Fuksas, Pecha, Gang, Josef Frank, Iannelli, Millet, Lai, VJAA, Visionary Cities, more - it's the September Calendar of Chicago Architecture Events and Exhibitions

Once more into the breach, dear friends . . .

After taking August off, we've got a very full  September Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.

among the highlights:

• Massamiliano Fuksas at the Graham (Tuesday, September 11)
•  Visionary Cities: Urban and Architectural Futures to Come, a day-long UIC School of Architecture conference chaired by Alexander Eisenschmidt with Sam Jacob, Clare Lyster, Sarah Dunn, Robert Bruegmann, Bill Menking and more, at MCA (Saturday, the 22nd)
•  Mikyoung Kim at ITT (Wednesday, the 12th) 

• Jimenez Lai offers a "quasi-bookreading" of his Citizens of No Place at the Graham (Tuesday, the 18th)
• Pecha Kucha Volume 23 with Lee Bay, Kara Kotwas and more, at Martyr's (Tuesday, the 4th)
• David Van Zanten on The Work of Louis Julien Millet at the Second Presbyterian Church (Thursday, the 20th)
• Vincent James and Jennifer Yoos of VJAA at IIT (Wednesday, the 19th)
• Learning from Tristan Sterk, AIA Chicago (Thursday, the 27th)

• Women of Influence: The Achievements of Women in Chicago's Early History, at Häfele America Chicago Showroom (Monday, the 10th)
• Glessner House's 125th Anniversary Gala on (Thursday, the 13th)

•  Secret Spaces Atop Chicago, with author Tony Macaluso, CAF lunchtime. (Wednesday, the 26th)
• Thomas Leslie discusses How Lateral Bracing Influenced Two Generations of Chicago Skyscrapers, lunchtime at CAF (Wednesday, the 19th)
• The White City: A Musical, at Glessner House (Friday, the 28th)

Exhibitions?  In addition to the great Skyscraper show at MCA, Wright's Roots at Expo 72 Gallery , and Unseen City at CAF,  this month we've got openings for ArchiTech Gallery's Alfonso Iannelli: Modern by Design, The Enduring Designs of Josef Frank at the Swedish America Museum, and, of course, the highly anticipated Building: Inside Studio Gang Architects at the Art Institute.

I'm sure we'll be adding more, but already there's over 50 great events this month.  Check out all the details on the September 2012 Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events (and Exhibitions).

Jeanne Gang: The Sky's the Limit - hidden documentary debuts tonight on WTTW

If look at the WTTW schedule for tonight, you wouldn't even know that it's there, but somewhere after the conclusion of tonight's 9:00 p.m. showing of American Masters, Bill T. Jones A Good Man  (the current estimate is around 10:30 p.m.) they'll be screening Jeanne Gang: The Sky's the Limit - a new documentary produced by Dan Andries, shot and edited by Tim Boyd.

It may be short - under 14 minutes - but it's far from filler.  For talking heads, there's Blair Kamin, Stanley Tigerman describing the rise of the Chicago skyscraper from the Great Fire to Mies to Gang, Redmoon Theater's Jim Lasko, and - apologies in advance - me.  Most importantly, there's lots of Jeanne Gang, herself, discussing her work and thought, and seen in action at Studio/Gang's Bucktown offices.  Boyd's photography is sharp and expressive, and the production covers a lot of ground without feeling rushed.

If you're not one for sleeping, the combo of documentaries is scheduled to be repeated on WTTW at 12:00 a.m., Monday Morning, November 14th.  Or you could just watch Jeanne Gang: The Sky's the Limit on-line here.

"He was still was wanting us to repeat Aqua, right?"  "He was wanting something Aqua-esque, yes."

Jeanne Gang before Aqua (and being name a MacArthur genius) - an early portrait.

"I was always fascinated with how pieces came together . . . When we make form, we’re thinking about how can we make the identity fluctuate."

When Studio/Gang architect Jeanne Gang was announced as the winner of one of this year'$500,000 MacArthur Foundation "Genius Grant" fellowships, I was reminded that just a week or two ago, I had come across a profile I had written, based on several interviews with Gang, back in 2004, as her career as an architect was just getting started. Among many things, she talks about growing up in Boone County, giant Pink Sea Snails, Rem Koolhaas, Marilyn Monroe and several of her early projects, including the Starlight Theater in Rockford, the Marble Curtain, the Chinese American Service League, and the Ford Calumet Environmental Center, among others.

 I don't think it's been published before, but you can read the complete profile - with photos - here.

On an Overgrown Path

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As Chicago grew to greatness, there were two basic types of park design, the "passive" designed for strolling amidst scenic vistas, making the new housing for the affluent rising along the boulevards even more attractive, and the "active", engineered to channel the leisure time of emerging Chicago's largely immigrant working class into wholesome programs and activities - swimming pools, baseball diamonds, field houses and the like.

You can see the persistence of the two approaches even in Chicago's front yard, Grant Park.  The part east of the railroad tracks, a "passive" park that been allowed to deteriorate and depopulate to point where vagrants and drug dealers were the primary users, was transformed into Millennium Park, cram-full of attractions such as Cloud Gate, the Pritzker Pavilion, and Crown Fountain, with a huge restaurant thrown in for good measure.  Daley Bicentennial Plaza, east of the tracks at end of Frank Gehry's BP bridge, was more "passive", an oasis from the hyperactivity to the west, suitable for strolling, relaxing, reflecting, or taking your kids to the small playlot.  Hence the battle to keep the eastern half free from a new building for Chicago Children's Museum, complete with jagged, soaring skylights.

An argument is made that in a city like Chicago, dense and crammed with structure, the "passive" park's attempt to emulate nature is a anachronistic affectation.  This is the city, it's man-made - get over it.

I remain unconvinced.  The global, supply-chain economy has created a supply-chain architecture, increasingly mechanized and dehumanized, built on a Six Sigma value system where efficiency is the highest possible good and variability a hated enemy.  Whereas the best architecture of the age of Mies was an expression of regularity and order as a response to the violent anarchy of the time, the best architecture of our time is usually a disruption of the straitjacket of supply-chain architecture.

Within this context, I believe that an expression of nature, as natural and variable as our meddling little hands can make it, is an essential relief in a city like Chicago.  For me, the best part of the Chicago riverwalk is where the trees and flowers take you away from the hard edges of Wacker Drive, where the seating isn't a concrete bench or a metal seat anchored into the ground, but the movable chairs under the shade of tall trees that let the visitor improvise their own space.

That's also why my favorite new public space in Chicago is the Lincoln Park Zoo Nature Boardwalk, designed by Studio/Gang with WMD Environmental.  We still have a full article on the Boardwalk coming up, but this weekend it was a great place to visit.

At the close of its second summer, the Boardwalk is really coming into its own.  On Saturday, after the morning thunderstorms and rain, the sun glistened in the moisture of the plants and flowers.  Nature, which in the Boardwalk's first season was sedate and controlled, was, on Saturday, bursting through, as if the prairie were about to take back the city. Black-eyed Susans, Blazing Stars, Cardinal flowers, Cup Plants, to name just a few, were growing in abundance.

 

Yes, we need soccer fields and baseball diamonds, skate parks and bicycle paths, and all the other resources parks can offer, but sometimes it's a good thing to encounter an alternative path.

Gang disputes Roeder Ford Calumet Environmental Center numbers

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In an email, Studio/Gang architect Jeanne Gang disputed the numbers quoted in a recent article by Chicago Sun-Times real estate reporter on the costs and status of the proposed Ford Calumet Environment Center, which Studio/Gang won a competition to design all the way back in 2004.  Articles around that time quoted it as being s $6,800.000 project.

However, writes Gang, "The project construction budget was established after the competition, in 2006, and was, including site work, $17 million.  Now in 2011 the cost is $20 million (not 27).  The difference is due to time escalation of cost, NOT cost overruns . . . The budget may have to be adjusted now due to [the current] financial situation, but the project is not cancelled.  In fact, they are in the middle of a fundraising campaign."

Having had to deal media flacks his entire career, it's puzzling how Roeder would just swallow a city bureaucrat's latest spin whole.  "If your mother says she loves you, check it out," was the mantra for cub reporters at the old City News Bureau, but perhaps the new realities of print journalism make that it impossible.

Being a blogger rather than a reporter, I'm not double-sourcing Gang's figures, either, but my bet is they're a lot more reliable than a second-hand version of a city bureaucrat's spin.

More importantly, the word that fundraising for the project is continuing is encouraging.  At the time of competition, it's projected completion date was 2006.  If the city had spent half the effort they wasted trying to jam a children's  museum in Grant Park, the Ford Calumet Environmental Center would have been completed long before the challenges of the recent global financial meltdown, and people would be coming to Chicago from throughout the world to see it.

Richard M. Daley, the killer of Chicago Architecture, leaves us one last parting gift

Can you name a single building the two-decade administration of Richard M. Daley put up that's in the great tradition of Chicago architecture? (And don't mention Millennium Park, where everything great was the result of the activism of others.)

His father gave us the Daley Center.  The son gave us Block 37, and the wanton destruction of the Michael Reese Hospital campus.  As being reported by the Sun-Times David Roeder,  Daley's last kick in the teeth to the city he supposedly so dearly loves is the death of the Ford Calumet Environmental Center designed by Jeanne Gang/ Studio Gang.  For the better part of a decade, despite funding of $6,000,000 from Ford, the city has failed to move a single brick toward constructing the spectacular design that won a competition all the way back in 2004.

Now, quietly, the bureaucrats at the Department of the Environment, according to Roeder, are saying the Gang design will never be built, because the original $7.600,000 estimate has soared to $27,000,000.  Except maybe not.  "It's unclear if that includes staff and programming," says Roeder, who doesn't know, and is apparently too lazy to find out.  He simply swallowed the city's line whole.

And of course, the city line is that it's all Studio/Gang's fault, just like Richard M. Daley tried to pin the cost overruns at Millennium Park on Frank Gehry during one of his infamous, petulant press conferences.  What's the truth?  We'll probably never know.

What I do know, however, is that Studio/Gang has made its reputation by creating amazing architecture on very tight budgets in projects such as the SOS Community Center, at the Chinese American Service League.  That is part of the public record.  Also part of the public record is that this is the administration that so mis-managed construction of just one key project that they somehow squandered almost half a billion dollars on a "superstation" beneath Block 37 before giving up and putting it in mothballs, never to open.  I will leave to you which party's motivations are the more reliable.


Most cities would be thrilled to get a first class design by a world-class architect like Jeanne Gang, and would be working overtime to make it happen.  Daley's City Hall takes seven years to find out it's too expensive and then just walks away.

Richard M. Daley's PR machine was relentless in portraying him as Chicago architecture's greatest friend, yet the city's architects spent most of his reign trying to appease what was perceived as his great love of neo-classicism, which he picked up on his junkets to Paris.  With friends like these, who needs enemies?

Studio/Gang Architects at CAF today, 2010 Preservation Excellence Awards Tomorrow (and the Calendar is coming . . . promise)

The new season's first Wednesday luncheon lecture, 12:15 p.m. at CAF, 224 S. Michigan, will feature Kara Boyd and John Wolters of Studio/Gang Architects discussing recent projects such as the new Lincoln Park Nature Boardwalk, the renovation of the Shoreland Hotel, and others.  There's also the always popular ARE Study Hall at AIA Chicago,  35 East Wacker, 5:30 - 9:00.

On Thursday at 10:00 a.m., the 2010 Preservation Excellence Awards will be presented in the Claudia Cassidy theatre of the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington, followed at 11:15 by the regular monthly meeting of the Commission on Chicago Landmarks in the Garland Room on the Cultural Center's 1st floor.  Also at the Cultural Center at 12:15 p.m., this time in the Millennium Room, Friends of Downtown will be sponsoring a talk by Rachel Weber of UIC on TIFs and Chicago Development.

All of this is to say that the September calendar isn't quite ready for publication, but we've already got three dozen items - everything from Pecha Kucha 15 on the 7th, to talks by architects Peter Bohlin and Jacques Ferrier, AIA/Chicago's Professional Development Conference, the Architecture for Change Summit on affordable housing at UIC, and Preservation Chicago's fall fundraiser at the recently restored Historic Sears Power House.  Check back Thursday (or maybe Friday) for the full roster of events.

Gang Weave, Nature Boardwalk Preview, and What to Do This Weekend

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Last week marked the opening of the spectacular new Lincoln Park Zoo Nature Boardwalk that has replaced the previous, bemucked, concrete-lined lagoon.. We expect to be writing a lot more about this, but for now, we present just a few shots of the pond and of the equally remarkable Peoples Gas Education Pavilion, designed by Studio/Gang, in the hopes you'll take the hint and do yourself the pleasure of checking it this holiday weekend.