新年快樂! Architecture as Canvas: Luftwerks takes over Cultural Center Facade to celebrate Chinese New Year in Chicago

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You apparently can't keep Luftwerk away from the Chicago Cultural Center.  It's been less than a month since their striking media exhibit Shift was on display in the CCL's 2nd floor galleriess.  Now Petra Bachmaier and Sean Gallero's mastery of color, light, video and projection has left the building and taken over it's long Michigan Avenue facade with Spring Light, which opened last night and repeats tonight (Saturday) and Sunday, 5 to 10:00 p.m.  It's described as . . .

A celebration of light and projection inspired by Chinese philosophy, art, architecture and traditional folklore illuminate the Chicago Cultural Center to commemorate the Chinese New Year. Spring Light transforms the building into a moving world where images of nature, people, geometry and color all intertwine in an artistic and harmonious balance.

Spring Light  is an initiative of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Choose Chicago, the city's tourism operation.  It's a two-week, city-wide celebration of the Chinese New Year and Spring Festival with a sequence of events that includes shadow puppets in Macy's windows, a free celebration by Redroom Theatre tonight (Saturday) from 6:00 to 7:30 in Navy's Pier Festival hall, and parades both on Argyle Street Saturday at 1:00 and the Lunar New Year parade on Wentworth in Chinatown Sunday at 1.

In a city that's besieged with financial problems, it's tempting to make some kind of comment on circuses in lieu of bread, but the fact of the matter is Chicago has an annual GDP of nearly $600 billion.  Rahm's Chinese New Year is a self-consciously shrewd move, not only to increase tourism, but to both address China as an increasingly powerful nation, and Chicago's own increasingly vibrant Chinese-American community.  (The events have already been picked up by Chinese news agency Xinhau.) Chicago is a great city, winter - especially this winter - is often cold and dark.  The Luftwerk installations are a welcome reminder of the city's resilience.

Spring Light plays with the element's neo-classical design with a series of overlays that evoke a cast-iron storefront, Renaissance-style rusticated stone, and even an Alhambra-like veneer of light. At one point it even seems to peel away the Cultural Center's facade and draw it up like someone removing a sweater over their head.  But there's a lot more than that, as you can seen in this video of excerpts (click on YouTube to see the video full-size):

Luminance has taken over the McCormick Tribune ice skating rink at Millennium Park.  As with Shift, the shadows of the skaters lose their monochrome and extend, contract and intersect in a rainbow of pastel colors. 

 

 

 

 

Also from Luftwerk:

Chicago Rediscovered in a Luminous Field, at Cloud Gate in Chicago's Millennium Park

Retro Saturday: Constructing Da Bean - Anish Kapoor's Cloud Gate in Millennium Park

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 We knew it when it was just a ring.

Almost as soon as it was unveiled in 2004, Anish Kapoor's Cloud Gate, a/k/a Da Bean,  not only became the centerpiece of the new Millennium Park, but it quickly took its place along with the Water Tower and Marina City as one of the most universally recognizable symbols of Chicago.  We were there to capture the construction, its imperfect debut with joins still showing, and the final careful sanding that created the seamless reflective liquid form that we see today.

Check it all out, photographs in abundance:

A photo essay on the making of Anish Kapoor's Cloud Gate Sculpture

Millennium Park - Sculpture as Architecture

It's a Bean!  Big Tent Gives Birth (Again) to Kapoor's Cloud Gate Sculpture.

Chicago Rediscovered in a Luminous Field, at Cloud Gate. 

Retro Saturday - Constructing Frank Gehry's Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park

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Since people have a lot better things to do on the weekend than spend it on the Internet, we're starting a new Retro Saturday series looking back to some of our original pieces.

This coming summer will be the 9th anniversary of the opening of Frank Gehry's Pritzker Pavilion.  Millennium Park has become such an integral park of Chicago, it's easy to forget what an amazing transformation it represented.

Back in 2004, we wrote a series of pieces on the Park, and on all its major attractions - the Pritzker, the Crown Fountain, Cloud Gate a/k/a Da Bean, from construction to completion.  All profusely illustrated with photographs.

Read: The Construction of Frank Gehry's Pritzker Pavilion

           Frank Gehry, Millennium Park,  and the Development of the Techno-Baroque

           Millennium Park - After the Hype

Chicago Streetscene: Fifty Shades of Fall at the Lurie Garden

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Chicago Street Scene: Snow Globe

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Relief for NATO Weekend, at the Lurie Garden

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 this one's a cheat - taken at the Widow Clarke house.

 . . . and this one's from somewhere along Archer avenue.  Now back to Lurie:

 Buckyballs.

more after the break.

Chicago Streetscene: Veined Lantern

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Chicago Rediscovered in a Luminous Field, at Cloud Gate only through Monday

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Ever since its unveiling at the opening of Chicago's spectacular Millennium Park in 2004, Anish Kapoor's  Cloud Gate sculpture, more popularly known as Da Bean, has been casting its funhouse reflections of cityscape and observers alike, but this week for the first time the amoeba-like sculpture was turned over to artists to exploit its mirroring potential.

Luminous Field, created by Chicago artists Petra Bachmaier and Sean Gallero of Luftwerk, is an installation of patterns of light and color projected down on Cloud Gate and its plinth by 10 projectors mounted on high towers, to a soundtrack of music composed by Owen Clayton Condon of Third Coast Percussion.  On certain nights, the installation also included concerts, and performers from the Collaboraction theater company.

"We create the stage for you to be there," says the team in this video.


The video shows the projections as a visual whole, which you'll probably have difficulty seeing as the installation has proven immensely popular, filling the "public playground"with people.  Since projectors don't discriminate, the crowd itself becomes a screen, with the presentation existing in three dimensions - on the plinth, in reflection on Cloud Gate, and on the spectators, themselves.

Luminous Field is a compelling demonstration - at once amazing and gentle - of the convergence of art, theater and architecture in the living dynamic of a great city.  Bathing it in striking patterns, Luftwerk helps us see and feel the city which we inhabit, workaday, often unseeing and unfeeling.  A benign bug-zapper for human beings, Luminous Field's light and sound draws in the politely jostling crowd, a flash mob of interacting strangers, individual personalities whose lives may never intersect again, for a small succession of moments finding common purpose in an exercise of the delight of being alive.

Luminous Field runs only Saturday, February 18th, from 6:00 to 10:00 p.m., and Sunday and Monday, the 19th and 20th, from 6:00 to 9:00 p.m.

Rehabbing Chicago, in Maple and Granite

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So, yeah, we've kind of dropped out for the moment, and the world doesn't seem any worse for wear.  Posts will be few through the holiday, as we deal with cats that won't eat, crumbling teeth, and Siri waking up my iPhone to make sarcastic remarks about the way I've dressed myself for the day.

We will, however, reopen for Black Friday at 9:45 p.m. Thanksgiving evening (take that, Wal-Mart!) and if you want to get a head start and out of the chill, doors to the cramped vestibule next to the dumpsters open at 6:00, with free hot coffee, strolling Mariachis, and a phalanx of really angry turkeys with some factory farm pictures they want to share with you.

Chicago Streetscene: Millennium Flush

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Oculi

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Organic Construction in the Garden of Lurie

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Through this portal, some of the most amazing engineering in Chicago can be found.

Check out those fractals!

From Louis Sullivan, to Frank Lloyd Wright, to Cecil Balmond, Zaha, and beyond, architects periodically convince themselves they've arrived at the organic, at a grasp of the informal that breaks the bounds of the traditional construction, and rivals the fecundity of nature.

A look at a single flower betrays how short even our best designs fall. The most abject plant is a marvel of adaptation, form and function far beyond even our most sophisticated attempts.

In the end, it's not an emulation of natural form, but geometric abstraction - the circle and square, the right angle and the straight line - that stand most human in their aspect, encapsulating both the mastery of our intellect, and the tragic denial of the primacy of our existence as living entities arising out of nature.

 Set against this splendor, our proud towers seem paltry reductions.