Thanks for the Views, Mr. Mies - one more event for November

We're pretty sure this will be the last event we add to the November Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.

This Thursday at 6:00 p.m. at the Graham, co-authors Danielle Aubert, Natasha Chandani and Noah Resnick will be discussing their new book, Thanks for the View, Mr. Mies, Lafayette Park, Detroit, which documents Mies van der Rohes enduring housing complex with both interior and exterior photographs, and interviews with homeowners, tenants and staff.  More information here. 

Saturday: Chicago Center for Green Technology celebrates 10 years; Kevin Harrington on Mies, Hilberseimer and Caldwell at Lafayette Park

This Saturday, June 16th, the Chicago Center for Green Technology marks its 10th anniversary with an all-day celebration featuring food, games, a raffle, a dunk tank and a Build Smart Expo with 40 product and service vendors.  It all takes place at the CCGT, 445 North Sacramento.  Check out more about Saturday's event, and the CCGT's ongoing mission of promoting and advancing "sustainable homes, workplaces and communities . . .  through Green Tech U seminars, guided and self-guided tours, the Green Building Resource Center, and more, here.

Also on Saturday, 3:30 to 5:00 p.m. down at Crown Hall on the IIT campus, 3360 South State, Kevin Harrington will be discussing Figure and Pattern -Mies, Hilberseimer and Caldwell at Lafayette Park, a talk held in conjunction with the Crown Hall exhibition, Lafayette Park: The Settlement Shape - running through July 27 - on the pioneering Detroit urban renewal project that is still thriving today.

Sounds interesting.  Even without a dunk tank.

SEAOI Awards, Pecha Kucha 22, Mies' Lafayette Park, rehabbing the Wrigley, Ian Schrager and much more - it's the June Calendar of Architectural Events!

Okay,we've got a ways to go, but we've got a good start on the June 2012 Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events

The week starts out on Tuesday, the 5th, with Volume 22 of the always popular Pecha Kucha Chicago, at Martyr's.  On Wednesday the 6th, Jean Guarino talks about Transforming Land Use for a 24-Hour Downtown, lunchtime at CAF, and on Thursday the 7th, Friends of Downtown host Jan Goldsmith of Zeller Development and Leonard Koroski of Goettsch Partners to talk about The Wrigley Building: Vintage Rehab of Chicago's Architectural Icon, while over at the Art Institute, assistant curator Alison Fischer presents a gallery talk on the exhibition, Rethinking Typologies: Architecture and Design from the Permanent Collection.  This Saturday, the 9th, the Structural Engineers Association of Illinois hosts their annual Structural Engineering Awards Banquet.

This week also holds the openings of two new exhibitions.  On Wednesday the 6th, the Chicago Architecture Foundation hosts a panel discussion with Joseph Calabrese of Cleveland, Michael Schwartz of San Francisco, Ted Orosz of NYC and Gabe Klein, Peter Skosey and Forest Claypool in conjunction with their new exhibition Ticket to Ride:  Bus Rapid Transit: Next Stop, Chicago.

Then on Thursday, the 7th, the Mies van der Rohe Society holds an opening party for its new show at Crown Hall, Lafayette Park: The Settlement Shape, concerning the Mies van der Rohe project, still thriving today, that was the first urban renewal project in the U.S.  The evening will also include a lecture by Noah Resnick, A Bustle in the Hedgerow - Urban Living in the Prairie Landscape, and offer a rare opportunity to see the show outside of working hours.  Normal hours are 9:00 to 5:00, Monday to Friday.  On the afternoon of June 16th, Kevin Harrington will offer another related lecture, Figure and Pattern: Mies, Hilberseimer and Caldwall at Lafayette Park.

NEOCON, Ian Schrager, Julia Bachrach at the Cliff Dwellers for Friends of the Parks, Christopher Vernon on Graceland Cemetery lunchtime at CAF, Frank Lloyd Wright's Ross House in Glencoe discussed by John Eifler for Landmarks Illinois - there's lot a more, and we've already got over two dozen great items to check out on the June 2012 Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.

Detroit's Lafayette Park at 50 - Mies's greatest triumph?

October 16th marks the 50th anniversary of the groundbreaking for Detroit's Lafayette Park, an 78-acre mixed use development not far from the city's waterfront that has proven an enduring success even as much of the city around it fell into deep distress.

Lafayette Park is the product of a team of four that gravitated around Mies van der Rohe in Chicago. First, there was developer Herbert Greenwald, who also took the risk to build Mies's 860-880 Lake Shore Drive Apartments, arguably the first modernist residential high rises. There was Mies himself and two of his IIT colleagues, the great landscape architect Alfred Caldwell, and Ludwig Hilberseimer, the planner who taught with him at the Bauhaus, and who followed him from Germany to teach at IIT.

Lafayette Park brought together these four men at the peak of their powers. It could be said to the one place where Mies, who had been steeped in socialist theory while in Germany but built his American practice on well-heeled patrons, actually married his art to social conscience. But perhaps the most extraordinary thing about Lafayette Park is the way it turns today's conventional wisdom about planning on its head. The development shears off the basic street grid, and personifies Le Corbusier's concept of the Radiant City, a series of tall skyscrapers set amidst abundant parks largely isolated from through streets. It's a basic matter of faith these days that these are all terrible ideas, but at Lafayette Park, they worked, and have continued to work for half a century.

Via PLANetizen, here's a great article from the Detroit Free Press by its architectural critic John Gallagher that tells the story. What is now called the Mies van der Rohe Residential District is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. There's also a book, Lafayette Park Detroit, edited by Charles Waldheim, who will be speaking this Wednesday, September 27th on landscape urbanism at a Chicago Architectural Club session, which will also include Sprawl author Robert Brueggman, at 6:30 P.M. at the Ispace Gallery.

Oh, and at Lafayette Park, a three bedroom condo can still be had for $135,000.,