Rafael Viñoly talks Wright, new hospital, at the Logan Center for the Arts

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Architect Rafael Viñoly was at the University of Chicago last night, speaking in the Performance Hall of the new Tod Williams/Billie Tsien Reva and David Logan Center for Arts, about to open with its own Logan Launch Festival this Friday through Saturday.  (Normally, I'd link to the architect's website, but the Rafael Viñoly Architects url is currently popping up a malware alert, so here's a link to his Wikipedia entry.)

Viñoly gave a preview of the thinking behind the newly christened University of Chicago Center for Care and Discovery, a $700 million, 10-story, 1.2 million square foot facility scheduled to open early next year.  The design is based on a 31'6" x 31'6" x 18' basic module extruded out to a building that's 570 feet long, 180 feet wide, and 198 feet high.  The actual inpatient rooms are on the top three floors, just above an inset sky lobby, providing both patients and visitors views out over the rooftops of the University and, to the north, the complete Chicago skyline.

I hope to be writing a lot more about this structure as we near the opening.  (Right now I'm working on finishing up my interview/tour with Tod Williams and Billie Tsien of the Logan Center.) For the moment, we'll just give you a little bit of Viñoly talking about Frank Lloyd Wright's Robie House . . .

. . . which was brilliantly reflected in Viñoly's own design for the Booth School of Business, just across the street . . .

 Says Viñoly . . .

Architecture is the art of the specific. There’s nothing open-ended or undetermined in architecture. It’s not, as some people used to say in the early 70’s, an autonomous discipline. There couldn’t be anything less autonomous than architecture. There’s money involved, there’s uses involved, there’s science, technology, a number of things which are more exactly parallel to the kinds of instruments and use of information than to the mastery of the craft as it happens in traditional visual art.

I think that what is remarkable in Wright’s work is the fact that he wasn’t doing the Prairie Style simply as a stylistic approach. He was pursuing a research on a proportional system and overall a compositional system that wasn’t even actually invented up until that point. If you put that in context with what was happening in Europe, it’s also a completely different approach than what modernism was based on, which was in appropriating images and ideas from painting and from the traditional arts and try to create a reality, a new philosophy.

What the Robie House does is fundamentally investigate the one thing I think unifies all architecture, which is the phenomenally subtle play of proportions and scale.

Viñoly's lecture was sponsored by Frank Lloyd Wright Preservation Trust, and was an early event this this year's edition of the incredible Chicago Ideas Week.

Schlepping with Stanley

 

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Chicago's architectural agent-provocateur Stanley Tigerman doesn't seem to think much of that whole "going gently" crap. 

His firm, Tigerman McCurry Architects, is designing a new space for the relocating Seminary Co-op Bookstore in Hyde Park.   He's got not one, but two books coming out this fall, Schlepping Through Ambivalence: Essays on an American Architectural Condition, drawing on Tigerman's writings from 1964 to - now -, and, Designing Bridges to Burn:Architectural Memoirs.  On Friday, September 9th, he'll be the inaugural lecturer for the Frank Lloyd Wright Preservation Trust/U of C series, Thinking Into the Future: The Robie House Series on Architecture, Design and Ideas, tickets and info here.  He may be an octogenarian, but to Stanley Tigerman, a schlep would appear to be a full-press sprint.

But wait, there's more! If you happen to be in the neighborhood - New Haven, that is - this Thursday, August 25th, you can stop by the iconic 1963 Yale Art and Architecture building, rededicated and renamed in 2008 to honor its architect as Paul Rudolph Hall, to hear Tigerman deliver still another lecture, DIS P L A C E  M  E  N  T, marking the opening of a retrospective on his work, Ceci n’est pas une rêverie*: The Architecture of Stanley Tigerman, which runs through November 5th.   (It's coming to the Graham in January next year.)  According to the press release . . .

Ceci n’est pas une rêverie is installed thematically, grouping Tigerman’s projects according to motifs that resonate throughout his body of work: “utopia,” “allegory,” “death,” “humor,” “division,” “drift,” “yaleiana,” “identity,” and “(dis)order.” Highlights include models and sketches of such early and mid-career projects as the Five Polytechnic Institutes in Bangladesh (1966–75); the Urban Matrix proposal on Lake Michigan (1967–68); the Daisy House, in Porter, Indiana (1975–78); and Dante’s Bathroom Addition, an  unbuilt, allegorical project for Kohler (1980), while more recent projects include the Commonwealth Edison Energy Museum, in Zion, Illinois (1987–90);the Park Lane Hotel in Kyoto (1990); the Berlin Wall project (1988); and the Holocaust Memorial Foundation of Illinois, in Skokie (2000–2009).

 . . .  [The exhibition also ] includes tableware designed for Swid Powell, along with designs for Cannon Fieldcrest, Alessi, and Cleto Munari. Original artworks by the architect include oil paintings from the “I Pledge Allegiance” series of the mid-1960s; a selection of “Architoons,” Tigerman’s cartoon-like drawings; and travel sketches from the 1970s onwards.

Also included is material dating from Tigerman's student days at Yale.  Next year, Tigerman's drawing archive goes into Yale's Manuscripts and Archives depository.

It is expected that across these many events, feathers will be ruffled, and insights gained. A report that Mr. Tigerman will also be a contestant in the fall 2011 season of Dancing With the Stars remains unconfirmed.