Chicago Streetscene: Head

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Adler & Sullivan's Auditorium gets a view block

We wrote last year about how the construction of Roosevelt's University's new vertical dorm uncovered, however briefly, a part of Adler and Sullivan's Auditorium Building that hadn't been seen in over half a century.

We've been spoiled down through the years by another open view of the Auditorium building from the southwest, courtesy of a surface parking lot that's been there since the days when the raptors were dropping off their dinomobiles.

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Now that's changing.

Under construction is Roosevelt's new 27,000-square-foot Lillian and  Larry Goodman Center, designed by Solomon Cordwell Buenz.  The two-level building is essentially a field house to support the university's athletic program.  It was jump-started by a $3,000,000 gift from real estate  magnate Larry Goodman, founder of the Community Discount store chain.  Opening is scheduled in time for the 2012-13 academic year.

 

It's possible the Goodman Center may actually be the tallest structure ever to occupy the site.  The classic Rand McNally view from 1893 shows it as a vacant lot, and a vintage postcard on the Chicago-L website  offers a murky view of what appears to be either a single story building, or a sequence of plywood walls papered over with billboards.

 The somewhat derelict self-park next door, however. endures.

Getting Chicago Culture's Light out from under the Bushel - One Word, Benjamin: Streaming

If you're one of the people who actually check out my monthly calendars, you know - both of you - that there's always a wealth of great lectures, forums and presentations going on.  Like fireflies, they light for a moment and then disappear.  If you live anywhere else in the world other than Chicago, or if you just couldn't make it downtown that day, well, too bad for you.

It took cultural institutions a long time to figure out that whole internet thingy.  And they're still catching up to basic idea that public events needn't be disposables.

At one time, the Graham Foundation was making its lectures available online, but that seems to have fallen by the wayside  To best of my knowledge, the great Art Institute creates custom-made videos, but no streaming.

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Now, the Chicago Architecture Foundation has taken the reins and gone where its more monied brethren have dared not tread.  I knew that last Wednesday's CAF lunchtime lecture with Lesley Slavitt of Roosevelt University and VOA's Christopher Groesbeck discussing the school's spectacular new dorm building was likely to be a good one.  Unfortunately, I couldn't get away (and it sounds like they had a full house), but, picking up on a CAF Facebook post, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that I could also take in the lecture on my computer as it streamed live.

It wasn't anything fancy - just a single camera covering both the speaker and the projected slides, and there was, truth to tell, some major audio distortion problems - but it meant that even those who couldn't be there in person didn't have to miss out.  More to the point, a recording of the lecture is now available on the CAF Facebook page to anyone in the world via on-line streaming.

The technology - in this case via Ustream - isn't expensive.  In its basic form, including ads, it's actually free.  Surely Chicago's other great cultural institutions can afford free.  For a bit more money and effort, you could load the slides beforehand and actually show them in full screen with occasional cuts to the speaker.  You can go High Def or have multiple cameras.  You can even do green screen effects.  Think Alison Fisher lecturing on Bertrand Goldberg while appearing to be hanging by her thumbs off a Marina City balcony. (ok, maybe some bells and whistles you don't really need). 

The point is that the technology is manageable and it's inexpensive.  How long before Chicago's major institutions transcend the 20th century and enter the 21st?

The Chicago Humanities Festival is already on the ball, posting YouTube videos of many of its lectures, including such speakers as Dan Savage, playwrights Tony Kushner and Sam Shepard, as well as the lecture by Jeanne Gang you see below.

Tonight, Tuesday, February 28th, the Chicago Architecture Foundation is offering the latest in its series of Chicago Debates: Beating the Odds: Designing a Casino for Chicago - Lakeside Resort or Bling Bingo in a Box, an all-star event moderated by Edward Lifson with Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, the Reader's Mick Dumke, CNU's John Norquist, Kimbel Goluska and Dennis Judd.  (Apologies for the montage below.)

 It starts at 6:00 p.m., it's free with registration, and it's at the fabulous Chicago Theater.  If you can, you should go.  If you can't, the CAF is streaming it for you, off of their Facebook page.  There's no link for it yet, but I'm betting there will be by 6:00 p.m. Tuesday.

If the CAF and CHF can do it, why not everyone else?  Chicago's riches shouldn't be a local secret.  They should be available to the world.

A Brigadoon Moment at Adler & Sullivan's Auditorium

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When our indefatigable correspondent Bob Johnson sent us the above photograph of the progress of VOA's stunning new 32-story. 469-feet-tall, glass walled "Vertical Campus" (naming rights still available) for Roosevelt University, we were reminded that a minor bit of history has just been rediscovered.  And it's already living on borrowed time.

For the last forty years, the Vertical Campus site was taken up by the late, unlamented Herman Crown Center, an infelicitous 19-story high design by Mittelbusher & Tourtelot, a firm perhaps best known locally for their work on the Krannert Art Museum at the U of I, Champaign/Urbana.  The Crown Center completely covered the north wall of Adler & Sullivan's 1889 Auditorium Building.

Over eight decades earlier, however, on Bastille Day, 1887, developer William Giles entered into an agreement with the fledgling Chicago Auditorium Association working out the details for the party wall that his 1875  Giles Building, a six-story, mansard-roofed structure designed by architect Otis L. Wheelock, would soon be sharing with the Association's massive new, Adler & Sullivan designed home.

With the Crown Center demolished, we're now able to see - for a brief period of time - a bit of architectural archeology.  The Auditorium's north wall is now exposed.  Most of it, that part butting up against the Giles, is alley brick.  At the top however, above what was then the roofline of the Giles, a section of the Auditorium's north wall has a full finish, topped by a mini-loggia which mirrored that of the Auditorium tower,  from which Adler, Sullivan, and Frank Lloyd Wright in their offices could look down - probably on multiple levels - on the Giles.

Soon this facing will again disappear, this time behind the new VOA Vertical Campus, which has its own, pre-made party wall.  While the renderings of the new structure almost all emphasize the shimmering glass walls on three of its elevations . . .

. . . the northern elevation is quite different, and far more utilitarian, with what appears to be a shear, blank concrete wall rising for half the structure's height.

Obviously, this is anticipating future development to the north, on what is now a surface parking lot.  Let's hope that the economy revs up fast enough so that we won't have to be staring at that towering mass of bare concrete for the next few decades.

I won't claim it merits a special trip, but if you happen to be in vicinity of Wabash and Van Buren, it might be worth looking up to grab a time travel glance at a Adler & Sullivan remnant that's again about to vanish into the steel and glass mists.