From Guns to Steel Skeletons, Blanc to Mies: Interchangeable Parts and the Beauty of Design

As we've mentioned before, our current conditions, including architecture, derive from being at the culmination of the Age of the Supply Chain, whose defining impulse is bringing the widest range of goods to the broadest number of people over the farthest geographic range using the minimum of human labor.

One of the key components of this process is the standardized, interchangeable part.  It's expressed clearly in the modern architecture of the grid and skeleton frame.  A modern skyscraper is, at its essence, a collection of standardized, interchangeable parts, assembled into modules that in themselves are repeated to the compose the pre-defined extent of the building.

While Eli Whitney, with his cotton gin, may have been the first person to make interchangeable, standardized parts an integral part of design, he was not the initiator.  That honor most often goes to French gunsmith Honoré Blanc, who developed the basic idea but was met with an uniform lack of interest from his countrymen in making it reality.  No less than Thomas Jefferson invited Blanc to migrate to the United States to be able to carry out his innovation, but to no avail.  And so it's Eli Whitney in the textbooks.

There is no underestimating the role of war in furthering technology, and so it should not be surprising that it was in the context of creating reliable firearms that the idea of interchangeable parts first found fruition.

An assemblage of interchangeable parts at
Mies van der Rohe's IBM Building

Tomorrow, Tuesday, November 10th, curator Ashley Hlebinsky of Wyoming's Cody Firearms Museum will lecture on From Protector to Perpetrator: Demystifying Firearms, the last of a series of Taboo Subject lectures organized by School of the Art Institute Professor Ben Nicholson.

The design and manufacture of firearms stands as one of the great achievements of the Industrial Age. The process pioneered the "American System" of manufacture that standardized mechanical reproduction on a massive scale. Gun and ammunition design has its own logic and, when demystified, can inform other disciplines. Ashley Hlebinsky will discuss the ways in which firearms are stigmatized in culture and how those perceptions can lead to obfuscation of the distinction between firearms and firearms violence in history.

Yeah, I know.  My first reaction was a kind of dumbfounded "WFT?" as well.  Yet if the Defense Department gave us the Internet (sorry, Vice President Gore), as well as numerous other core technologies we all depend on, a look at guns from a design standpoint might be a fairly essential perspective in understanding how we got where we are today.

The lecture will be given in the SAIC ballroom, 112 South Michigan, from 4:15 to 5:45 p.m. tomorrow, Tuesday, November 10.   It is free and open to the public.

Architect as Goth: Odile Decq to lecture at SAIC/AIADO

Yes, I know it's the 19th, but it's never too late to be adding stuff to the November Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.

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Specifically, on November 27th, the School of the Art Institute, Department of Architecture, Interior Architecture and Designed Objects will be hosting a lecture by Odile Decq of Odile Decq Benoît Cornette, Architectes-Urbanistes, the French Goth architect who could be said to be the anti-Richard Meier.

what kind of clothes do you avoid wearing?
anything which is not black.

what I am very interested in when I design and conceive something, is thinking about the close relationship between body and space.

when you think about quentin tarantino, robert altman…the way the camera is in a space or the way the different sequences are organized, films don't explain how you pass from one place to another. you are just 'there' and then you are somewhere else. I like these kinds of transitions…

The above quotes come from interview with the architect in designboom, which has also published some views of her firm's Paris studio.


Odeq's design philosophy can seen in her new addition for MACRO , Museo D'arte Contemporanea Roma, inserted into what was originally a Peroni beer factory, and anchored by a blood-red auditorium structure floating within a larger lobby space.(Great photographs of the construction and finished product at SkyscraperCity here.)

This foyer has been painted in black.  I hesitated in the beginning.  I have to confess I hesitated to do it because I was thinking, do I have to apply to everyone the punishment that I give to me, to be black, but in a way, yes, because of this question of being neutral, with the white.  I was thinking that if I painted  in black, this is another neutral, another neutral color, but it's a stronger one. And this stronger one will have resistance, a stronger resistance for the art, and the art has to be stronger, to be in front. And now they hang art on these walls, and it works very well.

You can see the entire Columbia University lecture from which Decq's quote was taken here.   The Chicago lecture on November 27th will be 6:00 p.m. in SAIC's Columbus Auditorium, 280 South Columbus.

Elsewhere, we've also added an AIA/Chicago/Architect Magazine Arts Club event on the 29th with Chris Sullivan, Building Enclosure Trends: Design, Energy and Codes.

This is also the last week for the exhibition The Enduring Designs of Josef Frank at the Swedish American Museum in Andersonville.  The show closes on Sunday.

Things are sparse this holiday week, but today, Monday the 19th, there's An Te Liu at UIC, and a Chicago Makes Modern book launch with Ben Nicholson and Inigo Manglano-Ovalle at the Graham. Things pick up again next week, so check out the nearly dozen great items still to come on November 2012 Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.

Prentice today - Behar, McCarter, Castro Iraola, An Te Liu, Njale, Russians, Richardson and much more - the November calendar

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November starts out today, Thursday the 1st, with the issue of landmark designation for Bertrand Goldberg's Prentice Hospital finally comes to a head at the Commissions on Chicago Landmarks monthly meeting starting at 12:45 p.m. in room 201-A (Council Chambers) at City Hall.  The event has been carefully scripted by Mayor Rahm Emanuel to quickly end in an approval of Prentice's destruction.  We'll see how much the players adhere to lines Emanuel has written for them.

It will to be hard to top today, but there are almost fifty items already on the November Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.  Its includes the announcement of the winners and display of the work of the Future Prentice Competition, at the Chicago Architecture Foundation on the 15th.

This Saturday the 3rd, Yves Béhar will be discussing Design for Tomorrow at the Chicago Humanities Festival, and next Wednesday Ann Clark discusses Design in Haiti at CAF.

You want architects? We've got Meejin Yoon at IIT Wednesday the 7th, where Jean-Louis Cohen lectures on the 14th, Eva Castro Iraola of Plasma Studio at the Art Institute Monday, the 12th, Chan-li Lin discussing Three Hospitals by Rafael Vinoly Architects at CAF lunchtime on Wednesday the 14th, An Te Liu, Monday the 19th at UIC, where Ciro Njale lectures on Friday, the 16th.

Books? Robert McCarter talks about his new book Understanding Architecture at Unity Temple on Thursday, the 8th, the same day Julia Bachrach discusses her City in a Garden at The Cliff Dwellers, and on Monday the 19th, Ben Nicholson and Inigo Manglano-Ovalle discuss their new book Chicago Makes Modern, at the Graham, where Yuval Yasky talks about Kibbutz on Tuesday the 27th

H.H. Richardson's Glessner House is celebrated with a lecture by Ken Breisch on Friday the 9th, and a day-long symposium Saturday the 10th,  the same day the Society of Architectural Historians have their annual gala, while Lisa Lise Dubé-Scherr of the Richard H. Driehaus Museum discusses the history of its home, the Nickerson Mansion, for Landmarks Illinois at the Cultural Center on the 15th, the same day Jean-Louis Cohen discusses The Russian Avant-Garde between East and West at the Graham and curator Karen Kice offers a gallery talk on the Art Institute's exhibition Building: Inside Studio Gang Architects, where Iker Gil of MAS Studio leads an "Archi-Salon" the following Saturday, the 17th

The Structural Engineers Association of Illinois discusses The Christchurch Earthquake Tuesday the 13th, the same day Christopher Enck gives an overview of 20th Century Furniture Design at the Herman Miller Showroom for AIA/Chicago.  SEAIO also offers an all-day symposium on Chicago Loads on the 7th, and a three-day conference on Fundamental and Structural Analysis for curved and Skewed Steel Bridges beginning on 14th.

And this is just scratching.  Check out the entire November 2012 Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.

Future of Grant Park Postponed, Nicholson's Aliens, Ghosts and Spirits invade, Lumenhaus to MP, Nickel archives to AIC

Apparently, the future is not yet here.  We received word today that an unveiling of the plans by Michael van Valkenburg and Associates for North Grant Park, aka Daley Bicentennial Plaza, aka Children's Museum battlefield, scheduled for this Wednesday the 17th has been cancelled.  "The team is not fully ready to present and other timing issues have arisen," wrote the Grant Park Advisory Council's Bob O'Neill, who said the session will be rescheduled at an unspecified date in the future.

Stepping into the void, the always provocative Ben Nicholson will be kicking off the Chicago Architectural Club's fall schedule with a talk on "aliens, ghosts and spirits" 7:00 p.m., at Archeworks, 625 N. Kingsbury, at Ontario.

Also on Wednesday,  Lumenhaus, Virginia Tech's entry to the DOE's 2009 Solar Decathlon competition comes to the north-south promenade of Millennium Park for a five day residency during this years Greenbuild Conference and Expo.

Inspired by the glass pavilion style Farnsworth house designed by Bauhaus architect Mies Van Der Rohe, Lumenhaus is a structure with open, flowing space that connects inside living with the outside world and is completely powered by the sun.  The north and south walls are all glass, maximizing the owner’s exposure to bright, natural daylight. The fully automated Eclipsis System, comprising independent sliding layers, permits a revolutionary design in a solar-powered house, while filtering light in beautiful, flowing patterns throughout the day.

The structure will be open 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. for tours.

The big news today:  as reported by the Trib's Blair Kamin, the Richard Nickel Committee has announced its archive of 15,000 items has been donated to the Art Institute of Chicago.  The news follows the recent publication of over 800 of those images in The Complete Architecture of Adler & Sullivan, a landmark catalog of all the firm's known work.