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.

The synapses of America: Koblin's Flight Patterns at Art Institute's Rethinking Typologies, plus Tagore's Paintings, only through Sunday

Rethinking Typologies is a kind of "greatest hits" placeholder show in the Modern Wing's architectural galleries,. There's a rich selection of drawings from everyone from Paul Schweikher to Bruce Goff to Richard Neutra to Helmut Jahn.  The model of the Bruce Graham/Walter Netsch Inland Steel Building is on display, as well as one of Studio/Gang's Aqua and Stanley T. Allen's New Maribor Art Gallery from 2010.

From the development of the modern house to the emergence of information design, each era faces the challenge of adapting conventional ideas to new technology, social needs, and cultural ideals. This exhibition takes a broad historical view of the innovations that have shaped contemporary life and the built environment through suites of work devoted to historical and emerging typologies in architecture and design. Spanning the 20th and 21st centuries, these thematic suites highlight important recent acquisitions and areas of strength in the permanent collection of the Department of Architecture and Design at the Art Institute of Chicago.

The design Gallery includes a fascinating selection of items in graphic design, designer flatware, furniture and lighting, including the Plumen 101,  from Hulger and Samuel Wilkinson Design, seen twirling above and at rest below, billed as "the world's first designer low energy light bulb." 

click images for larger view

We hope to be writing more about this show,  and since it runs through July 29th we might even get around to it, but for now, we're bringing you, at the top of this post, a video of Aaron Koblin's Flight Patterns, 2011.

This work was originally developed as a series of experiments for the project "Celestial Mechanics" by colleagues Scott Hessels and Gabriel Dunne at UCLA. FAA data was parsed and plotted using the Processing programming environment. The frames were composited with Adobe After Effects and/or Maya. Visit original project website here.

According to the artist's website, Koblin "takes real-world and community generated data and uses it to reflect on cultural trends and the changing relationship between humans and the systems they create. "

Flight Patterns is like a brain scan of a restless America constantly on the move.  As midnight approaches, the nation begins to go to sleep.  Somewhere around 1:00 a.m. EST, the continent goes almost completely dark. A delicate web of red-eye flights from the West Coast start threading east.  The East Coast - the frontal lobe? - begins to glow, an increasingly dense matrix.  Over the Atlantic, a spray of flights from Europe approach, and soon the entire nation is a mass of colorful synapses pulsing with charges both weak -sleeping, daydreaming - to strong - tapping away on laptops and iPads, and an occasional flight attendant or pilot in full mental meltdown.

Tellingly, there seem to be a lot more flights to Hawaii than to Asia - a troubling  harbinger?

And speaking of the Art Institute, I should mention that you have only through Sunday to see another great show, The Last Harvest: Paintings of  Rabindranath Tagore, which closes on Sunday the 15th.  Nobel Prize winner Tagore, whose 150th birthday was celebrated last year, was one of the greatest cultural figures to come out of India - poet, musician, philosopher.  And if that weren't enough, he decided at age 63 to become a painter. 61 of his works are on display in the Art Institute show, mostly striking portraits in an arresting and individual palette.  Tagore once referred to himself as "a celebrated colour-blind person" and was said to have difficulty distinguishing reds and greens.

Today, Tuesday, April 10th at 6:00 p.m. in the Art Institute's Fullerton Hall, scholar Partha Mitter will lecture on The Radical Imagination of Tagore's Painting placing "Tagore's art within the context of the development of modernism in India."