Architect as Goth: Odile Decq to lecture at SAIC/AIADO

Yes, I know it's the 19th, but it's never too late to be adding stuff to the November Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.

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Specifically, on November 27th, the School of the Art Institute, Department of Architecture, Interior Architecture and Designed Objects will be hosting a lecture by Odile Decq of Odile Decq Benoît Cornette, Architectes-Urbanistes, the French Goth architect who could be said to be the anti-Richard Meier.

what kind of clothes do you avoid wearing?
anything which is not black.

what I am very interested in when I design and conceive something, is thinking about the close relationship between body and space.

when you think about quentin tarantino, robert altman…the way the camera is in a space or the way the different sequences are organized, films don't explain how you pass from one place to another. you are just 'there' and then you are somewhere else. I like these kinds of transitions…

The above quotes come from interview with the architect in designboom, which has also published some views of her firm's Paris studio.


Odeq's design philosophy can seen in her new addition for MACRO , Museo D'arte Contemporanea Roma, inserted into what was originally a Peroni beer factory, and anchored by a blood-red auditorium structure floating within a larger lobby space.(Great photographs of the construction and finished product at SkyscraperCity here.)

This foyer has been painted in black.  I hesitated in the beginning.  I have to confess I hesitated to do it because I was thinking, do I have to apply to everyone the punishment that I give to me, to be black, but in a way, yes, because of this question of being neutral, with the white.  I was thinking that if I painted  in black, this is another neutral, another neutral color, but it's a stronger one. And this stronger one will have resistance, a stronger resistance for the art, and the art has to be stronger, to be in front. And now they hang art on these walls, and it works very well.

You can see the entire Columbia University lecture from which Decq's quote was taken here.   The Chicago lecture on November 27th will be 6:00 p.m. in SAIC's Columbus Auditorium, 280 South Columbus.

Elsewhere, we've also added an AIA/Chicago/Architect Magazine Arts Club event on the 29th with Chris Sullivan, Building Enclosure Trends: Design, Energy and Codes.

This is also the last week for the exhibition The Enduring Designs of Josef Frank at the Swedish American Museum in Andersonville.  The show closes on Sunday.

Things are sparse this holiday week, but today, Monday the 19th, there's An Te Liu at UIC, and a Chicago Makes Modern book launch with Ben Nicholson and Inigo Manglano-Ovalle at the Graham. Things pick up again next week, so check out the nearly dozen great items still to come on November 2012 Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.

Lichtenstein Express

  click images for larger view (recommended)

It's really meant to be seen above-ground as your car barrels down the Kennedy Expressway, a view  you can actually experience at about the 2:45 mark in the video found here.

The mural wraps around three sides of the loft building at 1735 North Ashland- -just south of the rail line that is becoming The Bloomingdale Trail - that had been home to the American Sample and Printing Company in the 1920's, and the Chicago Apparatus Company in the 1960's.  In the 1990's, the late Chicago menswear retailer Bigsby & Kruthers used the building as a warehouse, and began the practice of advertising via huge 8,600 square-foot murals facing the Kennedy, featuring Chicago sports figures such as Sammy Sosa, Michael Jordan and, most infamously, Dennis Rodman, whose mural featured a change of hair color every few days and resulted in gawking motorists ramping up travel times by up to 40 minutes.  It's identify as an architectural billboard eventually subsumed the structure's identity - it's now officially know as The Mural Building.

After LaSalle Bank assumed Bigsby's lease, it continued the program with its own murals.  LaSalle Bank was later absorbed and rebranded as the Chicago branch of the Bank of America, one of the key underwriters of the spectacular Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective, exhibition, running at the Art Institute through September 3rd, which has already blanketed the city with a promotion campaign including banners, stickers double-decker buses and election-day palm cards.

Working with the School of the Art Institute, a competition was held among students "to design a mural in the Pop Art style highlighting Chicago’s scenes and unique heritage."  The $7,500 first prize was won by Adam Horrigan, "a native of Grand Island, N.Y., who is pursuing a post-baccalaureate certificate in visual communication design."

The mural begins with the Trump Tower and ends with Marina City.  In between is the Chicago River and a ship moving under an opened bascule (not drawbridge, Conan) bridge, the Chicago flag and what looks to be a deep dish pizza.  The back fire escape actually looks like a three-dimensional expression of the structure of the bridge's under-carriage.

An estimated 400,000 people pass by the mural every weekday.