Great Sunday Reading: Kogan on Graceland, Borrelli on Complexity and Contradiction at The 606

The Trib's architecture critic Blair Kamin gets a run for his money with two great pieces by his colleagues in this Sunday's edition.  (You can see the stories in the print edition, or via free digital subscription on the Trib's website.)

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Rick Kogan on Graceland
First up, Rick Kogan has a great story on Graceland Cemetery, and the restoration by Bill Bickford of Holabird and Roche's 1888 arts-and-craft chapel.  Kogan reports that the cemetery could well become the final resting place of legendary film critic Roger Ebert, which would extend Graceland's role as a sort of Pantheon for important Chicagoans.  Especially architects - Graceland's got everyone from Daniel Burnam to John Wellborn Root, Louis Sullivan, Bruff Goff, Marion Mahony Griffin and Mies van der Rohe  In 2007, a new memorial was dedicated to William Lebaron Jenney, a century after his ashes were scattered over the cemetery.

Read:  Graceland, and restored chapel, a wonder to behold.

Christopher Borrelli on The 606

Even better, however, is Christopher Borrelli's consideration of The Bloomingdale Trail, now rechristened, as we wrote about Friday, The 606.  Borrelli faces head-on what is, in the end, the key question about the project:  when you take a rotting piece of real infrastructure and transform it into a public park, do you wipe out the very identity that make the place worth saving?  

And make no mistake, the Trail exists, even today.  As Borrelli relates, although every single one of them are illegal trespassers, the Trail attracts a large number of people who see past the broken glass to walk, jog, and even practice yoga while enjoying the Trail in its very distinctive current state . . .

The old Canadian Pacific rail, which hasn't been used in decades and runs along Bloomingdale Avenue (hence the trail's name), has rusted into chocolate autumn browns. The dark wooden tracks running beneath those rails have splintered. And the ground, littered with broken stones and glass shards, sprouts tufts of lilting greens and long grasses and sporadic fields of dandelions, is so dense in places you wonder if, given a few more decades of unimpeded neglect, a prairie could return to the West Side.

Standing on the Bloomingdale Trail feels like standing inside a Terrence Malick movie.

It is a ruin, and it is real.  What will replace it, in the words of the Trust for Public Land's Beth White, is “a giant, seamless artwork.”  Borrelli counters that it's already art.  “But it's not safe,” is Ms. White's reply.

And there's the rub.  The 606 is a Haussmannian-scaled intervention.  It involves not only the gentrification of the 2.7 mile rail line, but the replacement of a great deal of existing artwork such as the charming dog murals at Churchill Park.

Those interventions happened over time, neighborhood by neighborhood.  Although designed for variations, and with substantial community input, The 606 is a unitary, imposed design which, most likely, will speak less about the Chicago out of which it arose than the Chicago the leadership would like it to become.

Today, Paris wouldn't be Paris without those broad boulevards Haussmann smashed through the crowded older city.  On the other, hand Paris would also not be Paris without the narrow streets of the maze-like districts that survived the transformation. 

What I really like about Borrelli's take on The 606 is how he gets the complexity of architecture, and how its inextricably intertwined with culture, commerce, politics and life as it's lived day-to-day, moment-to-moment.  He has an acute awareness of the larger issues that sometimes eludes Kamin, who often seems most comfortable treating buildings as autonomous objects.

As I wrote on Friday, the new name The 606 is indicative of the pervasive, generic leveling that is a hallmark of our supply chain economy.  The new Bloomingdale Trail, assuming it delivers on its promise, will be a handsome new civic amenity, but, as Borrelli observes . . .

How do you sand down the rough edges of a place like this and make it accessible to the entire community without removing the raw beauty that makes the place so unusual and memorable?

Read:  On the Trail of Art

Also:

• If Dogs Ruled the Art World:  Canine-ized Matisse, Dali and Seurat at Churchill Park
• Major Jenney Garners a Salute
• Sour Disposition Friday:  Vue53 and The 606

If Dogs Ruled the Art World - Canine-ized Matisse, Dali and Seurat at Churchill Park

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So, it's not exactly Roy Lichenstein's cribs on the work of the likes of Cezanne, Gris, and Frank Lloyd Wright on view at the don't-miss Art Institute retrospective, but then, it's not Dogs Playing Poker either.

At the Churchill Field Dog Park in Bucktown, painted along the side of the rail viaduct that is to become the Bloomingdale Trail, there are a series of murals in which the artists pay tribute to some of the most iconic works of Western art by depopulating the humans and replacing them with dogs.

Colleen Cothern

John Bambino

Rainbow Kitty

(if you know the artist's name, please add a comment)

I'm sure the cats would respond in kind, but - wait - there are no cat parks.  What's up with that?

Classicist/Modernist Smackdown, Luis Urculo, Margaret McCurry: Distillations, Future City 2012, The L, Henry Ives Cobb's Chicago, Tugendhat, Bloomingdale, Hedrich-Blessing - it's the January 2012 Calendar!

It's Classicist vs. Modernist smackdown night January 19th,  as Iveta Cerná, Head of Villa Tugendhat at CAF faces off at 6:00 p.m. against Tom Beeby, of the Harold L Washington Library, at the Richard H. Driehaus Museum, a/k/a Nickerson Mansion.

But that's just two of the highlights of the January 2012 Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.

On Wednesday, January 25th, Madrid architect Luis Urculo lectures at the Graham, while at the Poliform showroom, Margaret McCurry signs copies of Distillations, the new monograph on her work. On Friday, the 27th, architect Will Bruder lectures at Crown Hall, IIT


There seems to be a new tradition of holiday parties after the holidays, which includes Architecture for Humanity Chicago Chapter's Holiday Hangover which couples the Black Cloud Gallery with Friday the 13th, while APT and others host a Chicago Preservation Holiday Party 2012 on the 11th.

Saturday the 21st is the 2012 Future City Chicago Regional Finals at UIC, where 6th, 7th and 8th trades from area schools  compete with their own visions.

More authors: Greg Borzo discusses the The Chicago L for Friends of Downtown at the Cultural Center this Thursday, the 5th,  Barbara Geiger talks about Low-Key Genius: The life and Work of Landscape-Gardener O.C. Simonds, and Edward W. Wolner discusses Henry Ives Cobb's Chicago for Landmarks Illinois at the Cultural Center on the 19th.

More?  This Thursday marks still another month when the Commission on Chicago Landmarks completely ignores the battle to save Bertrand Goldberg's Prentice Hospital, SEAOI has a dinner program on Geotechnical Lessons Learned on Tuesday the 10th, while Tuesday, the 17th, AIA  Chicago offers a tour of the ACE Technical Charter High School serving students with an interest in architecture, construction and engineering, and the Chicago Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians have a tour of the legendary photographers Hedrich Blessing.

Other CAF lunchtime lectures feature The Bloomingdale Trail on the 18th, and Zurich Esposito, Julie Liska, Pat Saldana Natke and others on the Small Firm/Small Project Awards on the 25th.

I'm sure we'll be adding more events, especially since the Chicago Plan and Community Development Commissions and the Center for Green Technology haven't released their 2012 schedules yet, but we've already got over 30 great items.  Check out the entire January 2012 Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.