts and Hairpin Arts Center in Chicago.  The Crombie Taylor Award recognizes a project that, through preservation and restoration, has enhanced the natural and built environments of a community.

Read: 
Baron von Steuben Refashioned - Randolph Tower: Restored Faux Gothic with a Candy Core
Would you walk a mile for a Camel?  Art Deco facade newly uncovered, quickly replaced.

Studio/Gang Architects  2013 National Design Award Winner

Cited in the category Architecture Design,  for how “each project resonates with its specific site and culture while addressing larger global themes such as urbanization, climate and sustainability.”  

Gang uses architecture as a medium of active response to contemporary issues and their impact on human experience. Each project resonates with its specific site and culture while addressing larger global themes such as urbanization, climate and sustainability. The firm’s projects range from tall buildings like the Aqua Tower, whose façade encourages building community in the vertical dimension, to the Nature Boardwalk at Lincoln Park Zoo, where 14 acres of biodiverse habitat are designed to double as stormwater infrastructure and engaging public space. 

The juried awards, now in their 14th year, are sponsored by the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum , and will be presented at a gala in New York October 17th.

Read:
Aqua refreshes the Chicago skyscraper
Reimagining Urban Eden: Studio/Gang and the Nature Boardwalk at Lincoln Park Zoo

Moves and More

Water Specialist Peter Mulvaney has joined the Chicago office of SOM. Brininstool + Lynch, which has just unveiled a new rendering for its residential project at 1333 South Wabash in the South Loop, has moved its offices to 1144 West Washington.

Studio/Gang's Aqua Refreshes the Chicago skyscraper

 On September 24th, the Art Institute of Chicago will be opening its new exhibition Building: Inside Studio Gang Architects. As a run-up to the opening, we're posting a series of new and newly revised versions of pieces on Jeanne Gang and Studio/Gang Architects.

An introduction to Aqua refreshes the Chicago skyscraper.

Although Jeanne Gang and her firm Studio/Gang Architects have completed a number of important projects since, Aqua remains her largest and most ambitious project do date.  The 81-story tower was largest building ever designed by a female architect, and the distinctive imprint it has made on the Chicago skyline marks it as an instant - and award-winning -  landmark.

Aqua has not been immune to criticism.  It's been noted that inside its sculpted exterior, Aqua is a completely conventional condo tower, and not especially energy-efficient. Valid complaints, that can also be made against a rather massive number of far lesser buildings constructed in the last decade.  In the last analysis, Aqua, like every other commercial project in the city, was built to make money for its developer.  What surprising is not its common shortcomings, but that something with Aqua's bold visual qualities came to exist at all.

And so we go back to the beginning, to the article we wrote in the Chicago Reader all the way back in 2006, before a spade of earth was turned.  I'm publishing it now because it recounts the story of how Aqua came to be, and the process by which Jeanne Gang and her associates at Studio/Gang arrived at the decisions that informed Aqua's distinctive design.

In terms of updates, Aqua was not the crowning endpoint of developer James Lowenberg's career.  Since then, his Magellan Development Group has entered into a partnership with bKl Architecture, the firm bringing together Brad Lynch and former SOM Chicago's Tom Kerwin, to continue to expand Lakeshore East with projects like the 49-story Coast, now under construction.

We also wrote about the Gang and others forming a "third school" of Chicago architecture.  We still have to see how that will play out.  John Ronan continues to create works of  distinction, such as his new home for the Poetry Foundation, but Douglas Garofalo's tragic, early death last year means we'll never get to see all the wonderful things we would have added to the argument.

For now, read about how it all started:  Aqua refreshes the Chicago skyscraper.  You can also see photographs of the construction process, from start to finish, here.

Planes and Towers, Spectated

click images for larger view (recommended)

 

 

 

the drama of this shot is via auto adjust, but it looks so good I couldn't resist.

Jeanne Gang's Grounded Magic - Building: Inside Studio Gang Architects opens at Art Institute September 24th

click images for larger view

If last fall was the year of Bertrand Goldberg at the Art Institute, 2012 will be the year of Jeanne Gang.  On September 24th, the Art Institute will open a new exhibition, Building: Inside Studio Gang Architects, showcasing the work of . . .

. . . MacArthur Fellow Gang and her team of 40 architects, designers, and thinkers have produced some of the most inventive and award-winning architecture today. Featured not as a survey or retrospective, the projects of Studio Gang Architects (SGA) will be showcased in an engaging workshop-like environment that reveals the practice's creative processes as they seek to answer pressing contemporary issues through architecture.

The exhibition, designed by Studio/Gang, in collaboration with Art Institute curator's Zoë Ryan and Karen Kice of the Department of Architecture and Design . . .

consists of two interrelated parts. The first functions as a gallery with projects illustrated through a range of materials from sketchbooks and models to photographs, plans, and other drawings. This space will also feature a special series of installations, also designed by SGA, dedicated to the studio's material research and formal explorations.

The second section of the exhibition replicates a workshop, complete with a large worktable, pin-up boards, full-scale mock-ups, and material samples.

SOS Children's Village Lavezzorio Community Center

The second space will host two "Archi-Salons" intended to place Studio/Gang's work "within the larger field of architectural discourse."  The first will be October 6th, 2:00 to 4:00 p.m., to be led by architect and UIC assistant professor Clare Lyster; the second, November 17th, also 2:00 to 4:00, to be led by MAS Studio's Iker Gil.

We were introduced to Jeanne Gang when we first began writing about architecture almost a decade ago, when she was flagged by Stanley Tigerman as an emerging star.  Since then, Gang, Mark Schendel and the other talented people at the firm have been extremely generous with their time as they've gone on to such hallmark projects as the Kam Liu Center,  the SOS Lavezzorio Community Center, the Starlight Theatre in Rockford, the Columbia College Media Center, and, of course, Aqua, which became an instant Chicago landmark even when it was under construction.

We've accumulated a lot of material on Studio/Gang that we've never published and, assuming my mind again begins to function, I hope to be posting a lot more text and photo's as the exhibition opening nears.  Some lines to the story so far . . .

Jeanne Gang: Before Aqua - an early portrait.

 Jeanne Gang's Cinematic space at Columbia College

 Designing Women: Five Architects, at exhibition at the Chicago Architecture Foundation.

Jeanne Gang awarded 2011 MacArthur Genius Grant

 click images for larger view

Officially, they're called MacArthur Fellowships, but unofficially, they've come to be known as the "Genius Grants", $500,000 over five years, no strings attached.  This year, among the 22 recipients who've just received "one call out of the blue", as the MacArthur Foundation describes it (do I see a licensing deal for a TV series in its future?) was Chicago architect Jeanne Gang, whose work ranging from the new Columbia College Media Center, to the Lincoln Park Nature Boardwalk, and the already iconic Aqua tower has been remaking the profile of the city.

It was a good day for Gang.  Earlier, as reported by the Trib's Blair Kamin, she was named one of two architects, along with Chris Lee, who will work with IIT students to design four new $4 million boathouses, assisted by a $1 million EPA grant, announced by Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel as keystones in his efforts to increase recreational usage of the city's river.  Now if he can only jump start getting the funding to build Studio Gang's Ford Calumet Environmental Center, which has the same potential to make that neighborhood a recreational and tourist magnet.

Studio Gang also has a new website, designed by Bruce Mau Design.